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Imani Delacruz (Career and Legacy)

Imani Ysabel Delacruz worked across dance, accessibility, creative production, and personal assistance. After chronic injuries and inaccessible professional environments ended her performing career, she moved into accessibility consulting, became Charlie Rivera’s creative and personal assistant, served as accessibility director for the Fifth Bar Collective, and continued teaching dance.

Dance and Choreography

Main article: Imani Delacruz

Dance was central to Imani’s early artistic life. She trained across multiple styles and worked as a professional dancer and choreographer. Her Deafness shaped how she used rhythm, vibration, spatial awareness, visual cues, and ensemble communication without limiting dance to a substitute for spoken expression.

Accumulated injuries and studios and companies unwilling to accommodate a Deaf dancer eventually ended her professional performance career. She remained connected to dance through choreography and instruction. Her teaching included classes open to all students and dedicated sessions for Deaf and hard-of-hearing dancers. She also continued to dance privately after leaving the stage.

Accessibility Consulting

After leaving professional performance, Imani consulted with music organizations on accessibility. The work drew on Deaf culture, ASL, disability-community experience, production knowledge, and the practical demands of artists and audiences moving through events.

She met Charlie at a disability-community music event in the late 2030s while consulting on stage access and interpreter logistics. When the event’s access arrangements failed, she reorganized the interpreter flow, intercepted media demands, found his AAC tablet, and asked whether he wanted her to handle the logistics. They talked for two hours after the event before Charlie offered her the assistant role. Their initial professional connection developed into friendship and a long-term working partnership.

Work with Charlie Rivera

As Charlie’s creative and personal assistant, Imani managed scheduling, interviews, press requests, show-access protocols, and communication logistics. She recognized signs of his fatigue in the quality of his signing and responses, kept migraine glasses, cooling towels, noise dampeners, ginger packets, and handwritten boundary cards in a care bag, and made AAC setups both functional and visually considered. Her role connected Charlie’s creative work with the access structure required to sustain it.

Imani and Mo Makani divided major areas of support around Charlie. Mo focused on medical and household care coordination, while Imani handled creative, professional, communication, and accessibility logistics. The work overlapped during travel, performances, crises, and other situations in which artistic and medical needs could not be separated cleanly.

Main article: Imani Delacruz and Charlie Rivera

Fifth Bar Collective

Imani later served as accessibility director for the Fifth Bar Collective. She extended the access work developed around Charlie across the larger organization, coordinating structures intended to serve artists, staff, students, audiences, and collaborators with different bodies and communication needs. When a record executive tried to describe Charlie’s continued work while ill as inspirational, she answered: “He’s not ‘brave for being sick and still working’—he’s just brilliant and sick. Sit down.”

Her work treated accessibility as part of artistic and organizational practice rather than an accommodation added after the central decisions had already been made.

Careers Accessibility Professionals Personal Assistants Educators Imani Delacruz