Aisha Jordan is an Actor, Writer, Producer with a B.A. from The New School and M.A. from NYU Tisch. She is Artistic Director of social justice theater ensemble 2050 Legacy, Staff Writer for BlackNerdProblems.com, host of podcast 2Nerds and an Actor, Executive Produces #HashtagTheShow, acting credits include HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness.
Alejandro Chellet is a multidisciplinary artist and social practitioner in cultural and permacultural networks. He was born in Mexico City raised in a family of artists and performers, he currently lives between Upstate NY where he practices permaculture and NYC-CDMX where he is also a cultural producer curating and providing exhibition space for other artists.
A dance artist, researcher, and educator, Amelia embodies her identity as a descendant of Andeans, Africans, and Criollos. Graduate of Juilliard Dance and the Tamalpa Institute. Founder of Río Danza Comunitaria, promoting ecological activism in Perú. She continues to collaborate with artists and institutions in Peru, California, and Germany. She pursues her MA in Contemporary Dance Education at the HfMDK-Frankfurt.
Mexican artivist and cabaret performer who enjoys to make humor. Based in Mexico City. Founder of the cabaret company Parafernalia Teatro (2011) and member of Las Reinas Chulas Cabaret y Derechos Humanos AC (2013). Scenic Creators FONCA scholarship holder, 2017 program.
Angela Veronica Wong is a poet, writer, artist, and educator based in NYC. She is the author of elsa: an unauthorized autobiography (Black Radish 2017). Chapbooks include the Poetry Society of America New York Fellowship winning Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter. Poems have been anthologized in Please Excuse This Poem: 100 poems for the next generation and Best American Poetry (collaboration with Amy Lawless). Fiction has appeared Denver Quarterly and other journals. Performance work has been featured in independent galleries in Buffalo, Toronto, and New York City.
As an AfroBoricua multidisciplinary artist and educator I am here to ensure resources for marginalized artists, platforms for inter-community conflict resolution, and be an example of a strong Revolutionary Queer man of Taino and African descent for youth who need one. Born in Bushwick and bred between here, East New York, Brownsville, and Jamaica-Queens I am Anthony Rosado, a creator and curator committed to producing events for the sake of community, city, state, country, and earth wide conversations that aim to organize and mobilize against the many faces of neocolonialism.
Mexican multidisciplinary artist with a background in neuroscience based in NYC interested in repetition and duration to access heightened states of awareness. Their work explores biobehavioral research, gender constructions and politics of migration; its affects and consequences in the construction of identity. They hold an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College. CONACYT scholarship holder, 2012.
Ariel Speedwagon’s work has been seen extensively on Broadway, Lafayette, Fulton, Chrystie, Avenue A, Leonard, and many other fine streets and avenues throughout New York City. Trained as a modern dancer, Ariel’s inherently interdisciplinary work has taken many forms — interactive sculpture, modern dance and dance theater, drag performance and burlesque, collective mapmaking, clowning, and video art. Most interested in the intersections of storytelling, participatory environments, magic, and democratizing knowledge, Ariel has tap danced about limericks, lectured about unicorns, made slapstick about apartheid, and built telephones that tell secrets.
Ashley is a theatre artist and scholar who creates work to challenge the status quo. She is dedicated to documenting the socio-political issues that define our times. As a director and playwright, her work has been seen off-Broadway, at the White House, United Nations, TED conferences across the United States, Europe and Asia. Currently, Ash is working on her Ph.D. in the Department of Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is focusing on theatre and war.
Azure D. Osborne-Lee (he/him, they/them) is an award-winning Black queer theatre maker from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Azure is the founder of Roots and River Productions, and a Recipient of Parity Productions’ 2018 Commission for Women and Transgender Playwrights, Winner of Downtown Urban Arts Festival’s 2018 Best Play Award as well as the 2015 Mario Fratti-Fred Newman Political Play Contest.
Beatrice Glow is an artist and multisensory storyteller leveraging installations, experiential technology and olfactory art to shift dominant narratives. She has been named a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, Smack Mellon Artist, American Arts Incubator artist, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU Artist-in-Residence, Honolulu Biennial artist, Wave Hill Van Lier Fellow, Hemispheric Institute Council Member, Franklin Furnace Fund recipient and Fulbright Scholar.
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez's performance and visual art works emerge from his experiences as a transnational adoptee from Colombia growing up and living in the U.S., and have recently focused on who or what gets to be (in) public and the limits of empathy when working on problems of structural inequity. He is a resident artist at AS220 (Providence), sits on the board of the Colombian American Cultural Society of Rhode Island, and is a two time Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Merit Fellow. (Photo © Lena Wunderlich 2016)
Bex Kwan is a multimedia artist, organizer, social worker, and athlete. They are a core trainer with the Anti Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA). Bex is currently in collaboration with Sophia Mak (EMERGE'16) creating performances which unearth secret histories of foreignness, family mythologies, and kinship in East Asian communities in the United States.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays include Neighbors (Public Theater), Appropriate (Signature Theater, OBIE Award for Best New Play, Outer Critics Circle nominee), An Octoroon (Soho Rep, OBIE Award for Best New Play), War (Yale Rep, forthcoming), and Gloria (Vineyard Theater, forthcoming). He is a Princeton alum from the Class of 2006 and holds an MFA in Performance Studies from NYU. In 2016, he became a MacArthur Fellow.
Carolina is a theatre teaching artist and cultural worker whose practice of theater and performance focuses on collective artistic creation that links the personal with its context. Victoria holds a Fine Arts degree from the National University of Colombia, and an MA in Applied Theatre and Performance from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has led educational programs at the Cartoon National School, the National Museum and the Children and Development Corporation in Colombia. Currently, Victoria is a collaborator of Madalenas Teatro das Oprimidas.
Chelsea Gregory is a dance theater artist, cultural organizer and facilitator who weaves embodied arts together with equity work, community building, healing and restorative practices. She is inspired by working with brilliant folks like Urban Bush Women, Artists Co-Creating Real Equity, Cornerstone Theater Company, PowerTools for Progress, PopUP Theatrics and others that bring about radical change through creative process.
