Credits & Contributors
|
Editorial Advisors: |
Founder & Editor in Chief: |
Visual Curator: |
|
Editorial Managers: A. Nia Austin-Edwards, Sydnie L. Mosley |
This inaugural Journal was produced by Angela’s Pulse and developed and designed in partnership with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and PURPOSE Productions, with funding from The Surdna Foundation.
Maria Bauman | Photo by Thomas Dunn
Maria Bauman-Morales (Content Creator) is a Bessie-Award-winning, Brooklyn, NY-based, multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL. She creates bold and honest artworks for her company MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and fascination with intimacy. Bauman brings the same tenets to organizing to undo racism in the arts and beyond with ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), the grassroots organizing body she co-founded with Sarita Covington and Nathan Trice. In particular, Bauman’s dance work centers the non-linear and linear stories and bodies of queer people of color onstage. She draws on her long study of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in living rooms and nightclubs, as well as concert dance classes to embody interconnectedness, joy, and tenacity. Currently, she is an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship Candidate and an Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She just finished her tenure as Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance.
In New York, Bauman-Morales’s work has been showcased at Harlem Stage, SummerStage NYC, Danspace at St. Mark’s, BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, Dixon Place, the Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, WOW Café Theater, and more. Bauman-Morales and MBDance have also shared artworks across the U.S., in South Africa, and in Singapore.
Previously, she was Associate Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women and danced with that company for many years. Bauman-Morales has also danced with Paloma McGregor, Jumatatu Poe, Vincent Thomas, Nia Love, Kathy Westwater, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and jill sigman/thinkdance, and apprenticed with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. www.mbdance.net.
Read Black Space: …and The Cosmos.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (Art Contributor) (b. 1993) is a conceptual photographer working on ideas related to intimacy, domestic space, and marginality. He is interested in the limitations of photography, specifically what is excluded from what is included in the image. Brown Jr.’s work has been featured in exhibitions domestically and internationally, in addition to his first solo show, “a simple song,” at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York in January 2019. Brown Jr. was a participant in the New York Times Portfolio Review (2016) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017). He received his BFA in Photography from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is currently participating as an Artist-in-Residence at St. Roch Community Church in New Orleans, Louisiana. elliottjeromebrownjr.com
LaKela Brown
LaKela Brown (Art Contributor) was born and raised in the city of Detroit, MI, where she attended the College for Creative Studies. She majored in Fine Arts, and earned her B.F.A. in 2005. Brown has attended several artist residencies including Ox-Bow School of Art as a fellow in 2005 and 2018 as a Professional Artist. She has exhibited her work widely in group and solo exhibitions. Her untitled solo exhibition in Berlin with Lars Friedrich Gallery was featured in Art Forum International as a Critic’s Pick in 2018. Her solo exhibition “Material Relief” with Reyes/Finn was written about in several publications including Hyperallergic in 2018 as well. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. lakelabrown.com
Melisa (Mel) Cardona (They/Them – She/Hers) is a first generation queer Latinx self-taught artist and activist who grew up between Atlanta, GA and their parents native land of Colombia. After 10 years of building an array of artistic story telling skills in New Orleans – physical theater performance, learning the cameras eye, editing and lighting techniques – Mel birthed a small company to foster all of her artistic endeavors that focus on stories by, for and about WOC, highlighting those of QWOC via film, acting and music at MoonLab PICTURES. Melisa is a member of NALAC and served for four years on the executive committee of Alternate ROOTS, of which she has been a member of for 14 years. Mel is committed to creating stories that empower qwoc with while dismantling all forms of oppression through film and digital art for a beautiful new mañana.
Mel’s photos have been published on The New York Times, American Theater Magazine, Times Picayune, Antigravity, Creative Loafing, Inside Arts Magazine, CTNOW.Com, AutoStrattle.com, BuzzFeed.com and many others. One of her photos was selected as a winner by the New Orleans Arts Council for a photography competition. Her Photography and Video work have taken her across the country, through Canada and into several places in Central and South America. She is creatively committed to keeping her work accessible at the local street level, often working with non-profits and solo artists committed to fighting all forms of oppression. Mel currently resides between New Orleans and Atlanta, often traveling the country for work and artistic collaborations.
