About

Dani “dan” Cole (pronouns: they/them) is an experimental dance artist, poet, and tree steward, as well as a Licensed Creative Arts Psychotherapist working in acute public health settings. All of their work is heavily informed by ecology, recognizing the impacts of the wider circles — familial, cultural, societal, environmental — that reveal our impact on and inseparability from one another. dan’s experiences of chronic illness and work with disabled community in the overlapping spaces of the arts, the medical system, and political organizing shapes their aesthetics and ongoing exploration of accessibility.

dan’s choreography has been shared in New York at the Mark O’Donnell Theater, the Emelin Theatre, and Bridge for Dance. Cole was selected as a part of the 92nd Street Y's Dance Up! next generation of young choreographers and was a 2019 choreographic resident at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. As a dance artist, they frequently collaborate with jill sigman/thinkdance on projects related to social justice often in non-traditional performance settings, and performed in Deep Blue Sea with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company at the Park Avenue Armory in 2021. They train in Butoh with Vangeline at the New York Butoh Institute, and have also studied with Dai Matsuoka. dan has explored related movement approaches with Eiko Otake. They train in the discipline of Authentic Movement with Joan Wittig.

dan serves as a Super Steward Street Tree Care Captain with NYC Parks, organizing stewardship education and community events in their locale. They founded and facilitate annual Tree Time workshops that explore embodied practice as a means of relationship-building between people and trees, and offer education on the relevance of trees to cultural histories and environmental justice.

dan works as a Licensed Creative Arts Psychotherapist (LCAT) and Registered Dance/Movement Therapist (R-DMT) in acute inpatient medical settings. They facilitate individual and group therapy with culturally diverse populations across the age spectrum who are navigating complex, and often interrelated, medical conditions, systemic stressors, and mental health challenges. dan presented on their unique role in the public health system at the NYC Health + Hospitals 2026 Creative Arts Therapy Conference. They lecture annually about Dance/Movement Therapy at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

dan’s debut poetry book Between Heart and Sap was published by Nothing to Say Press in 2025. Writing from dan can also be found in Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s Imagining: A Gibney Journal. Photos by dan and C. Cole.

For Disability Justice modeling, education, and advocacy...

  • Sins Invalid (co-founders Patty Berne and Leroy Moore), Shadah Kafai, Stacey Milbern, Alice Wong, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Shadah Kafai, Hyp-ACCESS, Project LETS, Health Justice Commons, Talia T.L. Lewis, Dustin Gibson, Krishna Washburn, Shannon Finnegan... 

For supporting my understanding of the bodymindspirit through dancing and writing...

  • Karen King Flores, Cheryl Brower, Angelina Gallo, Ilana Puglia, Abigail Agresta-Stratton, Denise Purvis, Danah Bella, Elisabeth Motley, Catherine Cabeen, Karen Gayle, Krishna Washburn, Jill Sigman, Bill T. Jones, Sharon Milanese, Joao Carvalho, Elizabeth Keen, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Bobbi Jean Smith, Jhon Tamayo, Cara Gallo-Jermyn, Cashel Campbell, Joan Wittig, Ted Ehrhardt, Jill Sigman, adrienne maree brown, Daria Halprin, Vangeline, every single dance peer I've shared space with...

For education on accessible, holistic support through traditional/living and contemporary lineages...

  • Hypermobile Accessible Proprioceptive Therapy (HAPT) & Hyp-ACCESS (Audre Wirtanen & L Tuthall), Bryn Hlava/Svastha Holistic Healing & Marma Chikitsa education, Hae Jung/Doraji Healing & Traditional Chinese Medicine, Atmananda Yoga & Ayurvedic Education, Staci K. Haines/politicized somatics...

For helping me return to Earth and to embrace ecologies with love, curiosity, grief, and advocacy...

  • The trees, my mother and father, Suzanne Simard and fellow researchers, Leslie Day and Trudie Smoke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, David George Haskell, Meg Lowman, Steven Pratt, Richard Powers, Annie Novak, Carey Russell, Julia Butterfly Hill, Camille T. Dungy, Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Francis Weller, Margaret Renkl...

gratitude (in process)

land acknowledgment

this land acknowledgement is living — written with Laura Cedillo of the Pame del Norte peoples

I, dan, eat from, rest upon, and dream through the land nurtured, stewarded, and held in spirit by the Munsee Lunaape people. This land, known to colonizers as Brooklyn, New York, offers the last remaining old-growth forest of Lenapehoking, as well as countless gathering grounds for people of close and global diasporas. Lenapehoking shares remnants of glacial time and waterbeds that are a memory and living manifestation of geological migrancy. I am born of people across oceans and time, lands East of Turtle Island, that conjure and recall their own woodlands and saltwater. My ancestors birthed global bodies; they stewarded fish, tobacco, radishes, animals, lawnmower parts, and handheld electronics. Their bodies ate from soils I may never meet in the physical realm. I am born of people who settled Turtle Island with debts and without question; I do not know their relationship to Munsee Lunaape stewards, but I do know that their intergenerational silence and whatever circumstances they upheld directly contributed to the violence, harms, and loss of intimate connections to the land and the peoples who nurtured this entire continent long before my direct relatives, European and Japanese people, arrived. As far as I know, I am the first of my people to be here in Lenapehoking and I replicate the usurpation of people and land who can only afford this place until people like me, with some degree of privilege, access, and wealth, arrive. My intentions are to carry the openness of my ancestors to adaptation, and to remember the ways in which they made contact with materials only Earth can provide. I intend to reimagine contact with souls and spirits by feeling the memories and grief of this land, my ancestors, and the stewards who both have and do not have direct contact with their most beloved soils and waterways. I offer care to Lenapehoking's trees, both those who have been here a long time and those transplanted and surrounded by cement. I offer a channeling of wisdom from my ancestors, with respect to the original stewards of Lenapehoking, to share with others how to support trees and the ecologies they are apart of --- inseparable from humanity. I offer hope and a willingness to partner with indigenous communities worldwide to support people in reconnecting with fragments of place. I offer gratitude to the Munsee Lunaape and prayers that the ways they honored and stewarded the marshes and forests will be acknowledged, recognized, and adapted to support the well-being of the global human and more-than-human bodies that now live on and with this land. I am thankful for the time to be here while I vow to hold the land and their people in my spirit and actions. 

Film photo by Christian Tan-Lin Li