ABOUT
Make art. Make trouble.
"I am an embodied scholar. I see the body as the oldest and most cutting edge site of research; The body is my text, the site of my research, and the subject I am forever striving to better understand. Sometimes that makes me feel not as smart as my brilliant colleagues who focus on intellectual knowledge, the wisdom in books, science, and empirical evidence. But by studying the body, my body, my ancestral body, my cultural body, I am prioritizing the wisdom we each carry within us, tuning my ability to listen to it, and trusting its ability to teach me how to navigate the structures I have to survive everyday as a Black, queer, and Disabled woman.
I invite you to discover your own brilliance as I uncover mine, because enlivened, embodied beings have the power to change the world. May we together raze to the ground colonization and its offspring: white supremacy, capitalism, cis-heteronomativity and ableism. Let’s use art to conjure, and create joyful community because, to put it bluntly: it’s not about a seat at the table, fuck the table, burn it! Let’s dance on its ashes, to music of our own making, and together use its materials to create something better, something that leaves no one behind, and is all our own."
- KAI HAZELWOOD
ABOUT GTM
Good Trouble Makers is a moniker for the collaborative spaces and works facilitated by Kai Hazelwood — encompassing long-term or ‘chronic’ embodied research that facilitates community and healing. GTM is a practice-driven entity that has evolved and changed over the years to center and support mutual aid, queer folks and their identities, disability justice, healing justice and BIPOC; it will continue to shape shift to stay in alignment with its core values, our needs, and the world.
Kai Hazelwood (GTM’s founder and director) is a multi-award-winning transdisciplinary Disabled, Black, and queer artist, researcher, and embodied healing practitioner.
Kai was the resident Choreographer for Theatre Dybbuk from 2016-2019, a 2017 Art Omi Dance Artist in Residence, and a 2018 Los Angeles City Artist in Residence. She was invited to Jacob’s Pillow as part of the National Presenter’s Forum in recognition of her work as the founding Artistic Director of Downtown Dance & Movement, a state of the art dance facility offering classes, rehearsal, and performance space in Downtown Los Angeles before it closed due to COVID-19. In 2019 Kai was selected as part of the Dance USA Institute for Leadership cohort and received the Duke Access Award from the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP). Kai was also part of Chapman University’s faculty, teaching modern dance technique through an anti-racist lens.
After years of working independently in a variety of roles, Kai felt the urge to collaborate more deeply with other artists and communities. And so Good Trouble Makers (GTM) was born. GTM is an invitation to participate in spinning a web of community and creative mischief, through collaboration, across the world; to get in good trouble together. Inspired by the words of John Lewis, Good Trouble Makers’ projects are committed to making; making art, making room, making change, making good trouble.
The first GTM project, inVISIBLE, developed out of a weekly gathering of bisexual community members and allies that expanded into a five-year multilevel, multidisciplinary project. As the collective grew out of the traditional dance festival model, Unicorn pARTy was created — an event celebrating bi- and pluralsexual identities through many mediums.
Kai and GTM received support from the California Institute of Contemporary Arts, an Artistic Impact Award from Invertigo Dance Theatre and received funding from the city of West Hollywood to turn parts of their dance theater piece inVISIBLE into dance films. As Pieter Performance Space’s first virtual Artists in Residence, GTM collaborators led workshops in early 2021 that led to the premiere of an interactive virtual performance called Touch | Screen at The Musco Center in Orange County. In 2022 Kai was a Lincoln City Fellow supported by the Speranza Foundation to further her work with GTM.
In the chaos of 2020, both the pandemic and racial reckoning pivoted GTM toward Zoom-based offerings and mutual aid. A shift in Kai’s personal needs as she confronted chronic illness and disability started to reorganize the group’s values as well, prompting Kai to reimagine GTM’s creative process on a slower timeline, and across new mediums.
To foster communal healing for QTBIPOC and unravel embodied white supremacy, Kai and Sarah Ashkin co-founded Practice Progress: a consultancy addressing structural, professional, and interpersonal white supremacy through body-based learning. Practice Progress facilitates anti-racist learning through Kai and Sarah’s perspectives as embodied researchers and changemakers, and has served 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.
Navigating her own chronic illness and disabilities became a driving force in reshaping Kai’s life, and GTM along with it. Understanding how structural violence and inequities impact the health and wellbeing of people living at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities, like Kai does, further hones GTM’s values.
From 2022-2023. Kai was the first Black Executive Director of Pieter Performance Space, and began the hard work of transitioning a historically white and ableist organization to one with accessibility woven into its core, its physical space, and mission, as well as boldly centering Black and brown working class artists across Los Angeles.
From her perspective as an embodied researcher and changemaker, Kai completed a certification with The Embody Lab and launched a new GTM project: Homebody Living, where she combines EMDR and Somatic Therapy to support individuals and groups.
Kai travels between Los Angeles and Amsterdam NL to continue her work unraveling embodied white supremacy in dance and fostering embodied healing for QTBIPOC as an artistic research fellow at DAS Graduate School and as one of the inaugural California Arts Counsel Creative Corps fellows.
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. On Grief At The End of The World was recently published for a special issue of Performance Philosophy. She’ll have two additional pieces published in 2025 and is working on her first book Shedding: A Playbook.