Artist in Residence
Biography
Dr. Shamell Bell, founder of Street Dance Activism and the Global Dance Meditation for Black Liberation, is a mother, global movement artist, scholar, quantum activist, and Emmy-nominated producer whose work lives at the intersection of embodied activism and radical imagination. She earned her PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Dr. Bell has held teaching appointments at Harvard, Dartmouth, Berea College, and across University of California and California State University campuses.
Her research and artistic practice center Black street dance forms as tools for healing and resistance, as explored in her dissertation, Living is Resisting: An Autoethnography and Oral History of Street Dance Activism in Los Angeles. As an interdisciplinary scholar and documentary filmmaker, she explores collective freedom dreaming and multimedia storytelling to challenge oppressive systems and cultivate transformation. She served as Supervising Producer on the Emmy-nominated series Lessons in Chemistry, helping shape its social justice narrative. Her social impact work spans the entertainment industry, including work on The Hate U Give (directed by George Tillman Jr., 2018) and collaborations with Common, Dominique Fishback, Lalah Hathaway, and Esperanza Spalding.
An original member of the Black Lives Matter movement and co-founder of Justice 4 Trayvon Martin (J4TMLA)/Black Lives Matter Los Angeles (BLMLA), Dr. Bell currently holds space weekly for grieving families alongside Rev. Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar Grant, offering somatic exercises and embodied healing practices. She serves as co-social impact director alongside Ms. Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, for The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, a dance-opera-theater work responding to state-sanctioned violence.
As the Debt Collective’s Visionary Escalator, Dr. Bell leads monthly healing-centered gatherings that merge somatic practice and imagination for collective liberation and advocating for student debt abolition and debt-free college for all. She serves on the steering committee of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and co-chairs its Antifascism Caucus.