UPDATED – Embodied Design Lab: Virtual Summer Course with Kimberly Tate
NEW Dates and lower course fee!
Dates: Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 2 – 25, 2026
Time: 7:00 – 8:30 PM EST
Location: Virtual
Course fee: $400
Instructor: Kimberly Tate
MFA DSI Designer in Residence (2023)
Bambulawan, Embodied Designer, Architect, Dancitecture
4 weeks (8 Sessions), Credits: 1.5 CEUs
This course is for creatives, designers, and thinkers with a project, idea, or question they’re ready to deepen and develop. Participants will use their own work as a container to explore how body-based practices can support creative clarity, direction, and momentum, as well as insight. Each week will follow a rhythm of practice and application. On Tuesdays, sessions will be led by embodied practitioners sharing real-world tools and approaches. And Thursdays will be project labs to test ideas, receive feedback, and move your work forward. Participants will leave with: a more developed project, a personalized embodied design practice, and tools to navigate creative blocks and decision-making. Grounded in somatics, movement, and sensory design, this course centers on care and sustainability to support people in working with greater clarity, responsiveness, and resilience.
Note: Please bring materials for an in-progress project, which could simply be an idea in a notebook, for the first class. This course is fully online and offered through synchronous sessions during the listed course hours.
This SVA Continuing Education course is fully online and offered through synchronous sessions during the listed course hours.
Course fee: $400
*Proceeds from this course help to grow our scholarship fund for pathways to eco-social design.
About Kimberly Tate
@architate / @dancitecture // @bambulawan
Kimberly Tate (she/they) was born in Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines, and migrated with her family to the American Midwest in the mid-1980s. Now bridging Leyte and Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, New York), Kimberly’s work focuses on cultural restoration, community building, and ecological care. As a trained architect, movement artist, and interdisciplinary embodied designer, they create, teach, mother, and perform with a vision to honor, reimagine, and uplift the cultural inheritances of the diaspora and the global south.
Kimberly is the founder and director of BAMBULAWAN, a bamboo architecture and design-build social impact startup in Burauen, Leyte, Philippines. The project promotes indigenous culture and heritage through bamboo craft, aiming to nurture resilient livelihoods by growing the local bamboo industry. Bambulawan’s goals include establishing a bamboo carpentry training center and forming an association of women bamboo growers and producers.
Choreographed by architectural tape labyrinths, the facilitated movement ceremonies of her project DANCITECTURE make space to hold both heartache and beauty, fostering kinship in the diaspora. Her own movement practice is grounded in capoeira, Filipino martial arts, somatic movement, and traditional Filipino and Western dance forms. Central to her design process and pedagogy are trauma-informed embodiment practices.
Kimberly has collaborated with artists and organizations, including Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts, Akim Funk Buddha, Walang Hiya NYC, and Moving Rasa. She has presented at venues and festivals including The Highline, Insitu Site Specific Dance Festival, Downtown Brooklyn Arts Festival, BAM Cafe Live, and Women to the Front. She was a Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow and a Designer in Residence with SVA MFA Design for Social Innovation. She is also a faculty member at Parsons School of Design, and a K–12 design educator with the AIANY Center for Architecture.
