T A R A   H E M M E R

A resident of Brooklyn, Tara Hemmer (she/her) was raised in the mountains of Northeast Georgia.  She is a graduate of the University of Georgia with a BA in Dance and a minor in English. Tara is an active creator, performer, and movement practitioner.

Tara’s work has been presented by Women in Motion, WaxWorks at Triskelion Arts, Dance Chance, AUX Festival, Skwhirlhaus, Art on the Beltline, Core Dance / The Field, and currently a 2023 space grant recipient at MOtiVE Brooklyn. She has taught at Gibney Dance, Core Decatur, Atlanta Ballet Center for Education, and The University of Georgia. She helped co-found Skwhirlhaus, a sustainable performance co-operative in Atlanta, GA, that aimed to create space for all makers and performers. She was selected as an exhibited artist and grant recipient in 2012 by Art on the Atlanta Beltline.

Outside of performing and creating her own body of work, she has had the pleasure of working with movement artists such as Erik Thurmond, Nattie Trogdon, Kristin O'neal, Greg Catellier, Maryn Whitmore, Alex Abarca, Corian Ellisor, and Rebecca Gose. She is a pilates and reiki practitioner, writer, quilt maker, and hiker.

A R T I S T S T A T E M E N T

I am an interdisciplinary artist situated at the intersection of movement, writing, and textiles. My practice is based in improvisation, ritual, and communing with nature. Growing up in the mountains of Northeast Georgia, my first memories of performance were among the trees; I coexisted with the foothills of mountain ranges, shallow creeks, deep lakes, and dark forests. Movement enables me to create and traverse the landscapes of my imagination, emotions, and memory. Grounded in the visual, somatic, and psychological, my work physically constructs a spacial and temporal layering of the subconscious. It is driven by images found in dreams, tethered to memory, that surface throughout a non linear unfolding. I am interested in the possibilities of the moving body as an energetic field, and its ability to emphasize and explore the effect of light, time, and sound to reconstruct the architecture of space, and how it is perceived. Through embodied movement and an assertion of presence, I believe there is potential for reclamation. In performance, I aim to create moments of transformation, exploration, and agency.