A B O U T

Alexandra Barbier is a multidimensional artist who engages dance, performance art, theatre, creative writing, and visual art to explore themes within Blackness, queerness, Southern-ness, and millennial pop culture. Her works are often whimsical and humorous while also inspiring critical thought and social/cultural commentary and inquiry. In 2022, she was selected as NCCAkron’s Community Commissioning Residency Artist, where she began developing her current project, Stations of Black Loss – a 14-part, multidisciplinary, autoethnographic body of work that documents her journey of embracing Black identity. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she has had the opportunity to continue developing and presenting components of Stations of Black Loss, as well as choreograph the Theatre Department’s production of RENT (2003).

Alexandra is originally from Louisiana, where she was a member of the Baton Rouge-based contemporary dance company Of Moving Colors Productions for eight seasons between 2004 – 2016; taught dance at various studios and Pre-K – 12 schools and summer camps; and performed with Theatre Baton Rouge (formerly known as Baton Rouge Little Theatre), where she played “Liz/Pop” in their production of Chicago, among other musical theatre roles. For several years, she was heavily involved in the Salt Lake City arts community, where she received her MFA from the University of Utah and afterwards held a teaching fellow position in their School of Dance; served as an organizer for Queer Spectra Arts Festival; and briefly worked as the Salt Lake City Public Art Program assistant. Additionally, she spent one academic year in Nantes, France as an English Language teacher through the Teaching Assistant Program In France (TAPIF), and has previously been on faculty for the Joffrey Ballet and Jazz + Contemporary Trainee Programs (NYC) and Joffrey South’s summer intensive (Athens, Ga).

Photo by Todd Collins

Alexandra’s performance works have been presented in Utah at the Marriott Center for Dance (University of Utah), Salt Lake Performance Art Festival, The Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival, Sunset (formerly Commonwealth) Studios, Red Butte Garden, The City Library’s 12 Minutes Max, loveDANCEmore’s Sunday Series; in Louisiana at the Shaw Center for the Arts’ Manship Theatre, the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge’s Shell Gallery; in Ohio for University of Akron’s Rethinking Race Symposium; and in Illinois at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), the Virginia Theatre. She has presented research, lecture-demonstrations, and papers at the International Association of Blacks in Dance conference, Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, and Popular Culture Association conference. Her visual art has been exhibited through the Champaign Urbana BIPOC Artist Collective’s exhibit for the 2024 Boneyard Arts Festival.

Other highlights include: presenter for The History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at UIUC’s event, The Blaxtravaganza! (2023); audio contributor for Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibit Black Refractions: Highlights from the Studio Museum in Harlem (2021); featured in Slug Mag (2021); dancer in No Love Like Yours, music video for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, choreographed by Kristin Sudeikis and directed by Olivia Wilde (2016).