About

Grisha Coleman is an artist and scholar working in areas of movement, digital media, and performance that engage creative forms in choreography, music composition, and human-centered computer interaction. She is a joint professor in Theatre and Art and Design at the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. Her research explores relationships among physiological, technological, and ecological systems and human movement, as well as the interaction between our machines and the places we inhabit. Coleman’s fellowship project, “The Movement Undercommons,” reimagines the use of new mobile motion-capture technology to build a data repository of vernacular movement portraits, focusing on cocreating critical narratives through animate, sonic, and sculptural treatment of movement data. She earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts and has been supported by numerous prestigious organizations including Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her previous work includes being a dancer with Urban Bush Women, founding the music performance group Hot Mouth, and serving as an associate professor at Arizona State University, where she focused on movement, computation, and digital media.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Epistemology
• Computer network
• Art
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Supra-Organism: Biophysical Sensing Toward Affective Somatic Integration

  2026-04-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Blk as Tek | echo::system and Black Performance Technologies

  2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Computer network

  This paper considers dance, ecological systems, and technology through the frame of critical race theories and histories. The authors describe an iterative, long form performance project to theorize its making and collaborative processes within a cultural context; the social construct of the “digital divide” alongside notions of Black Futurity and Afrofuturist praxis. The paper examines aspects of artwork to reveal synergies and ground embodied research through analysis of a project built between 2004-2016. Additionally, the essay tracks the activities of a multi-disciplinary collaborative team and the artists’ process through creative and empirical discoveries to better understand collaboration across diverse vectors and the paired roles of ecology and technology as both signifier and function. echo::system is the engendering of alternative landscapes deeply connected to culture and the environment in a way that postulates multiple affective realities of loss, heightened agency and presence, and possibility for the unknown. The project's constructed environments move audiences near to the environment through the distances we increasingly impose and inherit. Such inherited distance can be understood as industrial and colonial, enforced and false, driven by techno-ideological characteristics of the modern era. The projects’ presentation of dance and technology in a race-non-neutral performance reworks our sense and, importantly, sensorial experience of the environment and ourselves in its retooling of the technological descendants of the very mechanisms of our destruction. This paper combines a formal analysis of artistic practices, critical theory of race and technology, and inherent pressing conversations around algorithmic justice. It proposes challenging cultural logics through dance performance and art making as a provocation to others to extend and explore these concepts.

  PublisherDOI

• Decolonizing the Machine: Race, Gender and Disability in Robots and Algorithmic Art

  Electronic workshops in computing · 2021 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  <p class="first" id="d156156e111">This paper calls attention to critical race theory, critical disability studies, decolonial theory and their relevance to the study of robotic art and performances that utilise algorithms and other forms of computation. Our purpose is to uncover the veiled links between racial, gendered, and ableist practices that inform theory and practice in media art and performance, and to combat the governing codes that construct – and continue to normalize – practices of dehumanizing exclusions. While robots and cyborgs have the potential to figure posthuman forms of subjectivation, in practice they often reinforce human-machine, self-other, or abled-disabled binaries and gloss over the racist and dehumanizing exclusions that uphold neoliberal forms of power and Western conceptions of the human. Our aim is that this track, and the papers and discussions that follow, will highlight mechanisms for meaningful intervention and instigate critical reflection within media art theory to make visible how artworks and technologies continue to encode colonial hierarchies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reach, Robot: AfroFuturist Technologies

  transcript Verlag eBooks · 2019-12-31 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Reach, Robot: AfroFuturist Technologies

  Post_koloniale Medienwissenschaft · 2019-06-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Framework for Interpretable Full-Body Kinematic Description Using Geometric and Functional Analysis

  IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering · 2019-10-10 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  Rapid advances in cost-effective and non-invasive depth sensors, and the development of reliable and real-time 3D skeletal data estimation algorithms, have opened up a new application area in computer vision - statistical analysis of human kinematic data for fast, automated assessment of body movements. These assessments can play important roles in sports, medical diagnosis, physical therapy, elderly monitoring and related applications. This paper develops a comprehensive geometric framework for quantification and statistical evaluation of kinematic features. The key idea is to avoid analysis of individual joints, as is the current paradigm, and represent movements as temporal evolutions, or trajectories, on shape space of full body skeletons. This allows metrics with appropriate invariance properties to be imposed on these trajectories and leads to definitions of higher-level features, such as spatial symmetry (sS), temporal symmetry (tS), action's velocity (Vl) and body's balance (Bl), during performance of an action. These features exploit skeletal symmetries in space and time, and capture motion cadence to naturally quantify motions of individual subjects. The study of these features as functional data allows us to formulate certain hypothesis tests in feature space. This, in turn, leads to validation of existing assumptions and discoveries of new relationships between kinematics and demographic factors, such as age, gender, and athletic training. We use the clinically validated K3Da kinect dataset to illustrate these ideas, and hope these tools will lead to discovery of new relationships between full-body kinematic features and demographic, health, and wellness factors that are clinically relevant.

  PublisherDOI

• Motion, Captured

  2016-07-05 · 2 citations

  article

  This paper begins to describe a new kind of database, one that explores a diverse range of movement in the field of dance through capture of different bodies and different backgrounds - or what we are terming movement vernaculars. We re-purpose Ivan Illich's concept of 'vernacular work' [11] here to refer to those everyday forms of dance and organized movement that are informal, refractory (resistant to formal analysis), yet are socially reproduced and derived from a commons. The project investigates the notion of vernaculars in movement that is intentional and aesthetic through the development of a computational approach that highlights both similarities and differences, thereby revealing the specificities of each individual mover. This paper presents an example of how this movement database is used as a research tool, and how the fruits of that research can be added back to the database, thus adding a novel layer of annotation and further enriching the collection. Future researchers can then benefit from this layer, further refining and building upon these techniques.

  PublisherDOI

• Experiential Ecologies: A Transdisciplinary Framework for Embodiment and Simulacra

  Future city · 2015-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• SomaTech

  2014-04-26 · 16 citations

  article

  We propose SomaTech, a Kinect-based system that encourages users to expand understanding and awareness of their everyday movements. The system creates real-time auditory feedback based on the user's whole action, aiming toward re-education of habitual, potentially unsound movement patterns which are often ingrained within the brain. To do this, we draw inspiration from the field of somatics, which has well-studied prophylactic benefits. Our initial evaluation shows promising results that users become more aware of movement choices and are able to improve their efficiency after using the system.

  PublisherDOI

• 36 Walk

  2014-06-16 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the context of a choreographed media arts performance, we consider the relationship between movement and computation. We describe the case study of one sequence of this performance, 36 Walk, a composition that is built on algorithmic precepts. Drawing on observed experience from a series of movement and design residencies, we outline potentials for new relationships between movement and computation found within this project. We describe the need for new reciprocal relationships between computer and performer and highlight an opportunity space for movement and computation.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pavan Turaga

  Arizona State University

  4 shared

• Boulbaba Ben Amor

  2 shared

• Thomas F. DeFrantz

  University of Iowa

  2 shared

• Daragh Byrne

  Carnegie Mellon University

  2 shared

• Marco Donnarumma

  University of Iceland

  1 shared

• Qiao Wang

  State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry

  1 shared

• Christina Schoux Casey

  Aalborg University

  1 shared

• Boris Abramovic

  ETH Zurich

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Carnegie Mellon University, STUDIO…
• Fellowship project, 'The Movement Undercommons'