CO-FOUNDER &EXECUTIVE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR,
ANGELA’S PULSE

Paloma McGregor is a Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and arts leader. As co-founder and Executive Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse, McGregor has spent more than a decade centering Black voices through collaborative performance projects that she has dubbed “community-specific” -- centering communities of color and non-traditional performance spaces as underpinnings of her work. A former newspaper editor, McGregor brings a choreographer’s craft, a journalist’s urgency, and a community organizer’s framework in the service of big visions.

As a consultant, McGregor designs and facilitates workshops and long-term engagements, using creative practice to build collective capacity for deep listening, shared leadership and collaborative visioning. She and her team have worked with such diverse institutions as Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Virginia Commonwealth University, Faculty Women of Color in the Academy conference and the Bronx River Alliance. As a dancer, McGregor has performed at the Venice Biennale, the United Nations, State Department tours to South America and Turkey and the World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal. She was a member of the internationally acclaimed Urban Bush Women dance company, and has a longtime collaboration with MacArthur-winner Liz Lerman.

Working at the growing edge of her field, McGregor has been an inaugural recipient of several major awards, including: Creatives Rebuild New York/Artists Employment Program (2022); Dance/USA’s Fellowship to Artists (2019); Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Institute Fellowship (2018); and Surdna Foundation’s Artists Engaging in Social Change (2015). McGregor was a 2020 Soros Arts Fellow, 2018 Movement Research NYSCA Artist-in-Residence, a 2016-18 New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist, a 2014-16 Artist In Residence at BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange and a 2013‐14 Artist In Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. In 2017, she won a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for performance with the group Skeleton Architecture.

Always committed to creating spaces that center Black innovation, McGregor founded Dancing While Black (DWB), a platform for community-building, intergenerational exchange and visibility among Black dance artists whose work, like hers, doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. Since 2012, DWB has produced more than three dozen public dialogues and performances, supported the development of 22 Black artists through the DWB Fellowship, and published the country’s first digital journal by and for Black dance innovators.