Imani Deal

Imani Deal was born and raised in the Greater Boston Area. Deal is a recent graduate of Montclair State University where she received a Bachelors of Fine Art in Dance and a minor in Business. During her training at MSU, she’s had the privilege of dancing in works by Camille A. Brown, Earl Mosley, and Charles Weidman. Deal maintained a position on the Dean’s List throughout college and is a member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. She has attended Urbanity and EMIA dance intensives and has also interned for Urbanity Dance Company. Since graduation, Deal has danced in local projects by Jenny Oliver, Nailah Bellinger and Rachel Linsky. Deal plans to open an Arts Center that gives back to the inner city through the arts while also expanding her dance journey through traveling.

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Rachel Linsky

"Selection"

https://www.rachellinsky.com/zachor.html Director & Choreographer: Rachel Linsky Videographer: Olivia Moon Photography/halfasianlens Dancers: Gabriela Amy-Moreno Imani Deal Haylee Denham Olivia Link Erin McNulty Mindy Phung Erin Washington Soundscore: To The Hills (Variation 1) - Alexander Balanescu Speech of Bernard Marks - ICE Forum in 2017 in Sacramento, California. Filmed at The New England Holocaust Memorial This film is part of my ongoing project series, ZACHOR, which seeks to preserve and eternalize the words of WWII Holocaust Survivors through dance. The choreography in this piece was built using memories of Holocaust Survivors Elie Wiesel and Agi Geva on the selection process in Nazi concentration camps; a process determining who would be used for slave labor and who would be sent to gas chambers, separating and destroying millions of lives and families. For “Selection,” I incorporated the powerful words of Bernard Marks into the soundscore, as he confronts the ICE director in Sacramento, California in 2017. Survivors such as Marks, who chose and choose to share their stories do not do so because it is an easy experience for them to relive. They do so out of human responsibility, with the goal that history should never repeat itself; it is the responsibility of future generations to remember and acknowledge when history does. This project is funded in part by Combined Jewish Philanthropies and by New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund, with generous support from the Aliad Fund at the Boston Foundation. Thank you to these incredible organizations and the many generous individuals who supported the creation of this work. To learn more about ZACHOR visit https://www.rachellinsky.com/zachor.html