ABOUT SOPHIA
Sophia Wright Emigh (she/they) is an interdisciplinary, queer mother artist and movement filmmaker working at the intersection of somatics, ecology, and cultural practice. Their work spans performance, installation, film, photography, visual art, social practice, and writing, with a focus on embodied ritual and ecological belonging. As scholar, writer, and researcher, she explores questions of belonging, ancestry, and cultural-ecological repair through both artistic and intellectual inquiry.
Sophia holds a BA in Performance Studies from Yale University, an MFA from Transart Institute for Creative Research, and is a Registered Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist (RSME/T) through the Tamalpa Institute. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships at Vermont Studio Center, Future Forum, and Performance Works Northwest. Their films and performances have been featured in the Portland Dance Film Festival and Art Monastery Short Film Festival, with screenings and presentations at institutions and festivals including the Portland Art Museum (Northwest Triennial, Virtual Venice Biennale), PRAx, Oregon Contemporary Art Center, Newport Art Museum, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, Portland Winter Lights Festival, Creative Exchange Lab, CETI Institute, Transart, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas (New Haven, CT), 1 Festival at The Headwaters (Portland), San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, Weaving Waters @ Yarun SciArt Symposium (Australia), and Portland’s Hollywood Theatre.
Sophia’s lineage of influence includes Bread and Puppet Theater, Anna Halprin and the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, El Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Bad Unkl Sista, and diverse musical traditions spanning Slavic, Appalachian, Georgian, Shape Note, and experimental forms. Alongside their artistic practice, Sophia facilitates somatic expressive arts sessions, workshops, and land-based gatherings that emphasize cultural change, ecological belonging, and community resilience. Their collaborative and community-oriented projects have engaged audiences across the east and west coasts of the United States and in South America, often situated within frameworks of social practice and collective transformation.
They live and practice on unceded Ndakinna land of the Western Abenaki in Vermont, where they are developing their home as a center for art and ecosomatics, integrating creative practice with ecological stewardship and communal visioning.
BIO
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice of finding internal origin through somatic ecology calls upon slow time, whole time, geologic time. I seed somatic rituals and document their emergent textures through sketches, earth pigments, film as witness, audio traces of song and environment, and other translations of the body’s direct perception. Rooted in belonging, ancestral transmutation, and mycelial connection, my practice attends to subtle currents that invite deep listening within the stillness-movement continuum.
As queer, disabled, neurodivergent, m/othering body and future soil, my creative practice both regulates my own system and invites others into attunement processes via contact with the ecological nervous system. The artistic traces of these practices invite a restoration of trust in the intelligence of our bodies, a deeper relationship with land, place, and spirit, and a reimagining of how we live, learn, and create in community as microorganisms who are part of the greater earth body.
Committed to rhythmic, sedimentary presence, I return to the seeds I plant and witness their transforming landscapes. I channel emergent patterns into queer, feral, immersive containers that cultivate rest, listening, and intuitive connection — spaces where dissolution and meaning meet, where the wild world may intervene in the juggernaut of our psyches.
I live and practice on the unceded Ndakinna land of the Western Abenaki, apprenticed to decolonization, abolition, somatic remediation, and re-imagined futures. I belong to red cedar, lavender, dandelion, ghost pipe, mugwort, wild rose, and barn owl, rooted in the Askaskwiwajoak mountains, moss, and the North Branch of the Winóskizibó river.
