Biography
Nana Otaka (she/her) is a fourth-year undergraduate student pursuing a BFA in Dance and a BA in Psychology at the University of Michigan. As an immigrant and woman of color, she is passionate about social justice and advocating for accessible and affordable mental health care. She hopes to become a mental health professional in the future and is interested in studying clinical, social, and developmental psychology through a culturally-informed lens, with a focus on intergenerational trauma and movement/dance therapy.
During her time at the University, she has performed in works by Fangfei Miao, Nicole Reehorst, Leah O’Donnell, and Tanya and Thaddeus Wideman-Davis and participated in choreographic processes for multiple senior capstone concerts. For the past two years she has served as the President of Arts in Color, a student organization in the Department of Dance dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the performing arts. She has also participated in focus groups and meetings with faculty and staff of SMTD to give student input on and advance DEI initiatives. Through consistent dialogue and arts-based events surrounding DEI such as the annual student-led Arts in Color showcase, she has cultivated a community of inclusivity in which students feel empowered to become agents of change and investigate the intersections of social justice activism and the arts.
In 2021, she co-produced and choreographed for the Arts in Color showcase Close is Never Close Enough: Investigating Intersectionality, which explored how our
multidimensional, layered, and heavily nuanced experiences shape who we are and how we navigate different spaces in the public sphere, specifically as they relate to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized groups. She collaborated with three Japanese dance majors and a Japanese musical theater major to create her dance I hope you choke on it, which incorporated spoken word to comment on anti-Asian hate and the fetishization of Asian women. As the first live showcase after the COVID-19 pandemic and fueled by recent mass media coverage of incidences such as the murder of George Floyd and the Atlanta, GA spa shootings, the performance offered students an opportunity to articulate their frustrations as well as challenge (mis)conceptions of their multidimensional identities.
Outside of SMTD, she works as a Research Assistant for the Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race (EMBRace) Program, a culturally-based therapeutic program working to provide African American youth and their families with the tools to confront and resolve racial stress and trauma as well as implement healthy coping for racial encounters.