about
curriculum vitae
biography
Christopher "Unpezverde" Núñez is a BESSIE Award-nominated choreographer who works on movement and spatial relationships from a sensory perspective, on themes of disability, immigration, indigeneity, and accessibility. Originally from Costa Rica but based in NYC, he is a recognized educator for his "Vortex" methodology, which works from axes and planes, using respiratory proprioception and bioelectricity as triggers of bodily movement. He is in faculty at Movement Research, and has lectured at Princeton University; The New School; NCCAkron,The National Center for Choreography; University of Michigan; Dance/USA Conference; and Rutgers University.
Recent works include: The Square (Abrons Arts Center); Above Deep Waters (Battery Dance Company); The Circle or Prophetic Dream (Jacob’s Pillow; Danspace Project); YO OBSOLETE (Jacob’s Pillow; Brooklyn Museum; Leslie-Lohman Museum); and A Garden in the Shape of Dreams (The Kitchen). He’s been in residence at Loghaven, TN; The National Center for Choreography-Akron, OH; Abrons Arts Center, NY; Brooklyn Academy of Music BAM, NY; Danspace Project, NY; Center for Performance Research, NY; Movement Research, NY; and The Kitchen, NY. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2023), Dance/USA Fellow (2023), Princeton Arts Fellow (2022), and Leslie Lohman Museum Fellow (2018). Other honors include a USD$200,000 Mellon Foundation 2-year grant to support his practice (2022).
In 2023, the World's Premier Art Magazine "Art In America" selected Núñez as one of 20 up-and-coming artists for their recurring feature “New Talent.” The same year, he received a New York Dance & Performance Awards “Bessies” Nomination for Outstanding Performer.
Núñez is currently working on his new commission for Axis Dance Company to premiere in Spring 2026; he’s writing a book of his Vortex methodology; and researching for his new project “Tamata,” an exploration on votive offerings, theology and disability.
artist statement
I am a visually impaired choreographer who makes dances, films, and installations.
In my cosmology, the body becomes the raw material, the performance is a rite, and the space grows into a sanctuary. Ideas are revealed and materialized in movement, images, and narratives. The linguistic, the somatic, and the thematic intertwine to create performative playgrounds imbued with symbolic and ritualistic significance.
Linguistically, I offer a poetic perspective on audio description, using literary and artistic techniques to evoke sensory images through the spoken and written word. This has led me to create conceptual dances, in the form of poems, descriptions, and instructions. The use of language has shown me new insights into the natural abstraction of choreographic movement without revealing its provocative mystery:
dance forms forms
and the form dances the forms
forming and informing
"the formation of dance
Somatically, I am interested in transforming visual-motor-spatial concepts into sensorimotor-spatial experiences through proprioceptive breathing and bioelectricity, via the nervous system. I explore the alignment, positioning, orientation, and translation of the body as a sensory and alchemical experience. A reclamation of the land taken away, and our sense of belonging within it:
A warm and moist air leaves the body
at the same time that cold air enters and descends
A circuit of electricity traveling from your chest and hips
to your arms and legs
Feel your fingers. Feel your toes.
Imagine your fingertips drawing small circles, big circles, imaginary circles
Thematically, I am moved by addressing issues of disability, immigration, indigeneity, and accessibility. My diptych "Sacred Geometry," composed of the choreographies "The Circle" and "The Square," addresses themes of displacement, the ethics of immigration, and the ecology of reconciliation in times of current geopolitical crisis. Other themes I am unwaveringly dedicated to are memory and imagination, explored in my triptych "Memoirs of a Disabled Child," composed of the works "YO OBSOLETE," "A Garden in the Shape of Dreams," and "A Fuzzy Yellow Spot," which evoke imaginary places, people, and entities in response to childhood abuse:
When I was 7 years old
another child came to live inside my body
He was skinny
He had brown hair and black eyes
He came to live inside my body
because I was tired of feeling the pain
the pain I felt when my dad was beating me up...
Presently, my work is expanding into spiritual and hauntological anthropology. My current project, "Tamata," delves into the ex-votos (votive offerings) as a ritual of supplication, and promise for the healing of the disabled body.