She approaches choreography as cultural making, where memory, repetition, and collective presence shape both process and form. Drawing from Palestinian ways of knowing sustained across generations despite displacement and erasure, her work investigates how cultural practices, improvisation, and somatic intelligence can inform ethical, community-centered approaches to dance-making and performance.

Olivia holds an MFA in Dance from Temple University, where she was awarded the University Fellowship and currently works as a Professor of Dance. Her choreographic and pedagogical practices challenge Western dance training models that reproduce hierarchy, extraction, and cultural hegemony. Instead, she centers care, accountability, and collective authorship, cultivating learning environments that support sustainable movement practices, encourage students to develop their own artistic voices, and build the skills needed to navigate professional and academic dance spaces with clarity and agency. Integrating improvisation, practice-as-research, and critical theory into studio-based learning, her teaching prioritizes process, reflection, and embodied inquiry as foundations for artistic rigor. Palestinian cultural frameworks deeply shape her approach to process, structure, revision, and endurance, offering alternative models for how dances are generated, transmitted, and held in community.

Working from the diaspora, Alsamadi’s practice is rooted in cultural preservation, political clarity, and responsibility to community. Through choreography, teaching, and scholarship, she brings lived experience and research-based inquiry into dialogue with embodied practice, positioning dance as a site of resistance, remembrance, and survival. Her work is committed to honoring ancestral knowledge while cultivating liberatory futures through movement, care, and collective continuity.