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San Francisco native Bradford Chin (he/they/Bradford) is a Chicago- and San Francisco-based disabled dance artist & methodologist, accessibility cultural strategist, and artistic audio describer. Shaped by a love for chosen family (both blood-related and not), they hail from a family of artist-activists and creatives who document community histories through works that have received a National Book Award Finalist honor and been acquired by the Smithsonian and SFMOMA among other recognitions. Specializing in disability dance, Disability Justice-informed critically inclusive dance pedagogy, and creative process and aesthetics, Bradford uses choreographic process to explore disability as a generative lived experience that teaches us about our practices, aesthetics, and culture. Their work has received support from the California Arts Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts, The Actors Fund, and others. He earned a BFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach and an MFA in Dance from the University of California, Irvine and was formerly a company member with AXIS Dance Company (Berkeley, CA), one of the world’s leading ensembles of disabled and nondisabled dancers. A core member of Unfolding Disability Futures (Chicago, IL), Bradford joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dance Department as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025.
As incumbent for this advisory position overseeing Student Initiatives, my primary goals include: - Continuing to organize and strengthen National Conference student session offerings and community building opportunities, which I started in earnest and have been working on since 2022 - Introducing non-conference offerings that are relevant and useful for NDEO’s student membership and sustainable for NDEO staff capacity - Working with NHSDA and NDEO staff to connect NDEO’s student touchpoints and create a pipeline from NHSDA into NDEO student membership and organizational participation
My service to the field has been concentrated through NDEO, where I am in my fifth year of Advisory Council service, and the disability dance sub-field. Most visibly, I am a primary collaborator with Silva Laukkanen on Refocusing Dance Education, a nationwide, years-long project that has received multiple rounds of NEA funding to connect the various disability dance communities (region and institutional context) and better understand the different barriers, resources, and skills present in the efforts toward increasing the disability-accessibility of dance education. In addition to RDE and my NDEO Student Initiatives committee work over the last five years, my collaborative leadership experience includes leading multiple $20k+ budget events in graduate school and directing a creative work with a $17k budget. At the University of Wisconsin, in addition to my department service, I serve on the School of Education’s Global Education Committee and the Advisory Council for the School of Education’s Office of Research and Scholarship.