Kealoha Ferreira

Kealoha Ferreira is a Kanaka Maoli, Filipino, Chinese dance artist from Nuʻuanu, Oʻahu . She began her performing and teaching career with Ananya Dance Theatre in 2013, becoming the Artistic Associate and a Co-Leader of the Shawngrām Institute for Performance & Social Justice in 2018. A practitioner of Yorchhā, and an emerging student of Oli, Kūahu and Hula, Kealoha works at the intersection of these transnational feminist and aloha ʻāina embodied practices to create space, classes, and performance that dig into the tensious and expansive nature of relationality while remaining rooted in cultural and kinesthetic specificity. Her journey in reclaiming ʻike kupuna and nā mea Hawaiʻi is sustained by a collective of diasporic Kanaka Maoli based in Minnesota, Iowa, Texas, New York and Hawaiʻi. She is grateful to deepen her learning through the Lonoa Honua programming led by Kekuhi Kanahele Kanakaʻole. Kealoha mahalos the people, lands, and waters (chosen and ancestral) that teach her daily to dance with aloha and complex solidarity.

Yorchhā™, is Ananya Dance Theatre's contemporary dance technique that intersects the forms of Vinyasa Yoga, the classical Indian dance form Odissi (from the eastern Indian state of Odisha), and the martial art form Chhau (also from eastern India) to articulate stories of women, womxn, and femmes from Black, Indigenous, and communities of color around the world.