Gabrielle Civil | Photo by Dennie Eagelson
Gabrielle Civil (Editorial Advisor, Content Creator) is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit MI. She has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world, including her project “In & Out of Place” as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and her “Fugue” trilogy after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Recent performances include “Q&A (Eclipsing)” (Chicago), “a ritual of nest and flight” (Toronto); and “…hewn and forged….” (Salt Lake City). Since May 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering.
Her memoir in performance art Swallow the Fish was named by Entropy a “Best Non-Fiction Book of 2017.” Her forthcoming book Experiments in Joy engages race, performance, and collaboration. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and currently teaches Creative Writing and Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts.
The aim of her work is to open up space.
Read Black Swans (meditations on ballet).
Marlo D. David | Photo by Purdue University
Marlo D. David (Copy Editor, Content Editor) is the Director of the Purdue University African American Studies Research Center and an Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She received her PhD in English from the University of Florida and earned a B.S. in Newspaper Journalism from Florida A&M University. Her research focuses on contemporary African-American literature and culture and their intersections with political and social movements and Black feminist gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Mama’s Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, which examines how writers use representations of transgressive black motherhood to challenge neoliberalism, and her scholarly essays have appeared in Tulsa Studies of Women’s Literature, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, The African American Review, Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminist Anthology, and the forthcoming collection Black Girl Magic: Beyond the Hashtag. She is currently working on a book about the writer, actor, and filmmaker Bill Gunn. Marlo lives in Indianapolis with her husband and three sons.
Lizzy Cooper Davis | Photo by Melisa Cardona
Lizzy Cooper Davis (Editorial Advisor) is an artist and scholar interested in how the arts can facilitate community conversation, resistance, and change. Particularly focused on black freedom movements, she has conducted research in Cuba, Brazil, and New Orleans, and her current project examines the cultural workers of the civil rights era. She has worked at the intersection of arts and organizing with Anna Deavere Smith, The Urban Bush Women, Angela’s Pulse, Jacob’s Pillow, The American Repertory Theater, ArtsEmerson, and The Boston Foundation. Lizzy has also performed nationally as an actor in such theaters as Second Stage, The Long Wharf, Berkeley Rep., and The American Repertory Theater. Lizzy co-edited Enacting Pleasure: Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan’s Map of Love (2010), wrote on the freedom songs of the civil rights movement for the roots music journal “No Depression,” and contributed a chapter on the Free Southern Theater’s Story Circle Process for Discussing Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education (Stylus, 2019). Lizzy is Assistant Professor at Emerson College.
Thomas F. DeFrantz | Photo by Christopher Duggan
Thomas F. DeFrantz (Content Editor) received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. He directs SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He has taught at the American Dance Festival, ImPulsTanz, Ponderosa, and the New Waves Dance Institute, as well as at MIT, Stanford, Yale, NYU, Hampshire College, Duke, and the University of Nice. He contributed a voice-over for a permanent installation at the Smithsonian African American Museum. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
Read Black Swans (meditations on ballet).
Brenda Dixon-Gottschild | Photo by Ryan Collerd
Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild (Content Creator) is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner, 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of American Performance.
Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016); and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017).
A self-described anti-racist cultural worker utilizing dance as her medium, she is a freelance writer, consultant, performer, and lecturer; a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine; and Professor Emerita of dance studies, Temple University. As an artist-scholar she coined the phrase, “choreography for the page,” to describe her embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.
Nationwide and abroad she performs self-created solos and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild, in a genre they developed and titled “movement theater discourse. www.bdixongottschild.com
Read Black Space: Why BlackSpace.
Jonathan González | Photo by Alexis Ruiseco-Lombera
Jonathan González (Content Creator) is an artist, amateur farmer, and educator from Queens, NY. Their work investigates notions of blackness as it relates to creative production, and geopolitical efforts in sustainability regarding urban planning & agriculture. They are a 2018-19 Workspace Resident at LMCC, 2018 NARS International Resident, Bessie-nominated director for ZERO (2018 Danspace Project) with anticipated premieres of their work Lucifer Landing at MoMA PS1 and Abrons Arts Center.
Read #BessiesSoBlack.
