ABOUT ALEXIA BUONO, PHD

Alexia grew up and studied on the lands of the Haudenosaunee people, now colonized as Buffalo, NY. Her professional training in contemporary and modern dance forms led her to the fields of somatics, contact improvisation, education, and transformative justice. Since 2008, she’s taught across the fields of dance, early childhood, higher education, teacher education, and community education. 
 

At the University at Buffalo, SUNY, Alexia earned her doctorate in Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning and an Interdisciplinary Masters in Humanities with concentrations in Dance and Psychology. She also holds a certificate in Embodied Social Justice and is a member of the Latinx Dance Educators Alliance.
 

Alexia conducts participatory and collaborative research utilizing (post)qualitative, Chicana/Latina feminist methods, dance research methodologies, arts-based educational research, and critical somatic inquiry. Her work examines (1) social and structural inequities in education (e.g., teacher education, early childhood education, dance/arts education), (2) somatic experiences of un/learning related to identity and socio-political consciousness of young children, collegiate students, artists, and educators and (3) strategies for interpersonal, structural, and cultural transformations of relational and pedagogical values and praxes through Black queer, Chicana/Latina, and abolitionist feminisms. She conducts solo and collaborative research on these topics with scholars from universities throughout the US, Finland, and Norway.

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Alexia is trained in a variety of dance and somatic forms (including modern, jazz, ballet, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Movement Analysis, Authentic Movement, and contact improvisation) and approaches to choreography and performance (including site-specific collaborations, installation based and multimedia, improvisation, chance choreography, concert dance, and arts-based research). She has performed in and created site specific and community-oriented work with Jen Leung Johnson (Salisbury, MD), Jungwoong Kim (Philadelphia, PA), SUNY Brockport (Brockport, NY), Joanna Mendl Shaw’s Equus Projects (NYC), Torn Space Theatre (Buffalo, NY), Anne Burnidge Dance (Buffalo, NY), and ArtPark (Lewiston, NY). Her performative and choreographic scholarship explores how interdisciplinary creative and performing arts, improvisation, and somatic praxes with(in) communities and site specific, place-based work can investigate sociopolitical onto-epistemologies of the bodily self, relationality, and the reclamation of cultural forms.