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India Harville
she/her
Goodyear, Arizona | Akimel O’odham lands
India Harville is an African American, femme, queer, disabled multi-media artist, politicized somatic healer, and Disability Justice activist. She has performed with Sins Invalid, Dance Exchange, California State East Bay, The Queer Arts Festival, the Black Spirit Dance Collective, Mouthwater Dance Festival, and Movement Liberation.
Her creative work is rooted in the belief that art is a pathway to survival, freedom, and collective transformation. Through movement and ritual, India explores themes of resilience, interdependence, and liberation, drawing on somatics as both a healing practice and a creative tool.
India’s dance roots are in modern dance, African dance, and hip hop, and she draws from these traditions to ground her work in rhythm, storytelling, and embodied resilience. Over the past two decades, she has studied a wide range of accessible dance, somatics, and bodywork practices to develop her own fusion of movement. Her work integrates improvisation, contact improvisation, massage-based explorations, and tools from both the Dance Exchange and DanceAbility methodologies to craft a more inclusive and adaptive movement style. India is recognized internationally as a Master Teacher and Master Trainer in the DanceAbility method, and she continues to innovate approaches that invite Disabled and non-Disabled dancers alike into deeper connection with their bodies, communities, and collective liberation.
She is the co-founder of How We Move, a national dance intensive and leadership program for Deaf and Disabled artists. The program nurtures artistry and cultural organizing, building a vital ecosystem of support for Disabled artists of color. India is also a core artist in the Black Spirit Dance Collective, a ritual performance ensemble weaving movement, song, and ancestral practice to honor collective resilience and transformation.
A 2018 Queer Cultural Center National Queer Arts Festival–Sponsored Artist, India presented her solo work Enough. She is a two-time recipient of the Mellon-funded Access Movement Play Residency and is currently developing her solo piece Liminal, the ensemble On Our Own Terms with Black Spirit Dance Collective, and L-E-A-K-Y with Elisabeth Motley.
