About the work
I make dances to understand the world through images and sensations—movement as a way of seeing, remembering, and feeling. The work is rooted in my experience growing up as a quietly queer female in Northern California, shaped by the cultural textures of my Salvadoran heritage. I value form, abstraction, memory, and sensation as tools for forging deep connections with viewers. My choreographic style is influenced by film, Postmodernism, punk rock, and poetry—each informing a raw, nuanced physicality that resists easy narratives and embraces complexity.
BIO
Alma Esperanza Cunningham is a choreographer, mother, and public school teacher based in San Francisco. Her work explores the complexity and nuances of identity through abstraction, memory, and sensation. As a feminist, queer, bicultural second-generation Latina artist, Alma creates dances that are grounded in personal narrative and informed by a deep engagement with form, image, and the body’s capacity to speak beyond words.
While living in New York, her choreography was presented at Movement Research, Joyce SoHo, Dixon Place, and Dance Theater Workshop’s Fresh Tracks (Lively Arts). In San Francisco, her work has been featured at ODC Theater, Cowell Theater, Z Space, and Yerba Buena Gardens. She has held residencies at ODC, Margaret Jenkins’s CHIME, CUNY Purchase Dance Initiative, and Safehouse Arts’ AIRspace.
Alma is the recipient of a Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award for Outstanding Local Discovery in Dance and has served as a guest choreographer at the University of San Francisco’s Dance Department. She teaches solo composition workshops for adult dancers and facilitates dance-making classes for children in the Tenderloin through the Tenderloin Achievement Group and Safehouse Arts.
Blending influences from postmodernism, punk rock, film, and poetry, Alma’s choreographic style invites viewers into a raw, intimate space of image-driven inquiry and embodied reflection.
Current important people (dancer/collaborators:
Raina Sacksteder, Chloe Nagle, Sophia Grimani, Kyle Filley.
Other important people (past dancer/collaborators: Lisa Kitchen, Melanie Casey, Rosemary Hannon, kate Filbert, Chermi Conley, Rebecca Pappas, Phoenicia Pettyjohn, Karla Quinterro, Romina Daniela Rodriguez, Daria Kaufman, Ronja Ver, Caitlin Daly, Arletta Anderson, Keryn Breiterman Loader, Leigh Riley, Aura Fischbeck and more important people that I have had the honor to call a collaborator.