On embodied living
Dominique C. Hill (she/zo) is a brown-black girl from the east side of Buffalo, NY.
Home and origin tastes like BBQ pig’s feet, sweet spaghetti, fried bologna sandwiches, hot and charred BBQ Buffalo wings, and steak subs as treats. The landscape of her upbringing was shaped by the public library, vacation bible school, summer camp, step team, Easter plays, family cookouts, and street light time.
Hill was raised by three generations of womn and play kin who know the power of prayer and libations. Zo was nurtured in enrichment programs, community dance programs, and churches of various denominations.
These makings inform her values of place as central to the learning process whether it be the school classroom or the world classroom.
Scholar. Vulnerability Guide. Creative.
Hill’s written and performed scholarship traces the living edges of Black girlhood, textured embodied knowing, and Blackqueer intimacies. In Hill’s scholarship, the body functions as a central way of knowing and site of unlearning and retooling. Hill extends the field of Black Girlhood studies as an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Colgate University.
Zo has completed multiple solo and collaborative creative residencies across the United States. In the summer of 2025, she will take her practice abroad and complete an artist residency in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh.
As a political commitment to disrupt gendered separation within queer-related art and creativity alongside the propensity of siloed academic work, she co-visioned Hill L. Waters (HLW) with Durell M. Callier. HLW is a Blackqueer feminist collective that foregrounds embodiment as a way of knowing. Together they devise and stage performances, publish about the politics of collectivity and Black feminist practice, and enact workshops on the art of collectivity and storying the self in the presence of others. Thus far, HLW has created four staged performances, these original pieces explore race, gender, sexuality, and the politics of self-definition.
Hill is also trained in white belt Nia dance technique, received certified training in somatic emdr and embodied social justice, and will receive her Feminine Embodiment Coaching Certification and Breath and Movement for Trauma Healing Certificate by the end of 2025. Hill enacts spiritual and intergenerational work as a homegirl of Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT). She is also a guide of the 28 Day Global Dance Meditation.
Navigating geographies and contexts racially charged, anti-queer, and organized by dichotomies, Hill’s artistic practice, research, writing, and communal engagement destabilizes domination, investigates material and normalized borders, as well as engenders deeper intimacy and embodied living.
Hill’s recent book, Black Gurl Reliable, examines embodiment and practices of resistance in Black girlhood. Hill is also co-author of two books, Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet (Routledge, 2022) and Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body (Brill|Sense, 2019).
Lover. Body-Activator. Unraveling Doula.
Storied by elders as “dancing before she could walk, '' Hill is inspired by Black social dance, everyday artful living, poetry, and queer configurations of family. Hill is curious about what stories our bodies hold and how the body archives them. She uses breath, movement, dance, and impromptu experiences to open us to ourselves and explore what becomes possible for us to hear-see-feel-smell-create…
With over a decade of experience working in educational contexts outside of the traditional classroom, such as after-school and workshop settings, Hill aims to create scholarship that is vulnerable, embodied, community accountable, transgressive, and arts-informed.
Zo has worked with girls of color as well as various youth academic and cultural organizations across the United States. She has facilitated movement and creative workshops on topics including but not limited to self-definition, forgiveness, inner child and embodiment, inclusion and Black feminism, writing the self, practicing vulnerability, and rewriting childhood.
Hill harnesses Black aliveness and celebrates Black survival. She is invested in intergenerational dialogues, indivisible freedom, and culturally-located methodologies.
On an average day, you can find Hill
walking barefoot in the grass or on a beach,
stargazing, dancing with the moon,
at a cafe, or complimenting someone.
Photo Credit (top to bottom): Light to the Darkness Photography (1-2), and Lisa Salisbury Hackley (3).