Matthew Cumbie

Dancer

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Matthew Cumbie (he/him/his) is a collaborative dancemaker, writer, and artist educator. His artistic research cultivates processes and experiences that are participatory and intergenerational, moving through known and unknown, and bring a poetic lens to a specifically queer experience. His choreography and dancemaking- considered “a blend of risk-taking with reliability, [and] a combination of uncertainty and wisdom,”- weaves together a physical vocabulary of momentum and clarity, revelatory moments, and a belief in a body’s capacity to meet each moment. Among other projects, he sustains multi-year performance projects with collaborators in and connected to central Maine, exploring questions of community, place and belonging, and with collaborator Tom Truss. Together, Matthew and Tom are developing ReWritten, a multidisciplinary exploration of queerness, history, and the lives and writing of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Matthew is also a company member with Christopher K. Morgan & Artists, and is a certified practitioner of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process.

 

His work has been commissioned and supported by places like Dance Place, the Kennedy Center, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, and Harvard University, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, HumanitiesDC, the Arcus Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Maine Arts Commission. He has been on faculty at Texas Woman’s University, Queensborough Community College, American University, and the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, and has been an invited speaker at the New York City Roundtable Arts in Education conference, the Advancing the Human Condition Symposium at Virginia Tech, and the LGBT Health and Art Making conference, in partnership with the Human Rights Commission and the GWU Health and Well-being graduate program. Originally from Houston, Matthew holds undergraduate degrees from Texas Lutheran University and Texas State University and an MFA in dance from Texas Woman’s University. Matthew is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College.