Adesola Akinleye
Associate Professor of Dance
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Adesola Akinleye, PhD (she/they), is an interdisciplinary dancer, choreographer and artist-scholar whose work explores relationships of movement, place and lived experience. Rooted in non-Western, Indigenous, and Africanist worldviews, Akinleye’s practice investigates how body, mind and environment interact as intra-connected and relational. Akinleye’s creative work spans film, installation, text and live performance, often site-specific and collaboratively generated with diverse communities.
Akinleye began their dance career with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Workshop Ensemble in the United States, later performing with UK-based companies such as Green Candle Dance Company and the Carol Straker Dance Company. This early professional experience shaped their ongoing commitment to socially engaged and inclusive dance practices. Their choreographic approach is characterized by a desire to glimpse and voice people’s lived experiences through “moving portraiture.” Their work is grounded in the artistry of shared process, involving collaborators across a wide social spectrum—from ballerinas and architects to children, low-wage workers and city-makers.
They are the founder and co-artistic director of DancingStrong Movement Lab (DSML), a multi-generational, interdisciplinary, international organization co-led with Dr. Helen Kindred. DSML cultivates spaces for practice-based research and artistic experimentation.
In 2022, they were commissioned by the Hayward Gallery, Southbank, London, to create a site-specific performance for artist Jyll Bradley’s outdoor installation The Hop. Akinleye’s recent research integrates emerging technologies into choreographic practice. Their current choreographic project, Space+Dance+Digital (S+D²), employs Augmented Reality (AR) to create multi-user movement architectures in digital space, offering co-constructed choreographic experiences that reimagine dance as a spatial and relational act across virtual space/time.
Akinleye’s scholarly work has been published across dance, cultural and interdisciplinary studies. They are the editor of Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices (Palgrave Macmillan), which was shortlisted for One Dance UK’s Impact in Dance Writing Award in 2018, and of (re:)claiming ballet (Intellect Books, 2021), a groundbreaking anthology that reconsiders the ballet tradition through inclusive and critical lenses. Their monograph Dance, Architecture and Engineering (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores cross-disciplinary conversations between bodies and buildings, while Navigations: Scoring the Moment (Theatrum Mundi, 2022) further develops dance as a method for researching spatial and urban dimensions. They are also the co-author of the forthcoming monograph Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore, written with Dr Helen Kindred, published by Intellect Books, November 2025.
In addition to their books, Akinleye has contributed chapters to a range of edited collections, including “For Kaydence and Her Cousins: Health and Happiness in Cultural Legacies and Contemporary Contexts” in The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-being (Manitoba Press), “Keeping Movement at the Center as We Dance into Interdisciplinary Research” in Dance Research Methodologies (Routledge) and “The Distance of Education” in Futures of Performance (Routledge). Other chapters include “Finding a Place for Responsiveness, Possibility and Emergence in Dance Education Assessment Systems” in Ethical Agility in Dance (Routledge), “Fearless Belonging and River-Me” in Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages (Routledge), and “Choreography and Architecture: Compositions in This Place” in The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance.
Akinleye is an associate professor in the Division of Dance and serves as the coordinator for the TWU PhD in Dance program. They have held positions as research fellow at Theatrum Mundi and have led a studio at Central Saint Martins (M-Arch). They lecture and consult at Irie! Dance Theatre. From 2020 to 2022, they were a Visiting Artist at the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Research Affiliate with MIT’s Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) program.
Their choreographic work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the ADAD Trailblazer Award, the Bonnie Bird New Choreography Award and the One Dance Champion Trailblazer Award. For their contributions to community dance and education, they were named Woman of the Year in Community Dance by the Town of Islip, New York. Akinleye is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). They hold a PhD from Canterbury Christ Church University and two master’s degrees from Middlesex University: an MA (Distinction) in Work-Based Learning: Dance in Community and Education and an MA (Distinction) in Film. They are also a certified Gyrotonic® and Gyrokinesis® instructor.
Page last updated 8:55 AM, June 10, 2025