Since leaving New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Michelle Gibson has taken the city’s culture to the world through her own New Orleans second-line aesthetic, a unique blend of dance styles ranging from Afro-funk to jazz. She has presented choreographic workshops and lectures at multiple festivals such as Jazz Ascona in Switzerland and Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires, and she just completed her first year as a professor of practice in dance at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Following her post-Katrina mission to create and preserve spaces filled with the spirit of New Orleans, she still invests much of her energy in local organizations such as the Ashé Cultural Center, Cultural Ties Dance Festival, Dancing Grounds, and her own dance lecture and workshop project, The New Orleans Original Buckshop.

“To share New Orleans from an artistic perspective, through dance and history and music, is what my focus has been,” Gibson said. “I’m in the classroom and I’m outside of the classroom, so my teaching, artist practice, and scholarship are all linked together.”

Born in Independence, Louisiana, and raised in New Orleans, Gibson began her dance training at Milton School of Dance and an elementary after-school program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). She completed her conservatory training at NOCCA through high school and began undergraduate studies at Dillard University. Gibson eventually paused her studies but later decided to attend Tulane to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance.

“Tulane’s program gave me hope, even in the midst of everything that I was going through in my personal life,” said Gibson. “They created a space for me, so that as an artist, a mother, a student, I could finish and receive my degree.”

After completing her BFA at Tulane, Gibson traveled around the world for almost 20 years doing residency work at universities, later receiving her MFA in dance from Hollins University/American Dance Festival at Duke University. Now working as a full-time professor, she has more time to hone her practice and scholarship. She keeps her mantra of “crossing bridges and connecting cultures” at the heart of her work, drawing on the communal experience of what it means to be a New Orleans artist.

“I made sure that my practice was like a chain of links of who I am and what I was raised on, and so everything that I teach will always revolve around my roots, connected to the African diaspora, as a New Orleans homegrown artist and scholar,” Gibson said.

In partnership with the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Gibson will bring New Orleans culture to Dallas communities for the third annual Brass and Jazz in the Park this October. Gibson curated this festival for all communities, regardless of economic background, to create conversations about the importance of remembering New Orleans jazz roots.

“I’ve continued what I brought with me as the evacuee in my teaching practice. I open spaces around the world, utilizing what it is that I wear on my skin, in my body and my soul,” Gibson said. “And that is the rooted experience of growing up in a city that is the voice of Mother Africa on American soil. That is who I am.”