Naima Green
Naima Green (Art Contributor) is an artist and educator currently living between Brooklyn and Mexico City. She holds an MFA in Photography from ICP–Bard, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. Green presented two solo exhibitions in 2018 – All the black language and A Collective Utterance. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at MASS MoCA (2018), International Center of Photography (2018), Houston Center for Photography (2017), Bronx Museum (2017), BRIC (2015, 2016 and 2019), Arsenal Gallery (2015 and 2018) and Macy Gallery (2013 and 2014). Green has been an artist-in-residence at the Bronx Museum (2016), Vermont Studio Center (2015), and recipient of the Myers Art Prize at Columbia University (2013). Her artist books are collected by MoMA Library and International Center of Photography Library. Green’s work has been published in Arts.Black, The Atlantic, California Sunday, Cultured, The Fader, The Nation, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Spot Magazine, and SPOOK, amongst others. naimagreen.com
Kearra Amaya Gopee
Keaara Amaya Gopee (Art Contributor) is a visual artist and photographer from Carapichaima, Trinidad and Tobago. They live and work between Trinidad and Tobago and Brooklyn, New York. www.kearramaya.com
Melanie Greene | Photo by Larry Rosalez
Melanie Greene (Editorial Advisor, Content Creator), 2017 Bessie Award Recipient for Outstanding Performance with Skeleton Architecture, is a movement artist swirling on the edge of impossible, swimming in the sea of the minority. She is a choreographer, writer, administrator, thinker, big dreamer. She has shared dance works throughout New York City, and has received generous support from New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks, Gibney Dance, Actors Fund Summer Push Grant, and Dancing While Black Fellowship. Greene is a contributing writer for The Dance Enthusiast and Dance Magazine, co-host of The Dance Union Podcast, 2018 Bogliasco Fellow, and 2018/20 Movement Research Artist in Residence. A southern belle turned Brooklynite, Greene holds a special place for buttery biscuits, country ham, and collard greens. www.methodsofperception.com
Read White Box Recovery.
Ebony Noelle Golden | Photo by Melisa Cardona
Ebony Noelle Golden (Content Creator) is an artist, scholar, and culture strategist from Houston, TX and now living and working in NYC. As an artist, she stages site-specific rituals + live art performances that profoundly explore the complexities of freedom in the time of now. She lectures on contemporary black feminist, womanist, and experimental theatre of the African diaspora at The New School and community-based performance praxis in the graduate Performance and Performance Studies Program at Pratt.
As Founder/CEO of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative (BDAC), Golden unflinchingly pursues social transformation as a strategist and accomplished artist-scholar. Golden completed her academic studies in poetry and performance studies at Texas A&M University, American, University, and New York University, respectively. BDAC is affectionately named after Ebony’s mother, Dr. Betty Ann Sims, a retired professor, social worker, and youth interventionist. Current projects include: 125th & FREEdom (WP-June 2019), In The Name Of… (WP- August 2019), and wash’d//, an evening-length dance ritual.
Read Fugitive Choreographies.
Marguerite Hemmings | Photo by Aidan Un
Marguerite Hemmings (Editorial Advisor, Content Creator) is a Jamaican born, Jersey-raised, performance artist and educator who has been living in the NYC area for over a decade. She graduated from Columbia University in Education and Urban Studies. Hemmings specializes in street, emergent, improvisational and social dance styles.
Hemmings’ work centers itself in liberation. She has been subverting, working, and creating with youth as a teaching artist for a very long time. She has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Harlem Stage, University Settlement, and Dancing While Black to further her work. She is most recently a recipient of the 2017-18 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship, and through that, also the Projecting All Voices Fellowship at ASU. She is a 2017 recipient of the Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer in Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s Skeleton Architecture. She currently works inside of a self/spirit directed thing called we free. we free looks at the millennial and post-millennial approach to liberation through its music, social dance and social media. we free is centered in the livelihood and reparation of the African continent and diaspora. It is a social experiment, a conversation, a non-performance, a call to action, a revival, a bashment party, an ode to, and in moments a critique of, the present and emerging generations and what we are doing, right now, to be free.
Read Curating the vibe and the white space-is? project.
