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Jessica T. Pearson (she/her) is a Professor of Dance at ºÚÁÏÀÏ˾»ú. Ms. Pearson is a dancer, educator and choreographer who danced with the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Gesel Mason, Concepts In Motion (Bermuda), and Denizen Arts. As a senior member of the Cleo Parker Robison Dance Ensemble, she performed the dances of Cleo Parker Robinson, Alvin Ailey, Talley Beatty, Nejla Y. Yakin, Ron K. Brown, and Christopher L. Huggins and performed at the Joyce Theater and the Dance Place in Washington D.C. 

As an educator of modern dance, ballet, and dance wellness, she has been invited to teach at Ballet West Summer Intensive, Brown University, Providence College, Urbanity Summer Intensive, University of Kentucky Lexington, Ballet Rhode Island, and overseas.  

Her choreography has been selected to perform at Boston Contemporary Dance Festival, Southern Vermont Dance Festival, and Collective Thread (NY). Urbanity Next, Utah Regional Ballet, ºÚÁÏÀÏ˾»ú, Salve Regina University, University of Kentucky Lexington, University of Utah, and Providence College have commissioned choreography by Ms. Pearson.  

Ms. Pearson is the visionary and co-collaborator of the performance project Soul Value. Through monologue, dance, ritual, and song, she and April H. Brown unearth the unknown lives of Black and Indigenous New Englanders that worked and advocated for themselves and others during and post the American Revolutionary War. Soul Value received the RI250 Major Grant for its performance for America’s Semiquincentennial. 

Ms. Pearson was awarded a mini grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities for research for her pending book project What Grew in the Elm City? Through biographical and constructivist grounded theories the book demonstrates how Dee Dee Handy Morris and her New Haven, Connecticut dance studio Dee Dee’s Dance Center was a space for Black, female entrepreneurship, leadership, youth development, identity, radical space making and being a productive businesswoman, contributing to her community for decades. 

She was commissioned by FirstWorks in Rhode Island to author an essay on Rennie Harris’ 25th anniversary of Rome & Jewels, conduct an virtual interview with Rennie Harris, and moderated a post-performance discussion with the company manager and Rennie Harris PureMovement company members. 

Ms. Pearson is currently training in Afro-Brazilian movement with Maestra Isaura Oliveira and Power of Skirts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a principal dancer in Hocus Pocus 2 and recently joined SAG-AFTRA. Prior to ºÚÁÏÀÏ˾»ú, she was a Post MFA Fellow at the University of Utah. She received her MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado Boulder where she studied dance pedagogy and choreography and BFA in Dance from Towson University in Towson, Maryland. With a subspecialty in dance wellness, she has been trained in Progressive Ballet Technique and Sugarfoot Therapy.