Zion Martin-Hayes is a Dancer and Performer currently pursuing her MA in Dance Performance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance. Her dissertation explores on the evolution of dance in the contexts of pre-, post-, unnamed, and localized genocide, critically questioning how cultural erasure is represented through a history of dance.

She earned her BA from Connecticut College in English and Dance where she wrote an honors thesis called Passerby to Sonder: How Black Literary Sources Use Dance to Carve Out Relational Possibility. This work investigates the possibly for performance to exist in everyday interactions between bodies and their assigned personhoods.

Zion's practice is deeply informed by international engagement. She has traveled to a number of countries including Sénégal where she interned at École des Sables and Ghana where she participated in community dance initiatives, to explore ethnographic approaches to movement research.

As a dancer, performer, and scholar, Zion hopes to make meaningful contributions to society by bringing academic movement research into public spaces like museums, libraries, and community centers--using performance as a means to foster dialogue, empathy, and social understanding.