About Jasmine
Jasmine Rivers is a dancer, choreographer, educator, arts administrator, and multimedia, interdisciplinary creative based in Brooklyn.
Originally from San Francisco, she grew up training with ODC as a member of their teen contemporary company, and had the honor of guest performing with their professional company in 2019. Her early training was supplemented with summer intensives at Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Alvin Ailey, and she became a 200-Hour certified yoga instructor in 2016.
Jasmine graduated from Princeton University in 2024, with degrees in Medical Anthropology and Dance. At Princeton, Jasmine continued her dance training under the mentorship of Rebecca Lazier, Tina Fehlandt, Davalois Fearon, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener, and performed in repertory works by Urban Bush Women and Ronald K. Brown’s EVIDENCE.
She deepened her love for arts administration; she was elected as President of Princeton’s premier genre-expansive dance company, BodyHype Dance Co., in addition to dancing, choreographing, and teaching numerous workshops for the group. Jasmine is also passionate about furthering equitable and inclusive arts communities; she served as an Anti-Racist Teach-In Leader and Lewis Center Student Advisor at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, advocating for more just practices and supporting artists of underrepresented backgrounds.
Jasmine’s interdisciplinary anthropology and dance senior thesis, which drew upon tenets of Dance Movement Therapy and culminated in a 30-minute choreographic work integrating spoken word, live musicians, and projections to explore the complexity of multiracial identities, won the 2024 Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts Action Based Community Engagement Award.
Since moving to Brooklyn in 2024, Jasmine has danced professionally with Chutzpah Dance, allowing her to perform at various venues in New York City, Philadelphia, and Detroit, as well as teach Chutzpah’s Training Company. She is continuing to produce her own work, having choreographed, directed, and performed in two dance films that have premiered at multimedia arts events and been selected for film festivals.
Jasmine is also an experienced nonprofit and arts administrator, working for the programs and development teams of Association to Benefit Children and JUNTOS Collective. Jasmine is thrilled to be freelance dancing and choreographing in NYC, and continuing to create innovative, collaborative, and multidisciplinary works.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Jasmine’s approach to dance, choreography, and multimedia, interdisciplinary creation is inextricably linked to her multiraciality. For Jasmine, dance is a pluralistic art form that meaningfully mirrors her identity, as well as a valuable research tool and a sacred portal through which to connect with intergenerational embodied knowledge.
In navigating dual legacies of both marginalization and privilege and carrying an identity that subverts monoracial frameworks, Jasmine’s artistic practice is driven by her larger mission to make space for the simultaneous existence of multiple, ever-evolving truths.
As a queer, hapa Filipina woman, Jasmine’s work visibilizes and deconstructs the rigidity, harm, and inaccuracy of dichotomous and prescriptive paradigms, and engages in worldbuilding that explores and embraces complexity, ambivalence, and enduring curiosity.
These values manifest in her movement style and choreography as juxtaposed dynamics, patterns that are created only to be disrupted, extremes of stillness and chaos, and cyclical motifs. Deeply inspired by somatics, epigenetics, biomimicry, and emergent strategy,
Jasmine’s work is marked by an aversion to inaccurate simplicity and finality, instead drawing on the power of continuous questioning and change.