Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Her research attends to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography and dance as otherwise ways of being in relation.
Chambers holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and is currently Assistant Professor in the Dance Area at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Her recent choreographic projects include: The Brutal Joy, Zephyrs, Heirloom, Archives and Heirlooms, Steady, And then this also, One hundred more, tailfeather, for all of us, it could have been like this, ten thousand times and one hundred more, Family Dinner, Family Dinner: The Lexicon, Semi-precious: the faceting of a gemstone only appears complete and critical; Enters and Exits and COPY.
Chambers’ work has been hosted at: Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto Biennial of Art, EMPAC, Libby Leshgold Gallery at ECUAD, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Sophiensaele (Berlin), Burrard Arts Foundation, National Arts Centre (Ottawa, Canada), Nanaimo Art Gallery, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Mile Zero Dance Society, Festival of New Dance, Agora de la danse, Canada Dance Festival, Dance in Vancouver, Dance Saskatchewan, Dancing on the Edge Festival, New Dance Horizons, The Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Western Front.
Chambers is a founding member of project bk, was artist in residence at artist run centre 221A (2017), a selected artist for the Visiting Dance Artist Program at the National Arts Centre (2019-2020), one of three choreographer’s in the Yulanda Faris Choreographer’s Program (2017-2018), and associate artist and artist in residence to The Dance Centre (2024-2027).
