SAMMAY

SAMMAY Peñaflor Dizon (she/they/siya) is a Filipinx American choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural producer of Bikol, Kapampangan, and Ilokano descent. Raised in a multigenerational migrant household in Carson, CA, she creates ritual-based performance work that explores the diasporic body as a site of remembrance, resistance, and collective healing. Her practice is rooted in ancestral reverence and the belief that dance bridges the material and spiritual realms, offering pathways to transmute intergenerational trauma across cultures and geographies.

Guided by a responsibility to the Divine and to her ancestors, SAMMAY cultivates intercultural and intergenerational exchange that centers re-indigenization, social justice, and embodied liberation. Her work lives at the intersection of ritual, healing, and activism, calling forward radical futures grounded in ancestral wisdom.

SAMMAY is the founding director of Urban x Indigenous, an intercultural arts festival; Daluyan: Embodied Storytelling Workshop; and SAMMAY Productions in the SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District. She has served as a Teaching Artist and Community Liaison with San Francisco Ballet’s Dance in Schools and Communities Program, Chair of Dance for the Balay Kreative Advisory Board, a founding member of Dancing Around Race, and a core member of Embodiment Project in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land.

In 2018, SAMMAY was the inaugural Featured Artist at the United States of Asian America Festival. Her work has been presented by CounterPulse, Dance Mission Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and CAAMFest, and supported by the California Arts Council, Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and San Francisco Arts Commission.