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• Read more about Nailah!

  As she stated years ago in an article for Jane’s Pocket Change, ”I have come to believe that education can be a magical experience if we approach it through varying epistemologies. Too often, academia defines scholarship and intellectual development as the gathering of empirical information, memorizing formulas, and reciting quotes from classical texts. But what if the educational experience also valued the artistic realm of understanding the world? What if the function of the brain in the head moved through the entire body, to interpret the world thusly, analyzing what those interpretations meant? What if we valued the arts enough to appreciate what indulging in them did to our human existence? What would studying science, history, world cultures, and literature look like through a dance epistemology? In other words, what would it mean to offer a holistic educational experience? This is what we do every day at The Cambridge School of Weston.”

  
  In and outside of the Cambridge School of Weston’s dance program Nailah’s focus continues to employ dance to adress issues that threaten the whole of humanity. In Spring 2021, Randall-Bellinger facilitated the first of a series of virtual artist-led discussions around artistry, identity, and advocacy, where she presented her film works #shesstillbreathing and Women’s Work, both inspired and constructed within the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. She was a collaborating choreographer for Movement Meditations, as part of the A.R.T.’s The Arboretum Experience.  As  one of seven artists commissioned by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) in 2021 created a work on campus,  which she developed through a residency at Harvard Dance Center. The work, titled Initiation– In Love Solidarity and performed by her company RootsUprising, In March 2022, the work was presented by the Cambridge Arts Council and has been included in Harvard’s Presidential Initiative on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery digital archive and walking tour, published in spring 2022.

   

  Nailah is honored to be part of such a magical place as  the dance community here at CSW. She feels blessed to have met so amazing dancers here, that have gone on to be amazing humanbeings, changing the world beyond dance. “Our department prides itself in using dance to explore, examine, challenge, and heal. “ CSW dance allows students to cultivate and practice compassion in a very visceral way, such as the Haiti Project. The virtual dance class was created by an alumnae, Hope Cooper 17’ and was maintained by our dance students for 5 years. Combining technology and dance, our students conduct weekly dance classes at an orphanage in Kenscoff, Haiti. By coordinating the program and instructing the Haitian children through streamed video communication, our CSW students learned that dance is another means for changing the world and advocating for authentic experiences of social justice.

   

  “Yes, art for art sake holds its own aesthetic value. But even more, the arts — and especially dance — can reexamine the aesthetic qualities of creativity in uplifting the world. If education is going to move us through the 21st century, the arts must be considered as part of that work. That is my plan, my goal, and my driving force; to fully explore how dance can continue to be an integral component of the progressive voice of education here at CSW.”