Shani Jamila | Photo by Larry Lowe
Shani Jamila (Art Contributor) is a visual artist and cultural worker. Her travels to nearly fifty countries deeply inform her collage, photography and painting practice. She has exhibited and performed at institutions including the Manifesta European Contemporary Art Biennial, Harvard University’s Cooper Gallery, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, New Museum and Princeton. The community conversations she’s hosted at the Aperture Foundation, Lincoln Center, Schomburg Center and New York Live Arts are known for engaging discussions about the arts and society. This was also the subject of her TED Talk, “Reimagining Resistance Through Art,” which she delivered during a residency at the organization’s headquarters. A Fulbright scholar who was once named “One of the 35 Most Remarkable Women in the World” by ESSENCE Magazine, her image and quote are featured in “A Choice to Change the World,” a permanent exhibition at her alma mater Spelman College. www.shanijamila.com
Miatta Kawinzi
Miatta Kawinzi (Art Contributor) is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and educator. She works with images, objects, sound, space, the body, and language to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Born in Nashville, TN to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father and based in NYC, she has exhibited and/or performed her work internationally in spaces including BRIC and the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY) and the Bag Factory (South Africa). She received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in 2016 and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College in 2010 and has been awarded artist residencies at spaces including Alfred University’s Institute for Electronic Arts (NY), the Cité internationale des arts (Paris, France, with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE). Her work has been featured in publications including Femmescapes Magazine and Apogee Journal. https://mkawstudio.com
Paloma McGregor | Photo by Melisa Cardona
Paloma McGregor (Founder & Editor in Chief), is a Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and organizer who has spent her career centering Black voices through collaborative, process-based projects. In 2019, Paloma became the Artistic Director of BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a nearly 30-year-old organization dedicated to supporting artists at every phase of development – from toddler to professional – and committed to a mission of anti-racist, anti-oppression practice. Since 2008, she has been Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse, which she co-founded with her sister, director Patricia McGregor. Paloma has received support for her work from Surdna Foundation; MAP Fund; Dance/USA; Dance/NYC; NYSCA; Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant; and Jerome Travel & Study Grant. She was a BAX AIR from 2014-16, and launched her Dancing While Black Fellowship at BAX during that time. She was an inaugural Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow (2018) and is currently an Artist in Residence at Movement Research. Past artist residencies include: New York Live Arts Live Feed
(2016-18); LMCC (2014); NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (2013-14); and iLAND/iLAB (2012). Paloma toured internationally for six years as a dancer with Brooklyn-based Urban Bush Women; she won a 2017 Bessie Award for performance as a member of skeleton architecture.
Read Introduction.
Patricia McGregor | Photo by Matt Holiday
Patricia McGregor (Content Editor) is a director and writer from St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. She has twice been profiled by The New York Times for her direction of world premieres. Recent credits include the world premier of Lights Out: Nat “King Cole” (People’s Light), Skeleton Crew (Studio Theater), the world premier of Good Grief (Center Theater Group), Measure for Measure (The Old Globe), The Parchman Hour (Guthrie Theater), Hamlet (The Public Theater), NY premier of Ugly Lies the Bone (Roundabout Theatre Company), NY premier of brownsville song (b-side for tray) (Lincoln Center Theater), the world premiere of Stagger Lee (Dallas Theater Center), the world premiere of Hurt Village (Signature Theatre Company), the world premieres of Holding It Down and Blood Dazzler (Harlem Stage), and the world premier of The House That Would Not Stand (Berkeley Rep/Yale Rep). Other credits include tour consultant for J Cole World Tour, director and co-creator of the upcoming oratorio Place at BAM and LA Phil, and director of A Raisin in the Sun, The Winter’s Tale, Spunk, Becky Shaw, Adoration of the Old Woman, Four Electric Ghosts, and Nothing Personal. She has often directed the 24 Hour Plays on Broadway and staged readings for HBO’s Writer’s Access program. She is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop. She was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow at Yale School of Drama, where she earned her MFA and served as Artistic Director of the Yale Cabaret.
Read Introduction.
Dianne McIntyre | Photo by Larry Coleman
Dianne McIntyre (Content Creator) is a choreographer for dance, theatre, film, opera. Much inspiration comes from historical Black dances and narratives. Awards include: Doris Duke Artist Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, three Bessies, Ohio Creative Workforce Fellowship, Helen Hayes Theatre Award, two AUDELCOs, two Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts Degrees, ADF Distinguished Teaching Chair, Teer Pioneer Award/National Black Theatre, numerous grants and fellowships from NEA and NYSCA. Her dance/music company Sounds in Motion toured internationally and inspired countless dancers at its school in Harlem. Choreography commissions: Dallas Black Dance Theatre, DCDC, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. Commissions by New York Live Arts: James Baldwin tribute and performance with yMusic. Residencies: 2016 Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC) and 2017 Alan M. Kriegsman Creative Residency/Dance Place (DC). Musician collaborators: Olu Dara, Cecil Taylor, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Don Pullen, Ahmed Abdullah, Abbey Lincoln, Rod Williams. Her dance-driven dramas for the theatre arena: “I Could Stop on a Dime…” (her father’s stories) and “Open the Door, Virginia!” (1950s civil rights).