Chris is a Los Angeles-based playwright and performing artist examining the intersections of popular culture, collective action and digital identity. Recent projects include the Make America series (Ars Nova), Their food tastes better when they see us starving (The Brick), flesh failure (The Civilians' R&D Group), R*NT (University Settlement), and TOTAL REJECTS LIVE!!! (Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival). His performance style has been called "equal parts hilarious and chilling" (Fusion), "precise-yet-butchered" (Out Magazine) and "so cute" (Taylor Swift). AB: Brown University.
Clare Barron is a playwright and performer from Wenatchee, Washington. Her plays include DANCE NATION, which was the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Relentless Award, and recently received its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York City and the Almeida Theatre in London. Other plays include YOU GOT OLDER (Obie Award), and I’LL NEVER LOVE AGAIN.
We, the daughter from the land called Kiskeya Ayiti (aka Hispaniola aka Dominican Republic and Haiti), a land colonized but never conquered, raised in New York City on the ancestral bones and covered shrines of the Lenape people. Founder, Dominicans Love Haitians Movement, an art practice developed to heal wounds created by racial divides and historical myths. Educational Equity coach at CSS, Metro NYU. Asé.
Clark Stoeckley is an artist, activist, and Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at American University of Kuwait. He earned a BFA from Webster University and a MFA from Brooklyn College. He is the artist behind the WikiLeaks Truck and author/illustrator of The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning: A Graphic Account Inside the Courtroom. Currently he photographs stray cats which you can find on his Instagram.
Claudia Sofía Garriga-López is an Assistant Professor of Queer and Trans Latinx Studies in the Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies of California State University, Chico. After participating in EMERGE Claudia went on to be a part of the Art and Resistance course in San Cristóbal de las Casas, México. She is thrilled to be a part of the hemi family because there are always events, programs, and people, that bring politics and art together in meaningful ways.
Courtney Surmanek (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artivist (theatre-maker, visual artist, poet and organizer) living between Virginia and New York. They are a 2022 MFA/MS Candidate in Theatre: Directing & Public Dialogue and Urban & Regional Planning at Virginia Tech. 2018-19: Artist-in-Residence at Queens Library with ProjectArt, Fellow at The Performance Project at University Settlement and Participant in Theater of Change: Artistry, Law, and Activism with Broadway Advocacy Coalition at Columbia Law School. From 2017-18, they participated in the Mitchell Art Gallery’s Artist-in-Residence program, The Art & Law Program, and the C4AA’s Art Action Academy.
Damariz Damken is an artivist from the Rio Grande Valley Frontera of South Texas. She graduated from New York University in May 2019 with a concentration in Politics, Rights, and Development and Latin American Studies. Growing up on both sides of the border as a first-generation citizen from a Mexican immigrant family and daughter of undocumented parents, her work explores fronterizx landscapes to reclaim and deconstruct hemispheric border imaginaries as an approach to social justice and human rights.
Denae Hannah, a native of Fort Worth, Texas, is a performance artist, social entrepreneur, and Artistic Director and CEO of Denae Dance Theatre. She received her B.A. in Drama from Stanford University and M.F.A. in Performance and Choreography from Florida State University. Ms. Hannah was a 2012 EMERGENYC artist and a 2012-2013 Commissioned Artist at Stanford University. Her work was performed for Parent's Weekend and for the Dance Division's winter dance concert "Performing Past, Fast Forward: The Body in 3D."
I am inspired to create art work based on the familiar objects that I view through my daily travels. I ultimately set out to express a meaningful story about events in my life and those found with the communities I work. I utilize different media in the creation of my work. This allows for great versatility and a rich viewer experience as the eye uncovers the multiple layers that often characterize mixed media art. Much of my art has focused on issues like institutionalized racism and classism, jarring stereotypes, and displacement of people of color.
Doménica García is an Ecuadorian video and performance artist based in NY. She obtained a BFA in Film at the School of Visual Arts, 2018. Her work dives into a process of introspection, breaking down the personal and discovering the universal. By juxtaposing the radical and the ordinary, she gives greater relevance to the day to day experience.
Dominic Cinnamon Bradley is a Black gender non-conforming, 'crip and sick' multidisciplinary artist from the Dirty South. Dominic also holds a Master's Degree in Social Work from Columbia University. A 2012 EMERGENYC alum, Dominic continues to develop performance that illuminates the lived experience of disability. Dominic believes what is spoken can be acknowledged, what is acknowledged can be examined, and what is examined can be transformed. Dominic's approach to performance is identity-based, experimental, and frequently involves spiritual seeking.
Édgar J. Ulloa Luján is a performance artist and poet from Ciudad Juárez, México. He founded a pioneer multimedia poetry blog Mi Juaritos. His performances negotiate border politics, cultural memory, trauma, immigration, and violence in addition to instigating audience and public participation. Ulloa has performed in PEN World Voices Festival–PEN America, México Now Festival in NYC, and The Poetry Festival in México City. Ulloa’s work was included by CONACULTA in the first national anthology of visual poetry in México. He was the 2016 Emerge-Surface-Be Poetry Fellow from the Poetry Project in NYC.
Effie Nkrumah is an interdisciplinary artist and poet of Ghanaian descent brought up in Sydney, Australia. She has worked creatively between Sydney, Accra, and New York granting her a unique sense of humour, aesthetic & keen observation. She holds an MA in Arts Politics from NYU.
Elena Rose Light is a choreographer and performer originally from Southern California. Her choreography is rooted in the potential for somatic empathy to reorganize systems of thought and governance. Her work has been presented by Abrons Arts Center, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, among other venues. Recent grants/honors include the FCA Emergency Grant, danceWEB scholarship at ImPulsTanz, LANDING mentorship, and Chez Bushwick residency. She received a BA with honors in French and art history from Yale University, where she became enamored with experimental performance.
