WHO WE ARE
Kai Hazelwood (she/her) trained as a Ballerina across the US and in Russia, and is now a multi-award-winning transdisciplinary Disabled, Black, and queer artist, researcher, and embodied healing practitioner.
Kai is the founder and director of Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven collaborative arts project celebrating queer identities and centering disabled and chronically ill QTBIPOC. Kai and Good Trouble Makers have been supported by Arts Omi International Arts Center, The City of Los Angeles, California Institute of Contemporary Arts, Pieter Performance, The California Arts Council and DAS Graduate School.
From her perspective as an embodied researcher and changemaker Kai works with individuals and groups in her embodied healing practice Homebody Living which combines EMDR and Somatic Therapy; she is certified in both through the Embody Lab.
To foster communal healing for QTBIPOC and unravel embodied white supremacy she co-founded Practice Progress, a consultancy addressing structural, professional, and interpersonal white supremacy through body based learning. Practice Progress serves non and for profit institutions and individuals including MASSMoCA, University of Alberta, Trisha Brown Dance, Gibney Dance, Ohio State Dance Department, University of The Arts, Amsterdam, and University of Texas, Austin Dance.
Kai’s slower moving body has been less in the dance studio and more quietly processing so much grief and transformation in the last few years. Some of that process has been shared through writing in various publications.
Kai’s first published piece titled: I’m Breaking Up With Dance, I Can’t Heal In The Same Relationship That Hurt Me was published in Issue 5 of Imagining: A Journal published by Gibney Dance and edited by Eva Yaa Asantewaa.In 2024 On Grief At The End of The World was published for a special issue of Performance Philosophy. Her writing also appears in Stance On Dance’s Spring 2026 issue, as part of Interspecies Entanglement, and more. She’s working on her first book Shedding: A Playbook.
By the grace, generosity, and labor of her teachers, Sarah Ashkin (she/her) moves with white supremacy as a white problem (Yancy, 2007). She maintains an active practice of reckoning with and disrupting the weaponization of whiteness in herself and her relationships while cultivating a many-pronged approach of inviting other people benefiting from white privilege into the co-struggle against racism.
Tending to the structural and interpersonal race dynamics present in our interracial friendship and work partnership, Practice Progress is the manifestation of her and Kai’s own lived practice of anti-racisting world-building (We use the progressive tense in “anti-racisting” because it is an unfinished, constantly evolving practice).
As a professional dancer and dance company director, with 20 years of experience as a movement educator, Sarah recognizes embodied learning as an invaluable and transformative tool in addressing the ways that racism and anti-racisting happen in our bodies and in relationships between bodies. She draws upon this knowledge as a facilitator for Practice Progress, where she has led dozens of White Working Groups in creative nervous system practices which work to cultivate anti-racisting sensation and action. She has undergone intensive facilitation training with the Urban Bush Women and the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere Los Angeles, and artEquity. She also counts her work with DNAworks’ Adam McKinney as an essential influence upon her philosophies of anti-racisting dance education and community-centered performance. She is honored to bring her commitment, care, and humility to all those she encounters through Practice Progress.
Sarah has also worked extensively in schools; she has been a co-leader in anti-racisting / anti-colonial course design for elementary, middle, highschool, and undergraduate dance instruction. Currently, she teaches “Contemporary Dance: Resistance in Action” to undergraduates at University of California, Davis. In her work as a choreographer for GROUND SERIES dance and social justice collective, she uses site-specific performance as a ritual practice to gather around our collective wounds and healing strategies wrought by and in resistance to white supremacy and settler colonialism.
Sarah earned her BA from Wesleyan University in Dance Performance and Choreography and Environmental Studies, and a MA from University Roehampton in Dance, Politics and Sociology. She researches and writes on whiteness and the body, white supremacist legacies in dance education, and place-based anti-colonial ritual. She and Kai are currently working on a book project, Moving Racism, to document their learning from 7 years of practicing progress together. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the PhD program in Performance Studies at UC Davis, with dissertation research in the practical and symbolic uses of mud as a partner in embodied anti-racisting.
In 2023, Sarah married Sean McNamara, grandson of Robert McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam war. As Sean’s family continues to reckon with the atrocities enacted by his grandfather, Sarah recognizes her own grappling with the legacy of slavery in the American South that is alive in her bloodline. In making family with the McNamaras, she has found community in those who are not willing to look away. Sarah is also a new mother raising her baby Rylee.