Inside the Pillow Lab: Grisha Coleman

During her Pillow Lab residency in the new Doris Duke Theatre, dance and interdisciplinary artist Grisha Coleman developed "THE MOVEMENT UNDERCOMMONS: Technology as Resistance | Future Archive." This project explores the cultural and expressive dimensions of human movement through mobile motion capture technology. While in residence, Coleman and her collaborators experimented with the installation of movement data ‘portraits’—time-based movement vignettes built from data—visualized and sonified to depict the beauty of everyday movement hiding in plain sight. This project hinges upon data collected in subjects’ homes, storefronts, farms, studios, community centers, and roadsides. Through the gathering and creative use of motion capture data, the project builds ‘kinetic haikus’ from movement data. Alongside the installation, the project envisions a lexicon of movement-as-dance that considers the impact and ethics of technology and embodied cultural memory. Coleman is a former member of the acclaimed dance company Urban Bush Women. At Jacob’s Pillow, she recently participated in the Dancerly Intelligences residency in 2023, and in the series of talks “FUTURE FIGURES: Dance and Emerging Technologies” in 2025. She is a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her art and scholarly work echo::system is a springboard for re-imagining the environment, environmental change, and environmental justice. A New York City native, Coleman has received national and international recognition, including a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts in Media Grant, the position of 2014 Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University, a fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and multiple grants from the Multi Arts Production (MAP) Fund, The Surdna Foundation, and The Creative Capital Foundation. Video by Nel Shelby Productions.