mayfield is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program.

brooks received a B.A. from Trinity College, an M.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and a M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis. They also studied somatics and social change at Moving on Center: School for Participatory Arts and Somatic Research and contemporary dance at The School for New Dance Development in The Netherlands.

They enjoy living by the sea.