Dr. Adesola Akinleye is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar and choreographer. She began her career as a dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem (USA) later working in UK Companies such as Green Candle, and Carol Straker Dance Company. Over the past twenty years she has created works ranging from  films, installation and texts to live performance that is often site-specific and involves a cross-section of the community as well as acting as guest choreographer for university programs and professional company repertoire. Her work is characterized by an interest in glimpsing and voicing peoples lived experiences through creative moving portraiture. A key aspect of her process is the artistry of opening creative practices to everyone from women in low wage employment to ballerinas to performance for young audiences. Akinleye foundered and is co-artistic director of DancingStrong Movement Lab.  Working with Dancingstrong Movement Lab co-director, Helen Kindred, their new work Concrete-Water-Flesh, a hybrid physical-web-based live performance piece, seeing performance art as living across geographic location and across time. DancingStrong Movement Lab. also includes triip Lab (turning research ideas into practice) to cultivate a unique multi-generational, multi-disciplinary nurturing and practice-based ensemble space.

Akinleye is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts, Dance Division at Texas Woman’s University. She is a Research Fellow with Theatrum Mundi and visiting lecturer at Central School Saint Martins, Spatial Practices Department. She is Visiting Artist 2020–2022 at Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) MIT   and Research Affiliate at Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), MIT. 

Akinleye has published in the field of dance scholarship as well as cultural and social studies. Her work includes the editing and curation of Narratives in Black British Dance: embodied practices (2018), for which she was shortlisted for One Dance UK’s Impact in Dance Writing Award (2018). Upcoming publications for 2021 include editing and curating the forthcoming anthology (re:)claiming ballet, and Akinleye’s first monograph Dance, Architecture and Engineering. 

For her choreographic work, Akinleye has been awarded ADAD Trailblazer, Bonnie Bird, New Choreography Award and One Dance UK Champion Trailblazer. For her work in community dance and education she was awarded Woman of the year in Community Dance by the Town of Islip, New York. She is a Fellow of Fellow of the Higher Academy  (FHEA)   Royal Society of Arts (RSA).   She holds a PhD from Canterbury Christ Church University, MA (distinction) in work-based learning Dance in Community and education (2007), and an MA in Film (distinction) 2020 from Middlesex University. Akinleye is also a certified Gyrotonic and Gyrokinesis instructor. She currently lives between London and Boston.