Yauri dalencour

YSKD

My Interdisciplinary Story…

“I’m concerned with intersections between art, culture, education & technology.”

— Yauri Dalencour

Hi, I’m Yauri, a new media dance and visual artist and anthropologist with a full-time art practice performing, illustrating and designing. I am also a full spectrum doula, educator and published author and scholar. And I’m also a wife and mom 🙂

I work domestically and internationally. I am based in my hometown in the Washington, DC area and am well networked in NYC, Italy, Spain and Silicon Valley/San Francisco, where I formerly lived.

I’m a choreographer and performer by trade and a classically trained anthropologist. I found my way into combining dance and new media and design first with my work as an archivist for Katherine Dunham. I worked as a digital archivist on her estate with the Library of Congress, then in UX Design after moving from NYC to Silicon Valley for my husband’s job at Google. Before moving from NYC, I founded an arts education boutique there, consulting schools and partnering with museums designing dance curriculum and programs throughout the city.

Today, along with my dance work and UX Design consulting, I am a Surface Designer creating commercial patterns for physical products, returning to my early experiences as a young girl where I learned to draw and paint from my father, an illustrator.

I learned about creative process and conceptual art from my mother, who also painted and is a fiber artist. She made my dad’s suits by hand from organic threads and up-cycled and delicately woven textiles. My mother would also make my and my sisters’ clothes with vibrant fabrics and colorful threads. At the same time, my great-grandmother adorned us with her warm and billowy quilts of vivid and lively picturesque scenes that covered her patchwork duvets and spreads from corner to corner.

My great-grandfather, an entrepreneur, owned a pool hall, dry cleaners, and sweets shop in Washington DC starting in the 1930s in what was known as Black Broadway. From the 1900s to the 1950s, Black Broadway “was the core of commercial activity, education, innovation, entertainment, and [socializing] for African-American people”. Today it is known as the U Street Corridor. Everyone from Duke Ellington, Madame Lilian Evanti, Pearl Baily, Louis Armstrong, and others graced the bourgeoning community filled with theatres, clubs, restaurants, and more among 300 Black-Owned Businesses on the U Street Corridor alone.

“It is difficult for me to separate the arts. I see dance as visual and illustration as performative. ”

— Yauri Dalencour

While a dancer in NYC I dreamt of designing a silk scarf line, finely beaded jewelry, and creating a dance apparel line with skin-toned garments for dancers who looked like me. I even imagined the patterns and designsI would make for my scarves and swimsuits.

Not knowing where to begin, I started drawing again first. I started sketching out my intricate prints and motifs on loose paper and beading strings with jewelry materials and textiles. I matched textiles, colors, fibers and beads with goodies I’d fine from my trips from Brooklyn where I lived to NYC’s garment district. I didn’t know what I was doing, but wanted to play and explore.

We moved to the West Coast not long after and I dove into new media and tech because I was surrounded by it. I sought ways to combine technology with my dance work and didn’t realize it was the next step in my design process for my illustrated scarves, where today I am creating patterns commercially.

“Energy is infinite and it changes hand through interaction. I am happy to share my personal touch.”

— Yauri Dalencour

Working digitally as an illustrator and dancer have opened me up to infinite possibilities. From my surface and pattern design work to my experimental projects in photogrammetry and 3-D projection mapping, I combine and mix my dance choreography and performance with illustration and design in fun ways.

My artistic approach is inclusive design across diverse markets in technology, performance, film and archives, consumer goods, curriculum and education, museum exhibitions, interior and accessory design and more. I hold the following arts degrees: 

  • BFA, Dance and Theatre Tech (Adelphi University)
  • BA, International Studies (Adelphi University)
  • MA, Dance and Dance Education (NYU)
  • MFA, Interdisciplinary Arts – Performing Arts Concentration (Goddard Collage)
  • PhD, Dance Studies (2005-2010); PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies – Culture & Humanities (2023)
  • Certified in Lester Horton Technique (Alvin Ailey American Dance Center)
  • Certifying in Katherine Dunham Technique (Katherine Dunham Institute)
  • Certified Design Thinking Practitioner and Facilitator (Luma Institute)

Some of my UX design and surface/pattern design work projects include designing experiences in health care for Black families, particularly in Black women’s maternal health and making art that is representative and inclusive; what I often saw missing growing up.

This work is incredibly close to me as a doula and wife and mom of five children who were born at home. Black women have the highest mortality rates among childbirth, the US leading in the world. I believe this is unacceptable.

I currently serve as a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed academic journal Dance Education in Practice, I serve on the Design Innovation Global’s advisory board and on the Board of Directors for the National Dance Education Organization. I am also the Regional Lay Out Editor for Jack & Jill of America.

I’m the CEO of Dancetime Publications and the Founding Team member and former lead designer for a Fortune 10 based in DC. At the Fortune 10, I spearheaded and established the Design Thinking Education Academy after working in Silicon Valley as a UX Designer/Researcher.

Along with my husband, I am co-founder of the Brelii, a Black family lifestyle brand where we publish both a digital readership platform as well as a quarterly literary magazine in print. My arts education boutique I founded in NYC which I still operate today as the outreach education leg of my dance practice is EthnodanceologyCreative.

Resources on the intersections of dance and design:

More on Black Broadway and Today’s Washington DC U Street where my grandfather owned three businesses and where I get my Entrepreneurial Spirit

Before there was Harlem!

Howard Theatre was the model for the Apollo Theatre which was “Whites Only” until the 1930s

Three of my favorite quotes from the late great Katherine Dunham who I had the pleasure of working for as her archivist in the last year of her life while a grad student at NYU. I would visit her home on the Upper West Side every week:

I used to want the words ‘She tried’ on my tombstone. Now I want ‘She did it.’

Katherine Dunham

A creative person has to create. It doesn’t really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on.

Katherine Dunham

So many dancers paint. I used to paint. I started again recently. While I was dancing, I was very busy with my career. Start something else that makes use of your creative ability because if you don’t you will die inside as a person.

Katherine Dunham
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