BIO

PERFORMER | EDUCATOR | ACTIVIST

Anthony Otto Nelson Jr., is a Durham-Native of North Carolina. He brings the knowledge of connecting one’s embodied experiences to one’s external reality as a means for making personal and relational transformation. As a dancer and organizer of healing and digital “self-work” spaces, Otto embodies the freedom of expression by trade and a facilitator by process and execution.

Currently, he serves the world by developing deeper connections through movement and voice and teaching them as modes of self-exploration, inner healing, and collective recognition. He knows that our bodies hold the keys to our collective transformation, while they can also cling desperately to the behaviors, ideas, and concepts that no longer serve us well. Otto moves as a spirit of exploration.       

Otto found dance as a young teenager, falling in love with the freedom of expression that movement allowed. Dancing in earnest from fifteen years on, Nelson’s career has led him to seek training in a variety of styles, building his repertoire in Contemporary, Modern, Hip-Hop and Jazz, and refining his focus in a personal style that blends these traditions. Over the past decade, Nelson has performed with renowned choreographers in the Triangle and beyond, gravitating toward emotionally charged work and contemporary pieces with a social conscience and goal of bringing movement to a broad and diverse audience. Nelson’s belief in the power of dance to change lives and the world has led him to the classroom to share the gift of movement with students of all ages and backgrounds.