Her choreography has been on Broadway, London theatre and opera and numerous regional U.S. theatres. Screen credits: Beloved (Oprah Winfrey) and Miss Evers’ Boys (TV Emmy nomination) and a film for Lauryn Hill. Directors/writers she has worked with include: Des McAnuff, Jonathan Demme, Barlett Sher, Irene Lewis, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, Douglas Turner Ward, Regina Taylor. She was the 2018 Co-Director of the Hicks Choreography Fellows Program at Jacobs Pillow. McIntyre’s mentors include Gus Solomons jr, Louise Roberts, Vera Blaine, Helen Alkire, Richard Davis, Elaine Gibbs Redmond and Virginia Dryansky.
Read #BessiesSoBlack.
Nontsikelelo Mutiti | Photo by Sindayiganza Photography
Nontsikelelo Mutiti (Visual Curator) is Zimbabwean born visual artist and educator. She is invested in elevating the work and practices of Black peoples past, present and future through a conceptual approach to design, experimental publishing and archiving practices and peer to peer collaborations. As cofounder of Black Chalk & Co. Mutiti has produced cultural projects and events. She is also artistic director for Reading Zimbabwe, a platform for archiving and publishing. Mutiti holds a diploma in multimedia art from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital, Arts, ZIVA, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in graphic design. Mutiti is currently Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University. nontsikelelomutiti.com
jumatatu m. poe | photo by Tayarisha Poe
jumatatu m. poe (Content Creator) – I am a choreographer, performer, and educator based between Philadelphia and New York City who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with my siblings and cousins. My early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where my parents studied and worked, but I did not start formal dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. My work continues to be influenced by various sources, including my foundations in those living rooms and parties, my early technical training in contemporary African dance, my continued study of contemporary dance and performance, and my recent sociological research of and technical training in J-setting with Donte Beacham. I produce dance and performance work with idiosynCrazy productions, a company I founded in 2008 and now co-direct with Shannon Murphy. Previously, I have danced with Marianela Boán, Silvana Cardell, Emmanuelle Hunyh, Tania Isaac, Kun- Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Marissa Perel, Leah Stein, Keith Thompson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Reggie Wilson, and Kariamu Welsh (as a member of Kariamu & Company). As a performer, I also collaborate with Merián Soto.
Read Black Space: Up in.
Will Rawls | Photo by Luis Rodrigueze
Will Rawls (Content Creator) is a New York-based choreographer, performer and writer. His work focuses on how dance, language and objects embody notions of abstraction and blackness. Rawls’s choreographic work has appeared at Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Danspace Project; New Museum of Contemporary Art, Issue Project Room; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1 and The Chocolate Factory. He is recipient of a Bessie for Emerging Choreographer, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2016, he collaborated with Ishmael Houston-Jones to co-curate Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found, which focused on the intergenerational impact of the AIDS epidemic on dancers, women, and people of color. He also co-edited the catalogue Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS,Then and Now (2017). His writing has been published by Artforum, Triple Canopy, les presses du réel, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hammer Museum.
Read Black Space: Uncle Rebus Poems.
J. Soto | Photo by Stephanie Acosta
J. Soto (Content Editor) is a queer brown transgender chicano interdisciplinary artist and writer raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has curated and performed work for The National Queer Arts Festival (San Francisco), Links Hall (Chicago), as well as Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Knockdown Center (NYC), among others nationally. His collaborative writing project, “Ya Presente Ayer” can be found in Support Networks, Chicago Social Practice History Series (University of Chicago Press). His organizing projects include the Latinx Artists Retreat (LXAR) and the Latinx Artist Visibility Award (LAVA) for Ox-Bow School of Art in partnership with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago launched in 2015. He is also a 2017 fellow of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Advocacy Leadership Institute (ALI). His writing can be found in Original Plumbing, Apogee Journal: Queer History, Queer Now Folio, and American Realness 2018 Reading series. He lives and works in New York City.
