Personal profile
Research interests
Jessica Thomas received her BFA in dance from the University of North Texas and her MFA in choreography with a focus in interdisciplinary arts from Wilson College.
Along with dance, she is an active musician, poet, sound designer and videographer. She also is a licensed massage therapist, yoga practitioner, and member of the Dance Studies Association, Dance and Child International, and Dance Science and Somatics Educators.
She has performed professionally with companies and choreographers such as:
- Contemporary Dance Fort Worth
- Muscle Memory Dance Theatre
- Backhaus Dance Company
- Brenna Monroe-Cook
- Risa Steinberg
- Gus Solomons Jr.,
- and Colin Connor.
Thomas has premiered interdisciplinary dance works at a variety of festivals and venues, including:
- The Modern Dance Festival
- Dallas Museum of Art
- Brazos Dance Festival
- Austin Dance Festival
- Out of the Loop Fringe Festival
- Kimbell Art Museum
- Dance New Amsterdam
- 254 Dance-Fest
- Amon Carter Museum
- South Dallas Cultural Center
- Water Tower Theatre
- The Wild Detectives
- Bath House Cultural Center
- and Sammons Center for the Arts.
Her screendances, "Illuminight," "In Memoriam," "Vortex" and "Underdeck," have premiered nationally and internationally.
Thomas's practice-led research fuels her interdisciplinary dancemaking and teaching practices, exploring the multifaceted realms of embodied knowledge through the lens of the dancing body and has been presented internationally in Vancouver, Canada.
She teaches modern and postmodern techniques, ballet, jazz and dance improvisation, interweaving concepts from somatics, experiential anatomy, integrated bodywork and Skinner Releasing Technique. She also provides somatic lecture workshops, as well as participatory dance performance lectures that involve interdisciplinary explorations, intersecting dance, music, visual arts and creative writing to the general public.
Above all else, Thomas is enlivened by mentoring individuals in a way that experientially empowers and refines their autonomy as emerging dance artists and educators while enriching their collaborative capacity as creative human beings.