Following the 2011 EMERGENYC cycle the alumni decided to continue their successful and inspiring collaboration by founding the Emerge Collective. The Emerge Collective was a non-hierarchical performance collective of interdisciplinary artists and activists from the 2011 EMERGENYC program at the Hemispheric Institute. From 2011 to 2012, we met regularly in 3-month cycles to develop existing works and create new ones with a work in progress showing at the end of each cycle. Members included: Noelle Ghoussaini, Maria Schirmer, Katrina De Wees, Zavé Martohardjono, M. Liz Andrews, Shelah Marie, Lily Mengesha and Stephen Graf.
The EmergeLAB@BAX is comprised of alumni of the EmergeNYC program and takes place at BAX. The goal of the LAB is to provide a non-curated, non-hierarchical space for artistic development, where the artists determine their own frameworks and processes for experimentation and growth. The artists in the inaugural cohort are: Sabina Ibarrola (2013), Jeca Rodríguez Colón (2013), Mette LouLou von Kohl (2013), Guy Yedwab (2013), Dominic Bradley (2012), Samantha Galarza (2012), Benjamin Lundberg (2012), Jesse Phillips-Fein (2012), Katrina De Wees (2011), Mary Notari (2011), Maria Schirmer (2011), Mieke D (2009), and Megan Hanley (2009).
Emilio Martínez Poppe is a New York based visual artist working in sculpture, installation, video, performance, web design, and participatory projects. Their work explores forms of knowledge exchange and how the interfaces that host these movements affect the ways in which groups work together. Emilio earned a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art. That have exhibited their work at the Queens Museum, Abrons Art Center, CUE Art Foundation, and Pratt Institute in New York; Framer Framed, Side Room, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond, in Amsterdam, NL.
Emma Alabaster is a bassist, vocalist, and composer who grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and works in NYC as a musician and educator. Her primary project is decibelists, an experimental anti-gentrification pop band she co-leads with Leo Ferguson. Emma has worked with the luminary poet Cornelius Eady as Musical Director for his band Rough Magic and in collaboration with many musicians and artists of other disciplines. She is an arts educator in NYC schools, shelters, and community centers, and was Lincoln Center Boro-Linc’s 2017 Artist-in-Residence at Snug Harbor Cultural Center. In her "free time" Emma leads songs and chants at protests ...
Francheska is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from The Bronx who looks at domestic life and signifiers of Caribbean culture and the diaspora to explore slippages of identity, fragmentation, and longing. They graduated with a MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and hold a BFA in Painting from Hunter College and a BA in Art History from Old Dominion University. In addition, she’s a U.S. Navy veteran. Alcántara has exhibited and performed work at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum, La Mama Theater, Grace Exhibition Space, and BronxArtSpace.
An inaugural EMERGENYC cohort (2008) and 2050 Legacy ensemble member, Frantz Jerome collaborated with The Hemispheric Institute and participated in two Encuentros in São Paulo, Brazil (2013) and Montreal, Canada (2014). Frantz was invited to perform Spoken Word poetry by Harry Belafonte at The Interdependence Day Conference sponsored by DEMOS in Berlin, Germany (2010). He is a founding member of the artivist performance collective The Peace Poets, and staff writer for the PoC geek cultural editorial, Black Nerd Problems. Frantz holds a BA in Writing and Democracy from The New School.
Gabriela es creadora interdisciplinaria e intérprete de las artes escénicas, y ejerce como artista educadora y gestora cultural en Chile y Latinoamérica. Ha desarrollado una carrera creativa y artivista vinculada a temáticas e intervenciones socio-políticas. Se titula en Teatro en la Universidad Católica de Chile para luego especializarse en espacio público, pedagogía del oprimido, política y performance, y educación artística comunitaria. Actualmente ejerce su práctica en el norte de Chile trabajando en proyectos que vinculan arte y educación, colaborando con movimientos feministas y organizaciones afrodescendientes y es la actual profesora de Teatro del único Liceo Artístico de Arica.
Gethsemane Herron-Coward is a poet/playwright from Washington, D.C. She has developed work with JAG Productions, The Hearth, Magic Time@Judson, and Playwright’s Playground at Classical Theatre of Harlem. She is alumna of 24Hour Plays-Nationals and The Fire This Time Festival. She has held residencies at The Virginia Center of the Creative Arts and the Millay Colony, where she was the recipient of the Yasmin Scholarship. She has been a finalist for Space on Ryder Farm, among others. She holds a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MFA from Columbia University.
Girino (aka Lua) is a Brazilian video & movement artist and scholar based in Brooklyn, and current PhD candidate at NYU's Performance Studies. Their work happens amidst performance art, expanded cinema, contemporary dance, independent documentaries and undocumented phenomena. They are drawn to insurgent transgendering, prehensive performances, racial speculativity, precarious consistencies, abyssal subjectivities, micropolitical glitches, insistent choreographies and general delinquency.
Giseli is a cultural worker and interdisciplinary artist from Brazil based in US. She has been organizing festivals, workshops, exhibitions and publications that discuss media and technology related to the Brazilian scene of art and activism. Most of the projects are collaborative process that highlights practices on tactical media and radical pedagogies related to internet culture. Her work has already been presented in Quito (LabSurLab), Amsterdam (N5M), New Delhi (Sarai), Vienna (MQ21), Berlin (Radical Networks), São Paulo (31st Biennial of São Paulo, Sesc Pompeia), Rio de Janeiro (Capacete, Lastro).
Grace is an artist and organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a 2013 graduate of Williams College, where she studied narrative perspective and earned a BA in English and Philosophy. She works with language, movement, and space by navigating circular design, imagination, and empathy as currency. Grace facilitates workshops, tutorials, and room transformations to support embodied joy and multidimensional creativity. A distance runner and improvisational performer, she collaborates peer-to-peer, investing in human-scale exchange and abundance regeneration. Grace is a Weaving Worlds ambassador and is completing her postpartum doula certification with DONA.