Read “Hey Sister am I Good Enough for Your Heaven?”.
Nastassja Swift
Nastassja Swift (Art Contributor) is a visual artist holding a Bachelor’s degree of Fine Art from Virginia Commonwealth University with a major in Painting & Printmaking and a minor in Craft & Material Studies. She is the owner and artist of D for Dolls, an online collection of handmade needle felted figures. Outside of being a doll maker, she works with paint, print, performance and fiber within her studio practice. Nastassja’s work is currently on display in a group exhibition at The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, and her solo exhibition at the University of Michigan. She has participated in several national and international residences and exhibitions, including her solo exhibit in Doha, Qatar, and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and MASS MoCA. Nastassja is currently living and working in Virginia Beach, Virginia. https://www.nastassjaswift.com/
David Thomson | Photo by vicente de paulo
David Thomson (Content Creator) has worked as a collaborative performer/creator in the fields of music, dance, theater and performance with such artists as Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown (‘87-‘93), Susan Rethorst, Remy Charlip, Grisha Coleman|Hot Mouth, Ralph Lemon (’99-’10), Sekou Sundiata, Tracie Morris, Meg Stuart, Dean Moss/Layla Ali, Alain Buffard, Marina Abramović, Yvonne Rainer, Kaneza Schaal, David Bowie and Maria Hassabi among many others. His artistic concerns exist among the intersections of movement, text, sound and song. Thomson’s work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Gibney Dance Center, LMCC, The Invisible Dog and Performance Space New York. Thomson is a Bessie award-winning artist for Sustained Achievement (2001) and most recently for Outstanding Production for he his own mythical beast. He is a 2012 USArtist Ford Fellow, a 2013 NYFA Fellow in Choreography as well as a Yaddo, MacDowell and Rauschenberg Fellow. He holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.
Read Black Space: What is Black Space?.
Ni’Ja Whitson | Photo by by Maggie Shannon
Ni’Ja Whitson (Editorial Advisor, Content Creator) LA/NY, is a Bessie Award winning, gender nonconforming interdisciplinary artist and writer, who has been referred to as “majestic” by The New York Times and recognized by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer. They are a 2018 MAP Fund recipient, featured choreographer of the 2018 CCA Biennial, and 2018-2019 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship Candidate. Other recent awards include a Camargo Fellowship, Dance in Process (DiP) Residency, Hedgebrook Fellowship, LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist Residency, two-time Creative Capital “On Our Radar” award including being among the inaugural recipients, among dozens of other residencies and awards across disciplines. Whitson is an Assistant Professor of experimental choreography at UC Riverside. www.nijawhitson.com
Read “Hey Sister am I Good Enough for Your Heaven?”.
Tara Aisha Willis | Photo by Ian Douglas
Tara Aisha Willis (Editorial Advisor, Content Editor) is Associate Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, after working on programming and diversity initiatives at Movement Research in New York. She is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University, and has held editorial positions for Women & Performance and TDR/The Drama Review, and co-edited with Thomas F. DeFrantz a special issue of The Black Scholar. Other writings appear in Movement Research Performance Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Magazin im August, Voices from the Bush, Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance, Performance Research, and Performa Magazine. Willis currently performs in a collaboration between Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine, and recently in works by Kim Brandt, Megan Byrne, Anna Sperber, Ivy Baldwin, and Yanira Castro. She danced in the 2016 “Bessie” award-winning first performance by the collective of black women and gender nonconforming improvisors, the Skeleton Architecture.
Read Black Space.
Eva Yaa Asantewaa | Photo by Scott Shaw
Eva Yaa Asantewaa (Editorial Advisor, Content Editor) is Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney, New York’s acclaimed center for dance and social activism. She won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance as a veteran writer, curator and community educator. Since 1976, she has contributed writing on dance to Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, Gay City News, The Dance Enthusiast, Time Out New York and other publications and interviewed dance artists and advocates as host of two podcasts, Body and Soul and Serious Moonlight. She blogs on the arts, with dance as a specialty, for InfiniteBody. Ms. Yaa Asantewaa joined the curatorial team for Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found and created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of group improvisation featuring 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers. Her cast was awarded a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. A native New Yorker of Black Caribbean heritage, Eva makes her home in the East Village with her wife, Deborah, and cat, Crystal.