Emara Vonae’ Neymour Jackson is a St. Louis-born, multidisciplinary artist whose work moves fluidly between dance, theater, film, and performance research.

As a 2024 Princess Grace Award recipient, she cultivates artistic spaces that honor Afro-diasporic expression, emphasizing the Black femme experience through musical theater, pole, contemporary, postmodern movement, and task-based performance practices. Her work challenges traditional boundaries, inviting both ritual and rebellion into the physical and narrative landscapes she crafts.

Emara’s artistic foundation stems from her deep musical theater and jazz background, which she seamlessly blends with her contemporary and postmodern explorations. Her movement practice is a study of discipline and freedom, threading together pole, floorwork, improvisation, and groove-based social dance to shape a language that is both ancestral and experimental. Our Arch Temples, her experimental research project, was birthed out of the COVID era and her lifelong engagement with Call and Response practices, evolving into a sanctuary for embodied healing through pole dance, breathwork, and ritualized movement mechanics.

Her work as a choreographer and performer explores the triumphs and traumas of the Black femme body, navigating how it mobilizes through Black social dance, grooves, and presence in traditionally white-dominated dance spaces. Through her teaching and performance, she extends these conversations into heels technique, femme expressions, and pole flow, using floorwork and suspended movement as forms of transcendence, resistance, and storytelling—drawing parallels to the expressive liberation of the 1920s, reimagined for today’s roaring age of movement.

Her recent film and live collaborations include:

Sam McReynolds- Affirmed, Harness,(2025)

Gerard & Kelly’s- Bright Hours film, Marseille, FR

Marcella Lewis’ -Spectacle of Ritual, Los Angeles, CA

Stacey Busch- She Breathes Fire NewYork City, NY

Celie in The Color Purple (2024), Saint Louis, MO

Emara’s commercial, experimental and concert work move with equal force. She has performed pole work for Snoop Dogg and City Girls, embodying a raw and stylized approach to sensuality and power. She has also worked with Solange Knowles, Moses Sumney, Dimitri Chamblas, Nina Flagg, and Brian Arias, Alexander Anderson, among others great innovators. 

Her artistry has been recognized with awards including the Dance St. Louis Dance Career Award (2016) and as a finalist in the Seoul International Dance Competition (2019).

At the heart of her work, Emara Neymour Jackson remains committed to building a movement language that bridges theatricality, physical storytelling, and embodied liberation—bringing together ritual, groove, and the body’s innate ability to archive, transform, protest and resist.