Samantha (she/her) is a classical ballet dancer interested in art and culture as a means of understanding contemporary issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the past year she has been working in Puerto Rico as a gallery assistant, museum intern and company dancer.

A Chicago native, she grew up dancing ballet at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, where she became involved in a cultural exchange called “Cuba y Chicago.” In the year before college, she enrolled as a full-time student at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet in Havana. These experiences have sparked and continued her interests in cultural production in the Caribbean, arts in service of nation building and in postcolonial studies more broadly. Her work in Puerto Rico has deepened her desire to continue researching and amplifying the stories of Caribbean and Latin American artists.

While at OHMA, Samantha is excited to continue exploring the fields of dance and migration studies, collecting stories from dancers belonging to the Caribbean diaspora. Upon returning to New York she looks forward to building new connections with Latino cultural organizations in the city.

Samantha graduated summa cum laude from Columbia with a B.A. in Comparative Literature & Society. For her senior thesis, she collected and analyzed stories of emigrant Cuban dancers to explore how the body, displaced from its country of origin, remembers, rejects, and reinterprets national identity through dancing.