PROGRAM DIRECTOR - ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CRITICAL DANCE STUDIES

danielle.goldman@newschool.edu

In my research, I analyze the social, cultural, and historical conditions that affect how people move. I’m fascinated by critical theories of the body, and I tend to think about dance as an arena for experimental relations between self and other. These interests are informed by my experience as a dancer – taking class, rehearsing, and performing (most recently for the choreographers Sarah Michelson, Beth Gill and DD Dorvillier). Persistent shuttling between dance practice and academic work – two worlds that I’ve been trying to bridge for as long as I can remember – has shown me that dance and critical theory inform each other in significant ways, revealing much about embodiment, subjectivity, and notions of identity. I hope to make these relations apparent in my classes.

MA and PhD, Performance Studies, New York University
BA, Philosophy, Stanford University
Author of I Want to be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (University of Michigan Press, 2010).

COURSES TAUGHT:
Black Boxes & White Cubes: Relations between Dance & the Visual Arts
Dance and Theories of Community
Debates in Performance Studies
Ephemeral Art
First Year Seminar:  Improvisation: Embodied Practices in Art and Everyday Life
Foundations in Dance Studies
New York Dance in the Eighties
Politics of Improvisation
Performance, Politics, and Power
Performing Intimacy
Reconsidering Judson
Senior Seminar:  Re-imagining the Archive

PROGRAM DIRECTOR - PROFESSOR OF CHOREOGRAPHY

neil.greenberg@newschool.edu

I’ve been creating dances since 1979. I’m obsessed with the particular kinds of meaning that dance can provide (sensual, perceptual, phenomenological), and with how we construct meaninfulness from the various data we receive, in dance and in life.  My extensive dance background includes working as a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; as a teacher on the dance faculties of Purchase College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Riverside; and as dance curator at The Kitchen, the interdisciplinary performance space in NYC. Together with my ongoing work as a choreographer these experiences all inform my teaching, though which I hope to help students find a broad understanding of what dance might be.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Dance Improvisation
First Year Seminar: Performance Making and Viewing: Spectatorship and Meaning-Making
Introduction to Choreographic Research
Lang at Judson
Moving with Somatics
Music & The Body
Performance & Meaning Making
Performance Research: Queering Cunningham & Cage
Performance Workshop
Senior Seminar: Time-Based Performance

AWARDS:
Guggenheim Fellowship for Choreography; Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship, 6 NEA Fellowships, “Bessie” New York Dance and Performance Awards for Not-About-AIDS-Dance (1994) and Partial View (2005); "Bessie" nomination, Outstanding Production, This (2014).

LINKS:
Neil’s website 
Video of Neil’s choreography

top photo credit: Frank Mullaney
bottom photo credit: Frank Mullaney, (like a vase) -2010

luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, and was nominated for Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love (2016). She has received many accolades such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, MAP Funds, Jerome Foundation, 2017 Alpert Award and NYFA Artist Grants amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY’s “Best of Dance”. The Pleasure Project, an ongoing space intervention project, has been seen since 2014 in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, the American Realness Festival in NYC and at the Seattle Art Fair. She received the 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO, after being presented at the Fusebox Festival, and having premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her prior work “Brujx” premiered in October 2018 at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts during the Karl Marx Festival and toured to Hamburg for the HALLO: Festspiele in May 2019. Her most recent and ongoing current work "PURO TEATRO: A Spell for Utopia" began as an online project on instagram commissioned by and for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts' Time-Based Art Festival in the Fall of 2020, and was premiered as a live performance at The Chocolate Factory Theater co-commissioned by NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in November 2021.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Trio of Contemporary Dance Practices
Guest Artist Residency (2011)

