I am an artist making my home on the bridges between worlds. As a racially and gender ambiguous body moving between languages, cultures, and places, I’ve embraced the body as polyglot and chameleon. I excavate a body language made up of fragments: remnants of lands, communities, and machines. Via an intense, mercurial, and emotive presence, my work commits to a bodily poetics that re-worlds these fragments, tracing them to the social-material worlds they emerge from, and playing with those they might create.
As a queer, mixed-Filipinx artist I take inspiration from queer collaborative fabulation; from postcolonial Filipino practices of mimicry and re-use; and from contemporary interfacing of the body and technology. I draw from my childhood with an anti-imperialist feminist mother, and from my personal history of deep pain and deep joy in being this body, to seek to understand the daily ways people make their lives (and bodies) amid violent imperial structures. My movement is grounded, androgynous, and gestural; incorporates video-games and emojis; and draws from my practices of Aikido, Capoeira, (queer) Argentine tango, and contemporary dance.
bio
Luna Beller-Tadiar (she/they) is a Manila-born, US-raised, queer, mixed-Filipinx multi-media artist who works in choreography, video, text, and comics. Her work across artistic media investigates socio-historical forces at the level of the body, especially as they touch gender, colonialism, diaspora, and new media. In making choreographic work Luna draws on an eclectic mix of movement education that includes capoeira, Argentine tango, almost two decades of Aikido, new media research, study of gesture, and an ongoing investigation into embodied mimicry and malleability. She has trained at Yale University, Duke University, Bates Professional Training Program, Camping at the Centre National de la Danse, and New York Aikikai, among others. She has performed in Durham, USA; NYC; Pau, France; and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Luna’s dance-choreography work has been shown at Movement Research Judson Church; Ailey Theater; Mark Morris Dance Center; the 92NY; Duke University; Yale University; in La Union (Philippines); in Buenos Aires (Argentina); and in 2024 earned her recognition as a Jadin Wong Artist of Exceptional Merit from the Asian American Art Alliance. In video-art form her work has been selected for American Dance Festival’s Movies by Movers film festival; exhibited in installation form at Duke; shown at CICA Museum; and featured in Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies. Luna’s work with queer Argentine tango has received support from Yale University; McGill University; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has taught dance at American Dance Festival studios, Duke University, University of Michigan, Cornell University, in Detroit, Berkeley, Paris, and Lyon, and currently teaches at The LGBTQ Center (NYC). As a working performer she has danced for Emily Coates at the Yale University Art Gallery; for Korakrit Arunandochai and boychild at the Performa Biennal 19; for Sabaline Fournier at the Palais Beaumont in Pau, France; and for Marie Lloyd Paspe at Harlem Stage.
Yale comparative Literature BA ('18)
Formerly a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University; currently a doctoral student at NYU Media Culture and Communication