Romany Dear (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, researcher, and access worker. They describe their practice as a ‘spilling’ across access, arts, dance, education, and community organising at the edges of agriculture. Their work includes speculative and critical performance practices, poems, planting beans, and movement. Grounded in dance as collective and social action, Romany uses ‘translation’ as a method of anti-ableist movement.

Romany holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Live Arts, Crip Theory, and Feminist Cartographies (UNAL Colombia) and co-directs the Monstrous Futurities program at the Sandberg Institution, Amsterdam. They have lectured at institutions like the Glasgow School of Art, The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, HZT Berlin, and The National Universities of Bogota and Barranquilla in Colombia. With over 12 years of experience, Romany has worked with integrated dance companies such as AXIS, Con-Cuerpos, and Indepen-dance, and co-founded Glasgow Open Dance School. They have performed internationally with various organisations and venues in Colombia, Bolivia, New York City, and Berlin.

Romany will use her time at Cove Park to return to an ongoing body of research and development that has continued from her Masters thesis project, ‘Especies de Compania’ in Bogota, Colombia 2021. Romany will be in process-led residency, predominately working with and from body based, movement practices around what she calls, ‘constellations of together-mess’. She will also continue working on a series of ‘spilling’s’ that are word/text-based. Romany will be joined by other collaborators and practitioners, who will accompany this body of research.

Image taken from workshop, “Si no puedo bailar….”, facilitated by Romany Dear and Grace Turtle, La Casa de Meira, Barranquilla, Colombia 2024. Image of Romany Dear, Ébano and Medulla. (photography, Vanessa Marino, 2024)