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Davalois Fearon is a critically acclaimed choreographer, dancer, educator, and artist-scholar whose work has been described as “electrifying” (The Mercury News). Born in Jamaica and raised in the Bronx, her interdisciplinary practice brings Afro-Jamaican and African diasporic movement traditions into conversation with contemporary and postmodern dance, improvisation, live music, visual art, poetry, and dialogue. Her movement vocabulary draws from Dancehall, reggae, Caribbean social dances, formal concert-dance training, and a twelve-year career with the Stephen Petronio Company, resulting in a movement language hailed for its “tenacious virtuosity” (Dance Magazine). Her creative research asks how choreography and pedagogy can cultivate dignity, agency, belonging, consent, reciprocity, and shared responsibility across performance, education, and community.

In 2016, Fearon founded Davalois Fearon Dance (DFD), an interdisciplinary company that pushes artistic and social boundaries while cultivating the next generation of artists. Her works, including Up/right, Time to Talk, Finding Herstory, KERNEL, For C.J., and Consider Water, connect embodied and cultural histories to questions of identity, racial and environmental inequity, medical injustice, historical erasure, agency, and collective care. Across these works, she challenges dominant narratives, decenters whiteness, and foregrounds African diasporic contributions to American modern and contemporary dance. Rather than treating the works as unrelated responses to separate issues, Fearon understands them as a sustained inquiry into the conditions that allow people to remain fully themselves while participating ethically in relationships with others.

Her current projects, Stories Found and Queen, deepen this inquiry by researching Dancehall and other Afro-Jamaican practices as forms of embodied knowledge, survival, joy, liberation, healing, and community. Workshops, talkbacks, and participatory structures are integral to her choreographic process, extending performance into spaces for reflection, exchange, and collective inquiry.

Collaboration is central to Fearon’s practice, expanding the formal, sensory, and relational possibilities of each work. Her choreography often incorporates original live music, projection, wearable sculpture, poetry, and audience participation developed through long-term partnerships with artists including DFD Music Director, composer, clarinetist, and saxophonist Mike McGinnis; visual artist Jasmine Murrell; poet Patricia Smith; and interdisciplinary artists Myssi Robinson and André M. Zachery. Through these relationships, movement, sound, image, language, and material become interdependent elements of the work.

From 2005 to 2017, Fearon performed and taught internationally with the Stephen Petronio Company, where she was a critic's favorite and best known for her “fearless dancing” (The New York Times). In 2014, she developed the company’s first formal education program and became its Education Coordinator, creating a syllabus for the Petronio technique and a teacher-training framework for company members. This experience shaped both her dynamic physicality and her commitment to translating embodied practice into accessible, rigorous pedagogy.

Fearon holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a BFA in Dance from the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, SUNY. She is a Lecturer in Dance at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, where she teaches contemporary dance, choreography, repertory, improvisation, and interdisciplinary performance. Her culturally responsive and access-centered pedagogy integrates embodied inquiry, historical research, community agreements, reflective writing, collaborative learning, and the development of each student’s artistic voice. At Princeton, she has introduced Dancehall-focused offerings, co-taught the Atelier Blood Dazzler: Collaboration and Catastrophe with poet Patricia Smith, restaged Stephen Petronio’s Lareigne, advised senior choreographic projects, and directed Senior Independent Project productions.

She develops performance-based methodologies that integrate education, choreography, dialogue, and embodied inquiry as practices of learning, relationship-building, and community engagement. In 2025, Fearon and collaborator Elissa Buxbaum were selected to present a poster on their research using Fearon’s work, Time to Talk, as a tool for social impact at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education. The poster presentation shared how the creators examined performance, historical context, and facilitated dialogue as tools for community engagement and social change. Through an ongoing partnership with the New York Public Library’s Baychester Branch and JASA, she helped to create an annual Jamaican Independence Day Celebration program rooted in dance, music, and cultural celebration.

Fearon’s commitment to engagement extends beyond performance and the classroom. Through initiatives connected to Time to Talk, For C.J., and Consider Water, she creates spaces where artists, audiences, educators, activists, and scholars connect performance to historical context, lived experience, and collective action. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she created the DFD Virtual Theater to sustain performance, workshops, emerging-artist commissions, and dialogue-driven programming. Through DFD’s Mentorship Program, previously called the Commissioning Initiative, she has supported developing artists with artistic guidance, administrative and production resources, and opportunities to share new work.

Fearon received a 2017 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award as a member of the ensemble of the skeleton architecture or the future of our worlds, which gave rise to Skeleton Architecture, a collective of Black women and gender-nonconforming improvisers. Her work has been commissioned by Princeton University, Harlem Stage, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Barnard College, Gibney, and the University of Florida, and presented at venues including the Joyce Theater, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Victory Theater, BAAD!, Danspace Project, Roulette, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Her work has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, MAP Fund, Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mosaic Network & Fund, New Music USA, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and the Bronx Council on the Arts. Fearon is a 2026–27 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. Her career and work have been featured in The New York Times, Dance Magazine, The New Yorker, Ntozake Shange’s Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance, the documentary If the Dancer Dances, and Jamia Wilson’s A Year of Black Joy.