Angela’s Pulse logo
Angela’s Pulse
New York City
Fiscal Sponsor:
BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance
Paloma McGregor
Paloma McGregor
Executive Artistic Director + Co-Founder
Heather Benson
Heather Benson
Managing Director

Angela’s Pulse is an arts organization whose programs center Black people, stories and spaces. Angela’s Pulse creates and produces performance work across generation and geography. Their embodied methodologies for collaboration—including reading, writing, story-telling, drawing and dancing—create vital and enduring connections between people, places and visions.

Co-founded in 2008 by Paloma and Patricia McGregor, Angela’s Pulse was named for their mother, Angela—an artist, teacher, and activist who continues to inspire their work. Angela’s Pulse has spent more than a decade nurturing communities through short-term engagements and longer-term partnerships. They convene and facilitate interdisciplinary communities across generations and geography in order to develop rich, relevant artistic work. Angela’s Pulse’s embodied methodologies for collaboration—including reading, writing, storytelling, drawing, and dancing—create vital and enduring connections between people, places, and visions. In 2012, Paloma McGregor founded Dancing While Black (DWB) as a platform for community-building, intergenerational exchange, and visibility among Black dance artists whose work does not fit neatly into boxes. Since 2012, Angela's Pulse has supported the development of 36 emerging Black dance-makers in the yearlong Dancing While Black Fellowship program, presented countless public programs, incubated more than three dozen performance works, produced a landmark digital journal, and piloted a leadership-development program that shifted the platform successfully to a co-directorship model.

Jerome Foundation supports Angela’s Pulse’s Dancing While Black Fellowship program. Operating at the intersection of aesthetics and organizing, DWB supports six early career New York City-based choreographers per year. DWB centers the voices of Black dance artists, providing opportunities to self-determine the languages and lenses that define participating artists’ work. Fellows receive an honorarium and performance fee, free workshops with Black Master Teachers and former fellows, community meals, access to studio space to develop work, a professional development stipend, a produced showing, professional photos and video of their work, and access to a vibrant network of peers and mentors. Fellows also participate in monthly fellowship meetings—including the DWB cohort, Master Artists, and DWB Alumni—to share practices, ideas, challenges, visions, and work and attend performances and talks presented by Master Artists and practitioners.