Nora Alami is a Moroccan experimental dance artist, creative producer, and researcher, born and raised in Colorado. Dance is her tool for conducting research, building community, and organizing politically. Her artistic works research the trappings of nostalgia and desire for a sense of belonging never quite experienced. She joins disparate realities through sensuality, absurdity, and materiality. 

With experimental interdisciplinary methods at the center of my practice, I interrogate the porosity between the modalities of dance, text, theory, materiality, and performance. I explore this by centering satire alongside ritual, contrasting cultural signifiers alongside the body, and solo practice alongside collaboration and community-building. 

Through my choreographic works, I inhabit the in-between spaces. I create worlds which are built to collapse, exposing contradictions and similarities understood by people from minoritarian communities. Playing with gaze and excessive generosity, I embody hospitality to create experiential performances that ask questions about being seen, who is doing the seeing, and when we are in control of these perceptions. I deconstruct and integrate historically disparate dance forms through multi-modal investigations to ask: Where does desire live in the alienated body and how can it be liberated, traced, sensed, and transformed? How do we sustain feeling deeply?

Nora is a Triskelion Arts Fellow (2025-2026), danceWEB Scholar (2025), MANCC Forward Dialogues Artist (2024), CUNY Dance Initiative Artist (2023–2024), Resident Artist at Triskelion Arts (2022), and New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Resident Artist (2017–18). Her choreographic work has been supported by residencies at JACK, BRIClab: Performing Arts, and The Petronio Center, and presented at venues and festivals including Nublu Classic, UNDOXX Festival at JACK, New York Arab Festival, LaMaMa Moves! Dance Festival, Danspace Project’s DraftWork, Triskelion Arts, Houston Metropolitan Dance Center, Center for Performance Research, New York Live Arts, and Movement Research at Judson Church. 

She has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, River to River Festival, and toured with Jadd Tank for the Focus on Mediterranean Choreography platform in Castiglioncello and Spoleto, Italy. Ongoing collaborations include projects with Jasmine Hearn, Jadd Tank, and Kimiko Tanabe. For the last decade, Nora has worked in New York as a dance-maker and creative producer supporting festivals, collectives, non-profits, and independent artists. 

Nora is currently studying eros and empire in experimental dance as a PhD student in Performance Studies with a Mellon Fellowship in Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. She is the 2025 recipient of the Robert S. and Gertrude B. Breen Memorial Award in Performance Studies. Nora graduated cum laude from Colorado College with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy and holds an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. Her writing has appeared in Movement Research Performance Journal (on dramaturgy), Critical Correspondence (on eros), and Artists on Creative Administration (on creative producing).