Rachel DeForrest Repinz

Rachel DeForrest Repinz (she/her) is the Program Manager for the Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program (AGDEP) at CUNY Hunter College.

In addition to her work at CUNY Hunter College, Rachel is a PhD in Dance candidate at Texas Woman’s University, and is a visually impaired multidisciplinary artist-scholar based in Brooklyn, NY. Rachel’s work is rooted in the postmodern tradition and disability aesthetic lineage, weaving together movement, text, time, and sound as primary modes of inquiry through a Disabled worldview. Engaging access as creative praxis, experimental approaches to audio description, and improvisational time-based performance practices, her work takes an experimental, embodied, approach to accessibility. She currently serves as the Advisor of Dance and Disability for the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO), and was awarded as a Dance/NYC ‘Disability. Dance. Artistry.’ Dance and Social Justice Fellow (2023). Rachel founded and artistically directs RACHEL:dancers (spoken as Rachel and Dancers), a multi-modal dance performance company, and co-directs Bashi Arts with Enya-Kalia Jordan.

Rachel is on faculty at Temple University and serves as a Staff Writer and Editorial Board member for thINKingDANCE, a Philadelphia-based online dance journal. Her artistic and scholarly work has been presented nationally and internationally. Some of her favorite venues include Judson Memorial Church (2025), La MaMa (2024), Dixon Place (2024), the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (2024), Movement Research (2022), the University of the West Indies Barbados (2018), and the NDEO national conferences (2018, 2019, 2022, 2024, 2025).
Rachel has worked with esteemed choreographers including Merián Soto, Heidi Latsky, Sidra Bell, Abdur-Rahim Jackson, Dr. S. Ama Wray, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Carlos R.A. Jones, and as a principal dancer for Enya Kalia Creations, among others.

Rachel received a BA and MFA in Dance from SUNY Buffalo State University and Temple University, respectively.

• BA, Arts & Letters: Dance and Design, SUNY Buffalo State University
• MFA, Dance Performance & Choreography, Temple University
• PhD (ABD), Dance, Texas Woman’s University

Research interests include:

• blindness
• disability
• dance
• postmodern improvisation
• crip methodology
• practice-as-research
• anti-racist and feminist pedagogies
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• audio description for dance

• Forthcoming: Repinz, Rachel D, and Julie Pentz. In review. Dance in the Hybrid Realm: Creating Accessible High-Quality Hybrid Experiences for Disabled and Non-Disabled Dancers. Submitted to Dance Education in Practice, April 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/23734833.2025.2570056

• New York State Dance Education Association (NYSDEA) Regional Fund Award, NYSDEA, 2025: to support the re-staging of “”If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It”” as part of RE/VENUE Fall Performance Series at Mark Morris Dance Center.
• Disability. Dance. Artistry. Dance and Social Justice Fellow, Dance/NYC, 2023: to support ongoing work at the intersection of dance, disability, and social justice.
• Illuminate the Arts Individual Artist Grant, Creative Philadelphia, 2021: to support ongoing artistic development for performance-based projects.