Amy O’Neal is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator. A sought-after artist for over two decades, she teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for live performance, dance film, music video and virtual reality. She is Executive/Artistic Director of Hybrid Dance Lab, a performance and education platform for experimental street/club dance artists to challenge notions of street dance inside theater, address the inevitable process of hybridity, and nurture cultural literacy. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, an experimental multidisciplinary video, music, and contemporary dance company. Inspired by hip-hop culture and experimental cinema, locust‘s work created social commentary with humor and heavy beats. She was also the lead singer of Keeble’s band, Marrow, from 2002-2006. From 2010 until now, she creates experimental dance work merging Black social dance practices from hip-hop and house culture and contemporary dance while directly addressing race, gender and the sampling nature of innovation. She premiered her first evening-length solo in 2012 where she examined her influences, questioned her relationship to Blackness as a white woman, and paid homage to her teachers and dance heroes. As a practicing guest of Black dance culture, she has participated in experimental and all-styles battles, co-organized and co-produced Seattle House Dance Project, co founded and co taught the first House dance classes in Seattle with dani tirrell in 2014, and developed street and club dance curriculum for the University of Washington. Her passion and research meet at the intersection of hip-hop, house and contemporary dance communities. Within this intersection she explores the complex differences, nuances and layers of hybridized movement vocabularies. For example, in her eighth evening-length work, Opposing Forces, O’Neal and five Seattle-based B-Boys explored fears of feminine qualities in our culture through the hyper-masculine form of Breaking. Opposing Forces toured from 2014 to 2017, and an award-winning documentary about the show called How it Feels premiered in 2019. City Arts Magazine wrote, “O’Neal synthesizes complex themes with a cohesive, penetrating aesthetic. Her latest work transcends disciplines and boundaries. It is a bridge between worlds, a translator for opposing points of view, a force for good.”

O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artist Trust, and 4 Culture. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/ImpulsTanz scholar and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, where she was awarded the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. While at Cornish, she danced and toured with the Pat Graney Company from 1998 to 2001and Scott/Powell Performance from 1997-2004. . O’Neal has been an Artist in Residence at Bates Dance Festival, Headlands Center for the Arts, the US/Japan Choreographer’s Exchange, and Velocity Dance Center. Amy has worked on virtual reality music videos and projects that have premiered at Sundance in Utah and Cannes Lions Festival in France and created multiple dance films that have screened both nationally and internationally in dance film festivals.

After 20 years in Seattle, O’Neal relocated to Los Angeles in 2016, landing a weekly class at Ryan Heffington’s studio, The Sweat Spot, which closed in 2020. Here she continued developing her pedagogy of hybrid hip hop and contemporary improvisation/freestyle methods that began at Velocity Dance Center in 2010. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 where she teaches hip-hop, house and freestyle techniques, composition and improvisation, hybrid hip hop contemporary improvisation techniques, contemporary dance, and lectures on Black social dance history, practice, and media literacy.

In 2019, she was invited to curate an evening for the LAX Festival presented by Los Angeles Performance Practices. Versions of this format with different line ups of artists happened again at LAX Festival 2021, The Reach/The Kennedy Center DC in 2022, Stomping Ground LA and Velocity Dance Center Seattle 2023, NCC Akron 2024, and BASE in Seattle 2025. After five years of collective community research, Hybrid Dance Lab is an official organization based out of Seattle building intentional connections within the city and beyond. In Spring 2025, Amy made Seattle her home base again, and will continue to travel to LA for projects and community. She teaches Freestyle Methods at The Beacon: Massive Monkees Studio and continues to build Hybrid Dance Lab as a consistent space for research, development, and performance opportunities for experimental street/club dance artists. She feels the most at peace when she can embody her full human experience as an artist and is passionate about nurturing space for others to do the same.

Photo above by Maddy Talias