Art as a means to locate and disrupt embodied prejudice with emotional sensations on the body: The artful and transformative telling of stories of stigma and HIV.

This arts-based inquiry investigates how the arts can challenge the embodiment of prejudice and bias by its ability to inspire, through sensations on the body, a transformative empathetic experience in an individual. I located implicit bias through sensation awareness on my body by accessing associated embodied memories and disrupted such bias with the deliberate intervention of art imagery. I then, collaborated with a former dancer living with HIV and followed my felt sensation responses to artfully tell of her experiences with stigma using dance to create two videos that inspire transformative, empathetic sensation responses that disrupt my learned embodied resistances around HIV and help me better understand her experience. Through this research I learned what it means to be an artist researcher in an artistic endeavour of inquiry in the receiving and telling of difficult stories. Engaging through sensation awareness as inquiry, meaning-making and storytelling is an emergent reciprocal process of listening, receiving and offering. Remaining open to receive sensations on my body required that I be attentive to the storyteller throughout the creative process.