Isadora Frost Brasil (1985) graduated from PUC Sao Paulo in 2009 with a degree in Performance Art and Dance. In 2014, Frost completed her degree in Fine Arts at The San Francisco Art Institute. In 2018, she received a Masters degree in Photography from Parsons School of Design at The New School and was an Emerge co-hort at NYU 2019. Frost's work mixes media and deals with the relationship between the body, space, and communities. Since 2008, her work has been featured internationally in Brazil, San Francisco, New Zealand, India, New York, Russia, China, Munich, London, and Finland.
Isaque Ribeiro is a regular human being who likes and try to understand art's transformative power, mainly flirting with performance, theater and education. Currently residing at Vila Barroló, a rural community dedicated to cultural reflection, production and resistance.
Brooklyn based organizer and theater-maker, Janine Renee Cunningham has presented work at the Prelude Festival and On the Boards, among others. She holds a BA in International Studies from Portland State University and is completing her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College.
Jeca Rodríguez Colón is a Puerto Rican artist and emerging scholar living in New York City. She is currently a doctoral candidate in philosophy, aesthetics and art theory at IDSVA. Through her academic and creative work, she questions the societal prescription of motherhood and how aesthetic representations of the maternal influences maternal subjectivity and performances. Her work has been presented in the Americas, Europe and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tapei. Jeca was also part of the EmergeLab at BAX in 2014 and participated at the Encuentro in Montreal.
Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer currently living and working on Patwin and Ohlone lands. JT is the daughter of Nancy, Flora, Leonor, Sol, and Ana. Her poetry and art collections include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011), Poems are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof Books 2013), DORA/ANA/GUATAVIT@ (RSH 2016), YOU DA ONE (2017 Noemi Books & Letras Latinas's Akrilica Series), and to kill the future in the present (Green Lantern Press 2018). She’s a Cancer sun & Leo rising.
Jennifer Celestin is a writer, performer, and facilitator from Brooklyn, NY. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. in Humanities at NYU and an M.F.A. in Fiction at CUNY: Queens College. She has performed at numerous venues in NYC and her publication credits include No Dear, Magazine and The Hawai’i Review. She knows ou kapab leer esto. Li invite'ou to her multilingual imaginación.
Jesse Phillips-Fein is a Brooklyn born and based dancer, choreographer, educator and mama. Her work has been presented at venues in New York, New Jersey, Colorado and Maine, and her writing on dance and race is published in several anthologies.
Harlem-based Jonathan McCrory is an Obie Award Winning artist & Audelco Nominated, Harlem-based artist who has served as Director of Theatre Arts Program at Dr. Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre since 2012. He has directed numerous productions, including Dead and Breathing, HandsUp, Hope Speaks, Blacken the Bubble, Asking for More, Last Laugh, and Enter Your Sleep. In 2013, he was awarded the Emerging Producer Award by the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and the Torch Bearer Award by theatrical legend Woodie King Jr.
José Pérez IV is a fight choreographer, theatre maker, teacher, and performer. He holds an MFA in Performance Pedagogy from the University of Pittsburgh and a BFA in Drama from NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing. José has made fight theatre in a moving car (Orlando Fringe), in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, and on the streets of Greenwich Village.
Occupying Ohlone Territory (Oakland, CA), Juju is mothering, homeschooling, working with plants, and supporting people through their pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum journey. She graduated with a degree and a lot of debt from a Creative Writing program and facilitated spaces encouraging “marginalized” communities to tell their own stories. As an AfroTaino person, they are reclaiming and remembering their traditional practice as a form of decolonization. In 2014, they started Babymamahood, an online platform to dismantle, reimagine, and reclaim solo parenting for women and people of color in the hood.
Coming from a place of sexual and gender liberation, Julha Franz (Brazil, 1993) pushes boundaries with her own body. Through the language of performance art, she creates new forms of imposed body and social identities. She has been awarded artistic residencies in Venice, Italy, 2017, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015 and 2014. She has participated in collective exhibitions, mainly art performance festivals, such as VERBO - Galeria Vermelho (where she participated in two consecutive editions in 2017 and 2018). In 2018, she was nominated for the French Aliance Contemporary Art Award.
Julián J. Mesri is a New York based Argentinean-American director, writer and sound designer. He graduated Williams College with a B.A. in Philosophy having studied under Mark C. Taylor and was privileged to work with theatre figures like Tina Shepard and Carson Kreitzer. He was recently named a 2010-2011 Van Lier Fellow at Repertorio Español where he recently directed the NYC premiere of Rafael Spregelburd's "La Estupidez." He also directed and produced his play “The King in Exile” at The Tank Theater, where he is a current artistic resident.
Karina Claudio-Betancourt is a Boricua "artivist" and community organizer with a BA in Humanities—Theater and Creative Writing (UPR-RP) and an MA in Performance Studies (NYU). Born and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico, she now lives in Brooklyn. She received a scholarship from the Hispanic Arts Foundation in 2007, a “Performance Studies” Award in 2008 and was a Hemispheric Institute EMERGENYC Fellow in 2009. She has received the Brooklyn Lambda Award (May, 2009), a City Council Proclamation (June, 2009), a Proclamation from the Queens Borough President (2010), and a City Council Proclamation (2011).
Katrina is a Brooklyn born and based interdisciplinary artist, currently working (primarily) in choreography and performance. After experimenting with her education and art at Hampshire College, she returned to NYC and presented her work at Dixon Place, Williamsburg Art Nexus and MIXnyc among others. She currently works in museum education at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and is developing a new work through the Emerge Collective to present at the 2012 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. In the summer of 2012, Katrina will begin the certificate program at Wesleyan University's Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance.
