Samara Cohen-O’Neal

Princess Lockerooo is the professional name of Samara Cohen-O'Neal, a New York City dance artist whose work centers waacking. She began dancing at nineteen and studied with Tyrone Proctor, connecting her practice to the form's club-era lineage. Her first waacking class came in 2004 at Broadway Dance Center, a beginning that grew into a multifaceted career combining performance, education, competition culture, and public advocacy for the form.

Lockerooo's stage and screen work spans appearances on *So You Think You Can Dance*, collaborations across popular music and fashion, and teaching or performing in more than thirty countries. Her movement practice foregrounds rapid arm pathways, angular posing, rhythmic accents, directional changes, and dramatic musical response—choices that organize self-presentation, timing, and conversation with disco-derived musical structures rather than serving as merely visual effect.

In 2022, she founded Fabulous Waack Dancers and launched the Waack Dancer Training Program, creating institutional infrastructure for waacking artists. The organization provides a company framework while the program formalizes training, mentorship, and professional development. That same year, the New York Dance and Performance Awards recognized her with the Bessie for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer.

Lockerooo's continuing projects include Waack to the Future, workshops and battles, collaboration with New York Public Library programs, and development of a documentary and the stage work *Paradise Ballroom*. Together, these activities frame waacking as living social history, movement practice, and contemporary theater, centering lineage, individuality, and expressive freedom as inseparable from the form's artistic power.