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Dance Artist and educator, Justine A. Chambers’ Master of Fine Arts research is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, entitled, . This self-produced presentation attends to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreography, and dance as otherwise ways of being in relation as it unfurls Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.

Chambers’ scored improvisatory performance for dance, sound and light positions these diasporic social practices as epistemologies, ontologies, counter archives, tools for self determination, and the reclamation of Black humanitarian value in a 400 year dialogue with colonialism.

In the written statement accompanying Chambers’ performance, she contextualizes her creative research within her larger body of professional work; work that has, for decades, moved her audiences through affective memories of lived experience, the poetics of everyday life, the glimmer of the almost imperceptible, and the hopeful/critical charge of Black futurity.

During her studies, Chambers received two SFU Graduate Fellowships and her research has received funding from the Periculum Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts and the CanDance Commissioning Fund.

Ryan Tacata, Chambers’ supervisor, shares the impact of Chambers’ work that went into this production and writing.

Says Tacata, “I can attest to the extraordinary amount of time, energy, and passion Chambers poured into this project—in the studio, in the library, in the community—which brilliantly mobilized her unique brand of choreography as a method of research into the living ‘counter-archives’ of Black diasporic life.�

Being recognized for her research and project is meaningful for Chambers.

Says Chambers, “The acknowledgement of this research contributes to the valourization of Black-living, and creates a call-and-response system of support that shirks and ‘unsettles suffocating and dismal insular racial logics.’ (McKittrick, 6). Receiving the Dean’s Convocation Medal is an opening towards an otherwise way of being in relation. I am indebted to my supervisor Ryan Tacata, who tirelessly and joyously supported this project of re-centering that which is often relegated to the margins. The support I have received by staff and faculty for this research echoes forward a possibility to incite change, to be irreducible, and to imagine freely.�

Chambers is currently an Assistant Professor in the Dance Area at the SCA. In 2025 and 2026 her work will be hosted at several national and international galleries and theatres including the National Arts Centre, PuSH Festival, EMPAC, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. The Brutal Joy is currently touring across Canada and the US, and is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, The Periculum Foundation and the Can-Dance Creation Fund.