Kelsey Pyro is a St. Paul and Minneapolis-grown/Brooklyn-based producer, singer/songwriter, poet, and educator. Her work often encompases healing processes and her identity as a Black and Ojibwe Native American Woman. Kelsey has performed at venues such as The Last Of The Record Buyers at SoundSet and TEDx AIU. She has shared bills with Wale, MC Lyte, Trak Girl, and more. She received the 2018 and 2019 Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Grant for co-producing the Blue Nile Jam Session. Kelsey premiered her new work, Makadewiiyaasikwe, in June 2019 for The Shed’s Open Call artist residency.
Kirya Traber is an actress, playwright, and cultural worker. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Lincoln Center Education, and is on faculty at the School of Drama at the New School. Kirya received her MFA in Acting from the School of Drama, is the recipient of the California Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, Robert Redford's Sundance foundation award for Activism in the Arts, an Astrea Lesbian Writers Fund award for Poetry, and is a former judge for the LAMBDA Literary Awards in LGBT Drama.
Kiyan Williams is a multidisciplinary artist from Newark, NJ who works fluidly across sculpture, performance, painting, and video. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, Brooklyn Museum, the Shed, and more. Kiyan earned a BA with honors from Stanford and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia. They were selected to participate in the 2019 In Practice emerging artist exhibition at SculptureCenter. Kiyan is the 2019/2020 recipient of the Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University. Research questions: How can performance and sculpture unearth Black queer and trans embodiment? What are the aesthetics of decolonisation, resistance, and recovery?
Faustina KT Pe Benito is a nonbinary queer Filipinx, a Filipino man, and a white woman. They earned a BFA at Cooper Union (2016) and were a recipient of the Osage Nation Higher Education Scholarship. They have exhibited their work in New York City, including group exhibitions at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2019), Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY (2019), Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2018-19), Flux Factory, Queens, NY (2017), and Long Island City Arts Open, Queens, NY (2017). They have performed at Knockdown Center, Queens, NY (2019), Performance Space, New York, NY (2018), among others.
Leslie Guyton is a dance theater director based in Brooklyn, NY. She's the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Movement Workshop Group. Guyton is the Executive Producer and Curator for The First Layer Festival, a yearly dance, music, and theater festival in NYC, and is assistant directing Under Construction with Anne Bogart and SITI Company in April 2011. Under Guyton's direction, the Movement Workshop Group has created four evening-length pieces inspired by an element. The Boston Globe chose Dust to Dust (2006) and Moontides (2008) as "Dance Pick of the Week" in 2006 and 2008 respectively.
Lily is a director, dramaturg and assistant professor of race and performance in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her research focuses on contemporary indigenous performance art of North and Central America, particularly on art that address legacies of violence against women. In her performance work, she aims to make legible temporal scales of memory as measured through social and ecological difference, as in “manifestroom” (2014), “an emotion is a sign that something has shifted” (2016) and her current devised work that focuses on the history of the ocean.
lolo halman is currently a masters student at the process work institute in portland, oregon, which trains in facilitator awareness for conflict facilitation through a combination of taoist philosophy, quantum physics, jungian psychology, and psychodrama. in his creative work lolo explores the means of deep personal and social transformation through esoteric expression and community ritual performance.
Luisina is an actress, singer and dancer originally from Argentina. She's performed internationally; notable credits include: Carmen (directed by Franco Zeffirelli) at L'Arena di Verona, Italy; Shrek The Musical (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Midsummer Night’s Dream (Madrid, Spain); Limitless (with Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro); Coyote Lake (with Oscar nominee Adriana Barraza and Riverdale’s Camila Mendes); VH1 Save the Music with Tony Bennett; Edha on Netflix. She studied theater at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and The William Esper Studio. She speaks English, Spanish, and Italian fluently and currently lives in Los Angeles.
M. Liz Andrews is a doctoral student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University where she also serves as the Graduate Assistant for the GMU Diversity Research Group. Liz’s academic work explores the ways art can serve as a venue and vehicle for activism and discussions about democracy and social change. In 2009, she launched LetterToObama – an artistic space for democratic engagement. As the director of the project, she curates a monthly online publication and has produced live events in Washington D.C., New York City and Chicago.
Mare has been playing the piano for 34 years and writing music for a loooong time too. Mare believes in the importance of creative collaboration and community to help stop fascism and oppression and facilitates workshops called: Collective Songwriting for Collective Liberation. For many years they curated The Moon Show which featured underrepresented artists, and helped start The Moon Choir, a monthly song-share for queer and trans folk. Mare has played at the Jazz Standard, The Bitter End, and in the pit for the Broadway musical Evita.
Maria Schirmer is a theater artist, writer and arts educator. She has received a Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellowship with the Jana Sanskriti Center for Theatre of the Oppressed in Kolkata, India and was an artist in residence at the Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Currently she is a member of the movement installation ON DISPLAY with Heidi Latsky Dance, which has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum, and the United Nations.
An Egyptian immigrant living in Brooklyn, Mariam Bazeed is a performance artist and alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and personal essays. They have an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College; have been awarded fellowships from the Center for Fiction, Asian American Writers Workshop, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, and Lambda Literary; and residencies from Hedgebrook, Marble House Project, the Millay Colony, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.
Marta Jovanović (b. 1978, Belgrade, Serbia) constructs scenarios in which she interrogates politics, identity, beauty, and sexuality. Jovanović received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Tulane University in 2001 after attending Scuola Lorenzo de Medici, in Florence. Her works have been presented in institutions such as Museo Pietro Canonica and Museo della Civiltà Romana, both in Rome; G12HUB, Belgrade; Studio Marina Abramovic at Location One, New York; and Centre Culturel de Serbie, Paris, among many others.
Mary Notari has been making theater in NYC since 2007. She has appeared as an actor and/or puppeteer in a bunch of downtown and Off-Off Broadway venues and has shown a handful of original pieces as well. She produced direct actions and facilitated workshops with the culture-jamming group The Yes Men up until 2015. She is currently a master's candidate at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She holds a B.A. in Theater from Oberlin College.
