Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance, announced on November 15, 2022 that the second round of Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists (DFA) awarded $905,010 in funding to 30 dance and movement-based artists with sustained practices in art for social change. Each Fellowship includes a $30,167 grant that may be used at the artist’s discretion. DFA is made possible with generous support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF).

As society grapples with unprecedented challenges and increasingly recognizes systemic inequities and injustices, Dance/USA is reaffirmed that the work of supporting artists who engage in art for social change is pivotal and overdue. The goals of DFA include offering unrestricted financial support for individual artists, building a peer cohort among the Artist Fellows, and facilitating cohort spaces that are emergent and honor the artists’ choices and desires. 

Among the 2022 Dance/USA Artist Fellows is Ohio State Dance Graduate Fellow Bhumi Patel, a PhD student, a queer, desi artist/activist, and the Artistic Director of pateldanceworks. In its purest form, her performance work is a love letter to her ancestors. Her work involves dancing, choreographing, curating, educating, and writing as a pursuit for liberation, with the time and space to decolonize the body. She earned her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her MFA in Dance from Mills College. Patel’s work has been presented at SAFEhouse Arts, max10, Summer Performance Festival, RAWdance's Concept Series, The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest, Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival, and Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency. She has been funded by the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Rainin Foundation, Dancers' Group, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and The Center for Cultural Innovation. Bhumi has presented her research at Dance Studies Association's Annual Conference and Popular Culture Association's Annual Conference. Patel has curated “fem(me),” a performance of radical queers, since 2017. Bhumi was a 2017-2018 Lead Artist with SAFEhouse Arts, a 2017-2018 Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow and a 2019 Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow. She is a member of Dancing Around Race and Cat Call Choir. She has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance.