ESRAA WARDA
new york based north african performance + teaching artist
BIOGRAPHY
Esraa Warda is New York's emerging dance artist and educator specializing in Algerian & Moroccan traditional dance forms. A child of the Algerian diaspora, Warda is a cultural warrior advocating for the representation & preservation of North African women-led dance traditions and the decolonization of euro-centricity, orientalism, and patriarchy in dance.
Featured in VOGUE Arabia, Warda "takes Algerian dance from relative obscurity to the limelight"... In a society focused on all things svelt, there is a charm in seeing a woman of Esraa's size unbashedly, fiercely, and proudly..."
"The patriarchal gaze has to do with a woman’s physical presence. We’ve learnt that a woman moving in public means that she is now public discourse, that because she has the audacity to be outside, publicly, her body is immediately a public property..." The Metric
"Our dances are African, Amazigh" Al Jazeera Plus FR
Warda is a product of "popular education"; a student of intercommunal transmission of oral history and muscle memory from her family's living room in Algiers. She continues with this essence both still as a student of elders and as an educator for the upcoming generations.
Her dance workshops and lectures have trailblazed their way to educational insitutions such as Cornell University, Wellesley College, King's College (London), and University of Ottawa. She performs with notable North African women's groups such as Bnat el Houariyat (Marrakech) and often performs internationally in New York, Paris, Belgium, Casablanca, and London!