Mauricio Alexander is a first-generation bilingual artist of Latin American and East European roots. A graduate of Oberlin College and the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, he has performed at the US Social Forum, Kennedy Center, D.C. Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Symphony Space, and Public Theater. A SAG-AFTRA member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, his original work has appeared at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival, on television, and in new media. Mauricio is an Actors' Equity 2018 recipient of the Actors' Fund Push Grant and teaching resident artist at The Schermerhorn.
...Megan Hanley makes physical, political, and collaborative theater. She is a founding member of The Syndicate (wearethesyndicate.com), an ensemble theater company that devises intimate, spectacular plays from the ground up. With the Syndicate, Megan has appeared as Pentheus in Civility! and as Gertrude Stein in Well Job, Gertrude. Megan is also a core member of Man Meat Collective, a group that rewrites musicals to make them better, queerer, and more transformative. Megan facilitates workshops and actions with the Yes Men in her free time and works and trains at SITI Company.
Melanie Greene is a dance artist, writer, and podcast host. She is no stranger to swirling on the edge of impossible, swimming in the sea of the minority. She has received generous artistic support from MANCC, Marble House Project, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, New York Live Arts, Gibney Dance, Actors Fund, BAX, Dancing While Black, Bogliasco Fellowship, and Brooklyn Arts Council. Greene is a contributing writer for Dance Magazine, co-host of the Dance Union Podcast, and Movement Research Artist in Residence. Research question during EMERGENYC: How does my artistic practice live in conversation with my activism and advocacy work?
Mercy is a 21 year old Black and Native American nonbinary femme from Brooklyn, New York. They are passionate about land sovereignty, reclaiming ritual and healing intergenerational trauma. Mercy incorporates these values as a Stand-up Comedian, Dancer, Visual Artist, Capoeirista, Reiki practitioner, Actor, Singer, Food Justice Activist and Educator. As an educator and Performance artivist they use interactive theatre based activities to address social and environmental issues. Mercy has been community organizing, teaching and developing curriculum for eight years to complement their performances. Stay Tuned.
Mette Loulou is a performer and a wanderer. Currently based in New York City, Mette Loulou is a mixed-race queer femme, born to a Lebanese/Palestinian mother and Danish father. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco and Denmark. Mette Loulou is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. She uses performance as her first step to understanding and surviving generational trauma and as a key tool in her fight to end the occupation of Palestine.
Mieke is a queer mixed race femme of Asian and European descent, who seeks to investigate how a diversity of styles can or cannot co-exist in a performative space, hunting for cohesive narratives and aesthetic harmony while travelling through a vast terrain of fragmentation. Mieke studied at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU. She has performed with La Pocha Nostra, the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, Target Margin Theater Company, and Taylor Mac, among others, and she has worked on numerous community-based theater projects with Cornerstone Theater Company and The Foundry Theatre Company.
Mon Iker is an interdisciplinary artist devoted to elevating feminist, social, and environmental justice issues. Their work spans a variety of media, including street art, photography, performance, animation, film, and traditional herbalism. They combine experience in visual media making with knowledge of strategy, operations, and arts administration with and within social and environmental justice nonprofit community-based organizations, museums, and movements. Their artistic endeavors have shown internationally, been featured in the New York Times, and their arts administration work ranges from facilitating the growth of the world’s only queer museum to managing mural programs for detained young people on Riker’s Island.
Monica Furman is an actor, screenwriter, and theatremaker. She was raised in Brooklyn by her Jew-ish Russian-speaking family from Ukraine, so she’s working out her dual-identity crisis by being an artist instead of a doctor like her babushka wanted. Monica’s most recent work includes The Waiting Room for the ASHTAR Theatre Festival in the West Bank and TBD: The Live Devising Project at FringeNYC. Her bilingual TV pilot, First Jen, was recently a scholarship winner for the Reproductions Summer Screenplay Contest and a finalist for the Orchard Project’s inaugural TV Episodic Lab.
Natacha Voliakovsky (Buenos Aires, 1988) is a political performance artist, feminist, and activist who has been performing around the world for the last 10 years. Her work revolves around the concept of culture as a humanizing system and the deconstruction of the social body, and raises awareness on issues regarding gender identity, body sovereignty, and women's rights. She has taken part in the Venice International Performance Art Week workshop, Ûberbau Haus residency (Brazil), and Sur Polar residency (Antarctica). She is Director of Argentina Performance Art, the first research platform on performance art in Argentina.
Natalie Cook is a filmmaker, playwright, and poet. She has been a spoken word artist since the age of 13 and has shared the stage with artists such as Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Saul Williams, & MC Lyte. Natalie founded Atlanta Word Works (501c3). She is the writer and director of MANIKIN, an interdisciplinary theatre production that explores gender relations between Black men and Black women living in modern day America. Natalie obtained her Master’s at NYU.
Nefertiti Asanti is a writer, cultural worker, and occasional performance poet from the Bronx, NY. Nefertiti is a fellow of The Watering Hole (2016, 2017), Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab (2017), Lambda Emerging Writer’s Retreat (2018), and a founding fellow of the Anaphora Writing Residency (2018). The Queer Cultural Center commissioned Nefertiti's writing and performance work-in-progress Black Blood Is… for the 2017 National Queer Arts Festival. Nefertiti has also read poetry for Honeysuckle Press. Nefertiti’s work can be found at Winter Tangerine, AfroPunk, Foglifter, and elsewhere.
NIC Kay formerly known as Nicole K. is from the Bronx. Currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history and spirituality.
Noelle Ghoussaini is a playwright, director, performer and arts educator. Her work is dedicated to using arts to examine and re-imagine our society within a political, social and historical context. She has written four original plays and curated numerous devised pieces, which have been staged at theaters, site-specific locations and community gardens throughout NYC. As a director, she has worked with companies such as Culture Project, Noor Theatre, the Jenin Freedom Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Sepia Works, Brave New World Repertory Theatre, and the Movement Theatre Company.
