نوال
Noelle Awadallah نوال (she/her) is a Palestinian-American choreographer, dancer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis, Minnesota).
Alongside her sister Leila Awadallah, she is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance, a project and practice that is a point of entry into relations with people and lands through ancestral digs, present realities, and future visions of liberation that carry our dancing bodies across terrains of grief, rage, sumud, and love for Palestinian Aliveness. Awadallah has also been performing and training in Yorchhā with Ananya Dance Theatre for 6 years and holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018).
Awadallah’s daily pursuit of a “land-based life” emerges from sumud — a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land. Sumud drives her commitment and artistic approach to multi-directional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, grief and rage, futuristic imagination as strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings.
She has presented work at multiple venues such as Red Eye Theater, MOVO, Mixed Blood Theatre, Pancake House Gallery, RAWI, The Southern Theater, Links Hall, The Arab American National Museum, and Dovetail Studios. She’s had the honor to work with Slo Dance Laura Osterhaus, Parisha Rajbhandari, Emma Draves and I LAND with Jack Gray and Dakota Camacho.
She is the recipient of a 2019 youth teaching residency with Diyar Theater مسرح ديار in Bethlehem, Palestine, the 2020 Hinge Arts Residency, a 2023 Solo Perspectives Residency at MOVO, New Works Isolated Acts through Red Eye Theater, 2024 Creative Individuals Grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board, 2025 Next Step Fund through the Minnesota Regional Arts Council, a NextGen ChoreLab Artist 25-26, and was recently awarded the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship 2025-2028.
Outside of performing and making she lovingly holds the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine with her co-facilitators/co-conspirator/siblings, farms at Cimarron Community Farm, and teaches dance to youth around the Twin Cities.
Alongside her sister Leila Awadallah, she is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance, a project and practice that is a point of entry into relations with people and lands through ancestral digs, present realities, and future visions of liberation that carry our dancing bodies across terrains of grief, rage, sumud, and love for Palestinian Aliveness. Awadallah has also been performing and training in Yorchhā with Ananya Dance Theatre for 6 years and holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2018).
Awadallah’s daily pursuit of a “land-based life” emerges from sumud — a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rootedness in land. Sumud drives her commitment and artistic approach to multi-directional attention, storytelling, resistance and liberation practices, grief and rage, futuristic imagination as strategy, and tending to her reciprocal relationships with land and non-human beings.
She has presented work at multiple venues such as Red Eye Theater, MOVO, Mixed Blood Theatre, Pancake House Gallery, RAWI, The Southern Theater, Links Hall, The Arab American National Museum, and Dovetail Studios. She’s had the honor to work with Slo Dance Laura Osterhaus, Parisha Rajbhandari, Emma Draves and I LAND with Jack Gray and Dakota Camacho.
She is the recipient of a 2019 youth teaching residency with Diyar Theater مسرح ديار in Bethlehem, Palestine, the 2020 Hinge Arts Residency, a 2023 Solo Perspectives Residency at MOVO, New Works Isolated Acts through Red Eye Theater, 2024 Creative Individuals Grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board, 2025 Next Step Fund through the Minnesota Regional Arts Council, a NextGen ChoreLab Artist 25-26, and was recently awarded the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship 2025-2028.
Outside of performing and making she lovingly holds the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine with her co-facilitators/co-conspirator/siblings, farms at Cimarron Community Farm, and teaches dance to youth around the Twin Cities.