Yvonne Montoya
Choreographer. Writer. Speaker. Mother.

I am a process-based contemporary choreographer/dancemaker interested in the transformative places and spaces movement creates for dialogues and discoveries. My work is grounded in and inspired by the landscape, languages, cultures, aesthetics of the lands in which I was born and raised, the U.S. Southwest. I draw upon embodied, ancestral knowledge(s) and community histories for inspiration. In the Southwest deserts, I embrace rasquache aesthetics (art of resourcefulness, making the most with less resources) as an intentional practice and out of necessity.  My work is grounded in cultural values: simpatía, respeto, dignidad, personalismo. I seek to advance, develop, promote, cultivate Latine dance artists in AZ, NM, the SW, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and to build dance communities across the large expansive geographies of the Southwest deserts. As a 23rd generation Nuevomexicana (descendent of the Mexicanos who the border crossed in 1848), my artistic question is: what are the contemporary movement aesthetics of the Southwest?

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My current work, Stories from Home, brings together Latine dancers from various Southwest communities, centers U.S.-based Latine stories, bodies, and aesthetics on concert dance stages, and promotes contemporary concert dance from the region. Themes in Stories from Home include: The Bracero Program, 1940s Americanization programs, the creation of the Atomic Bomb in Northern New Mexico, family, love, and querencia.