Matthew Cumbie

Matthew Cumbie (he/him) is a collaborative dancemaker, writer, and artist educator. His artistic research cultivates processes and experiences that are participatory and intergenerational, moving through known and unknown, and brings a poetic lens to a specifically queer experience. His choreography and dancemaking- considered “a blend of risk-taking with reliability, [and] a combination of uncertainty and wisdom,”- weaves together a physical vocabulary of momentum and clarity, moving imagery, and a commitment to relationship-building and community participation. Through these experiences, Matthew's work is often deeply personal, timely, and grounded in community activism.

Matthew is an Assistant Professor at Colby College, and is a certified practitioner of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. He leverages the generative potential of dancemaking to create connections and catalyze community action, developing collaborative performances and community-specific programming in his home communities in central Maine and abroad; he also sustains multi-year collaborative relationships with New England artists Betsy Miller and Tom Truss, and a creative team of artists and scholars that stretches nationwide. He has danced in the companies of Christian von Howard, Keith Thompson, Jill Sigman, Paloma McGregor, Christopher K. Morgan & Artists, and Dance Exchange- an intergenerational dance organization founded by Liz Lerman- where he became an Associate Artistic Director and the Director of Programs and Communications. With Dance Exchange, he collaborated on and performed in works ranging in topic from the human genome to prayer and protest, on the highest point of the Great Smoky Mountains during a total solar eclipse, and with community organizers and activists after years of research and work in response to structures of racism and erasure in Dallas, Texas. He helped develop and brand Cassie Meador’s Moving Field Guide - a program created in partnership with the US Forest Service that connects artists with scientists, naturalists, and environmental educators to help people learn about environmental issues - and was an artist-educator with Jacob’s Pillow community engagement and Curriculum in Motion programs.

His work has been commissioned and supported by places like Dance Place, the Kennedy Center, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, and Harvard University, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, HumanitiesDC, the Arcus Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Maine Arts Commission. He is an alum of the Creative Community Fellows: New England, a program of the National Arts Strategies, and was a part of the Inaugural Artist Leadership Cohort for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) - curated by Liz Lerman and Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Mathew has been on faculty at Texas Woman’s University, Queensborough Community College, American University, and the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, and has been an invited speaker at the New York City Roundtable Arts in Education conference, the Advancing the Human Condition Symposium at Virginia Tech, and the LGBT Health and Art Making conference, in partnership with the Human Rights Commission and the GWU Health and Well-being graduate program. Originally from Houston, Matthew holds undergraduate degrees from Texas Lutheran University and Texas State University and an MFA in dance from Texas Woman’s University.