Embodied Design Lab: Virtual Summer Course with Kimberly Tate
Dates: Tuesdays and Thursdays, May 19 – June 25, 2026
Time: 7:00 – 8:30 PM EST
Location: Virtual
Instructor: Kimberly Tate
MFA DSI Designer in Residence (2023)
Bambulawan, Embodied Designer, Architect, Dancitecture
6 weeks (12 Sessions), 18 Total hours
How can the body guide the design process to foster balance, cultivate empathy, and expand creative possibilities? How can embodied exploration help us address challenges with resilience, innovation, and care? This course explores body-based knowledge as a powerful tool for designing meaningful change.
Grounded in somatics, movement, contemplative practices, and sensory design, the course also addresses nourishment and care for ourselves as we do work in our communities. Interactive classes feature demonstrations, warmups, and guided discussions around key concepts of embodied teaching and relational ecologies.
Weekly sessions offer virtual studio time and feedback to explore ideas, gain insights, and refine works in progress. Project-based learning assignments include reflective journaling, developing a personal embodied practice, and creating an experimental social ritual. Design is not neutral, and neither is the body. Both carry histories of trauma and resilience that shape the systems, products, and rituals we create. By centering embodied awareness, participants will explore how to integrate self-awareness, empathy, and relational engagement into a transformative design process to approach complex challenges.
Note: This SVA Continuing Education course is fully online and offered through synchronous sessions during the listed course hours.
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.