Pablo Varona —or Pablillo José—is an artist and puppeteer. He spends most of his time living close to the forested mountaintops of Las Marías, Puerto Rico, where he a resident artist liaison of Casa Múcaro. He is amazed by the immeasurable value of reusing discarded or “forgotten” objects in the transformation of urban contexts. Recently, he was also a lead artist at Honey for the Heart Parade, Athens, OH (2015) and Art Director of the Loisaida Festival Parade (2016).
Parker Allen Stanley is the embodiment of social media and the product of seeing reality television as a fine art. Having studied devised theatre in the International Performance Ensemble at Pace University, this Class of 2017 graduate now performs original work all around the world and sometimes even in the comfort of your home… that is if you’ve seen Parker on your screen. Obsessed with fame, horror, and deconstructing privilege, in or out of drag, Parker is a queer performance artist creating abstracted autobiographical musical pieces completely delusional about their own stardom.
Patrícia Faolli is an interdisciplinary artist from São Paulo, Brazil. With a Bachelor's Degree in Comunicação das Artes do Corpo from PUC- SP (2009), she started her career in theater and later focused on performance art and dance using her body as the primary medium. Since 2008, with the "Ajuntamento MeninasJoão de Performance," she has taken part in several performances and urban interventions such as: On Sale, Mínimos Silêncios, Tinta Fresca, Lamentos Contidos em Busca de Catarse, Transparências, Ctrl + Z ou 220 Lâmpadas de 1watt.
Paul Bedard is a Brooklyn-based theater director. He is an artistic director of Theater in Asylum. His work has appeared at the Hangar, Cherry Lane, IRT, and Dixon Place Theatres, as well as the Prague, Chicago, and Rochester Fringe Festivals. He has collaborated with Bread and Puppet Theater and The Democratic Socialists of America. Paul is a Drama League Directing Fellow and graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Polina Porras Sivolobova is a Russian-Mexican multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work includes visual arts and performance. She explores narrative using ritual, iconography, technology and nature. She has performed at the Venice Biennale and has been supported by the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, El Museo del Barrio, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Queens Council on the Arts.
Rachel Kara Perez is an award-winning singer, theatre artist, and poet whose work spans multiple genres, contexts, and locales. A member of Actors' Equity and a Latin Grammy Nominated musician with a repertoire ranging from opera to Afro-Cuban Jazz, she has appeared as a featured vocalist in concert at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center Out Of Doors, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and The Apollo Theater, among others. Rachel has participated in writing workshops at Cave Canem and The Leslie-Lohman Museum, where she was subsequently published in their magazine, The Archive. In addition to performing, Rachel works ...
randy reyes is a queer, AfroGuatemalan choreographer, performance artist, and healer born in New Jersey (Lenape territory) and is currently based between Lisbon, Portugal and the San Francisco Bay Area (Ramaytush Ohlone territory). reyes is interested in choreography as a process of excavation, task as meditation, psychosomatic Qi Energetics, edging and incrementality, and getting messy by conjuring contemporary rituals within quotidian and natural landscapes. reyes explores the notion of club spaces as sites of generative dissonance and asks, "Are we celebrating or mourning or both? How do we prepare for the emergence of the not yet seen?"
Rebecca Fitton is an improviser, facilitator, and citizen. Her work is informed by her experiences as a biracial immigrant and has been presented in NYC at Gibney, Movement Research, Staten Island Arts, Triskelion Arts, LiVEART.US/Queens Museum and Hemispheric Institute’s EMERGENYC at Abrons Arts Center, in addition to many non-traditional performance spaces such as bars, rooftops, gardens and streets across New York, New Jersey, Florida, Wisconsin, and Salzburg, Austria. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at center space (Grand Rapids, MI) part of the 2019 Hemispheric Institute’s EMERGENYC cohort (New York, NY) and is currently a Fellow at LEIMAY (Brooklyn, NY).
rex renée leonowicz (rexylafemme) is a performer, writer, and activist from NYC. As a working class, trans/nonbinary femme, rex’s work blends genders and genres and is grounded in a politics of radical resistance, healing, witness, and the power/struggle of intimacy. rex is the author of when there is no one and there is everyone (Magic Helicopter Press).
A local of Queens Village, NY with a US greencard and Pilipino passport. This multidisciplinary artist has organized various things but not limited to: public discourse with artists/curator, a physical theater with clickbaity title, solo movement improvisations, solo exhibition of gestural paintings, durational performance in a pond, sculpture with trash and notes, Instagram memes, solo and collective performance art projects, and anonymous dissents. Oftentimes, she daydreams about a borderless and debtless world of a collectively thriving society free from cycle of bad parenting, home and food insecurity, and of historical amnesia/erasure/distortions.
Activist artist Rosary Solimanto, explores oppression and societal stigmas living with multiple sclerosis evolving into her international artistic career. She approaches disABILITY identity, biology, healthcare and medicine from a humanitarian perspective. Solimanto graduated with her MFA from SUNY New Paltz in 2015 and since exhibited and performed across the US, Toronto, London, Greece, China and Spain, and featured in twelve international museums. Awards include Unlimit Fellowship from Art OMI; Kulakoff Award at SUNY Albany; and the Sojourner Truth Fellowship at SUNY New Paltz. She was a selected for the activist program, Emerge NYC.
Sabina is a Brooklyn-based performance artist, activist, and troublemaker: a dancer and bruja on the path towards becoming a writer and healer, too. Sabina currently apprentices with herbalist Robin Rose Bennett of Wisewoman Healing Ways. A graduate of Hunter College and the New York School of Burlesque, she collaborates with the Boston-based Femme Show and Brooklyn’s Heels on Wheels Glitter Roadshow. As a mixed-race Latina femmedyke, her work coalesces around conscious, performative femininity and camp as strategies for resisting racist heteropatriarchy.
Sacred is the Founder and Executive Director of Kuumba Health LLC. Through her company, Kuumba Health LLC, Sacred developed SoulCare, a model to train care takers, prepare practitioners to use therapeutic drama alongside other holistic methods, grounded in art and ritual, to provide positive impacts on ailments rooted in internalized oppression. Sacred earned her Masters of Divinity (MDiv) from Union Theological Seminary's, with a specialization in Holistic Psychology, while training as a Drama Therapist. She has written, directed, performed, and co-produced several plays, theater movement pieces, choreo-poems, and stage plays for over 15 years.
Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai is an Iranian American video and performance artist. Healing and language are the axes of her practice. She is interested in the metaphorical flux of translation that speaks to diasporic displacement when considering the decolonization of time and space. She is a world-builder and engages her audience in self-reflexive and affective moments of recognition and play. She has performed at The New Museum, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, and Performa ‘15 NYC. She also curates a show called Digital Diaspora for digital artists in the Islamic Diaspora centering Black Muslim Artists.
Samantha Galarza is a queer, mixed-race, Puerto Rican, SAG-AFTRA actress, writer, performance artist, educator, and director. Her work explores queer identity, racism, love, substance abuse, the U.S. prison industrial complex, and policy that disproportionately affects marginalized communities. Ultimately a storyteller, her dream is to bridge the gap between mainstream media and progressive "de-colonial" political art. She’s been published in award winning anthologies and performed throughout the U.S. and internationally. She is co-founder of the queer performance art collective A Beautiful Desperation and proud member of Alternate Roots.
Sara Lyons is a director who seeks to explode form/politic in new, critically embodied theatre and performance works. Working frequently in adaptation, social practice, and new media, their work has been presented by Los Angeles Performance Practice, The Wattis Institute, OUTsider, SFX Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE, LaMaMa, Edinburgh Fringe, and more. MFA-Directing, Carnegie Mellon.
Shelah is a performer, educator and activist from Hollywood, Florida. Shelah studied theater and performance at Florida State University where she received dual BA degrees in Theater and Mass Media Studies. She recently graduated from the Performance Studies program at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She loves homemade popcorn, documentaries and Facebook. Currently, Shelah is in Brooklyn teaching, performing and trying to put one foot in front of the other. Visit her website below for more information.
Sol de la Ciudad is a Chicago trans creator based in NYC. Sol has created and collaborated in numerous seasons of shows at Free Street Theatre. From audio engineering to performative efforts she has made mediums concerning the abstraction of how sounds are produced and operating sonically within and without the hands of the State. She is also a member of the radically politicized theatrical group Young Fugitives. A portion of her work can be viewed under the name Sol Patches and 1/2 of collaborative group solYchaski.
Sophia Mak is a Brooklyn based, multi-disciplinary artist and educator. They have had the pleasure of working with young artists across New York City’s five boroughs. Sophia is currently in collaboration with Bex Kwan (EMERGE'16) creating performances which unearth secret histories of foreignness, family mythologies, and kinship in East Asian communities in the United States.
Sriya Sarkar is a digital media producer, comedian, and filmmaker working at the intersection of digital media, comedy, and activism. She has worked with artist Maya Lin for the What Is Missing? Foundation as well as the feminist sleeper cell of riotously funny reproductive rights advocates at Lady Parts Justice. She is the producer of Speakout Laughout, a comedic storytelling show about abortion, as well as lolvote, a comedy variety show and accompanying Twitterbot encouraging youth voter turnout. Currently, she's the Digital Content Producer for Priorities USA.
Stephano is an artist and educator from Guayaquil, Ecuador. He is the co-founder and director of TrueQué Residencia Artistica, an annual artist residency in the coast of Ecuador. He holds a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis with concentrations in Latinx and Metropolitan Studies from New York University. He was part of the NYFA’s Immigrant Artists Program and the Center for Artistic Activism’s 2016 Art Action Academy. Espinoza has worked at the Queens Museum as a Public Programs and Community Engagement Fellow, as an educator at the Museum of the Moving Image and a teaching artist at Groundswell Community Mural Project.
...Stephen has written and performed in three solo performances, the most recent of which was entitled About Face: Marking the Unmarked. This piece explored histories of whiteness in the US and their entanglement in Stephen’s own life. He is currently writing a fourth piece about sexual difference and what it means to be alone. He can also be seen throughout New York City performing with the indie improv group COACH.
Taja Lindley is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the founder and Managing Member of Colored Girls Hustle, and a member of Echoing Ida and Harriet's Apothecary. Lindley considers herself a healer and an activist, creating socially engaged work that reflects and transforms audiences, shifts culture and moves people to action. Her artwork has been featured at the Movement Research at Judson Church series, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), the Gallatin Arts Festival at New York University, WOW Café Theater, La Mama Theater, in living rooms, classrooms, conferences and public spaces.
Born in Bogotá Colombia, Vanessa is a dancer, curator & cultural producer exploring the connections between identity, collective memory building and rituals of resilience in (but not limited to) Latin America. Working with dance, theatre and film organizations in Toronto, Buenos Aires, New York & Bogotá she has collected a multiplicity of stories. She currently works with film teams strategizing on how to use their documentaries as tools for social change, and connecting them to changemakers and partners that can fuel their impact campaigns.
Yael Miriam recently received Israeli citizenship and calls Tel Aviv her home. She is the Director of Outreach for an organization running volunteer, teaching, photography and design programs for international young adults. When not helping others develop creative projects in the middle-east she is developing her own photography and poetry shown seaside.
Zavé Martohardjono is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist born in Montréal, Canada. Their artistic practice explores geopolitics, social justice, queer glam, embodied healing, and modes of decolonization. Martohardjono studied political economy at Brown University, filmmaking at CUNY City College, and entered dance and performance art in 2009.
Zoe is an independent curator and performer born and raised in New York City. She currently works as Director of Exhibitions at Faena Art in Miami. Previously, she worked Inernational Liaison for the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Cartagena de Indias, Project Manager at Jeffrey Deitch, Inc. and Curatorial Coordinator the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MoCA). She completed a 2010 Fulbright fellowship in Colombia. As a dancer, Zoe has worked with Venezuelan choreographer Mariangela Lopez in her company Accidental Movement.