mayfield brooks
2025–2026 Artist in Residence
Dance, Performance Art, Improvisation
As the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence, mayfield brooks will expand Whale Fall, a performance cycle exploring life, death, and decomposition as world-making forces. Through dance, sound, film, and communal practice, the project uses the metaphor of the whale fall to examine interconnectedness, environmental crisis, and the possibilities that emerge when systems break down.
Residency Highlights
Throughout the 2025–2026 academic year, mayfield brooks will work closely with Wesleyan students, faculty, and community members to expand Whale Fall, a multidisciplinary project rooted in embodied research and collective inquiry. During the residency, brooks will develop a new dance-film, an artist book, and a series of community gatherings, while also teaching a course on practice-based research in the Dance Department. In partnership with Jacob’s Pillow, brooks will participate in a 10-day rehearsal residency to begin developing new work that looks to the shoreline as another site of entanglement between human and non-human worlds.
In February 2026, brooks and their collaborators will present all three parts of the Whale Fall cycle at the Center for the Arts, using both the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery and the CFA Theater, marking the first time the project is presented in its entirety. The residency will also convene an interdisciplinary “pod” of thinkers and makers from across the arts, humanities, and sciences, creating space to explore how the life cycles of whales—and their adaptation to environmental collapse—might inform new ways of understanding our shared ecological futures.
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About mayfield brooks
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film Whale Fall, and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-2023 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and are currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.
