SaltWater Road Performance Institute is a Black diasporic, woman-founded, artist-run 501(c)(3) performance organization rooted in the American South, advancing justice, cultural exchange, artistic research, and community well-being through site-responsive performance practice.
Rooted in Montgomery, Alabama, SaltWater Road supports artists working across movement, sound, installation, and performance research. Through residencies, public humanities programming, and collaborative artistic laboratories, we create space for artists and communities to engage landscape, memory, history, and justice through embodied practice.
SaltWater Road provides space for engaged practice based research experimental Black Southernist art forms.
Artists foster creativity and collaboration in a supportive environment.
Your support helps brings SaltWater Road's projects and performances to life.
What We Do
SaltWater Road creates intentional spaces for artists to research, gather, move, listen, and make in relationship with the cultural landscapes of the American South.
We define performance broadly to include dance, movement, sound, ritual, installation, storytelling, improvisation, and embodied research.
Artist Residencies
SaltWater Road engages experimental performance (dance, theater, and sound) as a method of inquiry to create collaborative, site-responsive, and community-engaged responses to issues affecting quality of life.
Public Humanities Programming
This work extends into ProcessionLabs, our public humanities process that activates procession as a community-based, site-responsive performance form and a tool for civic engagement.
Documentation + Archive
Each year, artists' creative processes and performances are archived, and their new work is added to a growing database of Black Southernist Experimental Performance.
SaltWater Road in Motion
Since 2023, SaltWater Road has grown from a founder-led artist residency into an emerging creative humanities institution rooted in the Deep South.
8+ artists supported
8+ historic and cultural sites engaged
3+ Gulf South regions activated
4 annual artist residencies
1 growing archive
2027 symposium in development
ARTISTIC FOCUS
SaltWater Road operates as a producing performance company grounded in dance and devised performance. Our studio-residency model supports artists through intensive creative research that integrates movement composition, site-responsive exploration, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Sound artists, installation artists, and moving image practitioners are welcomed as collaborators whose work expands the choreographic and dramaturgical field. Each creative process culminates in public offerings that invite audiences into embodied encounters with performance in both theatrical and civic spaces.