LINKS:
luciana's vimeo channel
luciana's website

photo by Nathaniel Phillips

Quilan “Cue” Arnold (MFA) is a movement artist based out of Union City, NJ, who uses his God-given gifts to create systems that advocate for the liberation of all people. As a performer Quilan has been a member of companies such as onCUE Chronicles (NJ), Camille A. Brown and Dancers (NY), Rennie Harris Puremovement (PA), Netta Yerushalmy Dance Company (NY), Abby Z and the New Utility (NY), and Enzo Celli Vivo Ballet (NY). Quilan’s most recent choreographic works, Grandbuelo’s Quarter and The Third Rail, were presented at DancePlace (DC) and New Jersey City University (NJ) respectively in 2023. He is a 2023-24 CUNY Dance Initiative awardee, a 2022 New Directions Choreography Lab Artist-in Residence at Alvin Ailey, and a featured artist in the ALL ARTS documentary, Alvin Ailey New Directions. Quilan is the founder and CEO of onCUE Chronicles, a kinetic storytelling company that uplifts historically oppressed demographics through performance and education. Through onCUE he hosts the Street/Club Dance podcast, The Good Foot Podcast; operates the dance education business, onCUE Center of Learning; teaches the Searching for a True Move dance method; and hosts the Hip-hop online course: Get Groovy.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance A: Hip House & Street Club Dance

LINKS:  
Quilan "Cue" Arnold: www.cue4christ.com
onCUE Chronicles: www.oncuechronicles.com

A gymnastics champion in his native Brazil, João has a degree in Physical Education from São Paulo University and a BA in dance from Empire State College. A Fulbright Scholar, Mr. Carvalho was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company for ten years. He was Choreographic Assistant for the John Boorman film “The Emerald Forest”, in which he also appeared. He was part of John Turturro’s “ Romance And Cigarettes.” He has choreographed for Balé da Cidade De São Paulo, different pick-up companies in São Paulo Brazil, and with Margie Gillis. As a dance educator he has taught at the Paul Taylor School, Marymount Manhattan College, Eugene Lang College, Montclair State University, and various other schools around the world.  He co-directs with Mrs. Yamauchi the São Paulo based pick-up company “LúdicaDança.” Most recently João graduated from the Feldenkrais Method Professional Teacher Training Program and is authorized as a teacher of Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Introduction to Modern Dance Practices

Will is an East Coast native. He earned his BFA in dance from Montclair State University, and his MFA in dance from the University of Illinois. He has also trained with Joffrey Ballet, EMIA, Rennie Harris, Jacobs Pilow, and Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet. 

Since graduating, Ervin has performed at the Alexander Kasser Theatre, the Joyce Theatre, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the Hearts of Men ensemble. As Artistic Director of his company Erv Works Dance Theater, he has presented choreography at the University of Illinois, the Dumbo Dance Festival, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. His body of work includes choreographing for Kemar Jewels Dance Film project - headlining the Global Black Pride event where Kemar’s work was presented after the keynote speaker President Joe Biden - Battery Dance Festival, Maria Torres’s Sol El Bario, the Joyce Theatre in partnership with Future Dance Festival, 92nd Y, and The Martha Graham Dance Company. 

Ana Rockafella Garcia is a female Break dance (B girl) pioneer who began dancing in middle school with her friends for annual talent shows.  After experiencing the NYC club scene of the late 80’s and being scouted to do background dancing for recording artists, she focused her energy on having a career in dance. Street performing with the Breeze Team/ Transformers gave her a solid and unique edge in her dance display. Traveling the world with Hip-hop dance pioneer and husband Kwikstep further exposed her to the reach and history of Hip-hop and became immersed in sharing its vernacular aspects. She quickly became known as a female contender in many styles such as House, Popping and Breaking not to mention the “uptown” free style of Hip-hop dance. After co founding Full Circle Prod a non profit Bronx-based dance company, she began to incorporate her poetry and vocal talents to the evening length engagements in addition to developing her choreographic and directorial skills. She was featured as a B girl in many rap music videos and appeared in a few films and work on commercial shoots as well. Internationally she is hired as an event host, dance teacher and dance contest judge as one of the few females that can hold her own in a male dominated genre. Martha Cooper asked her to contribute her story for the We B*Girlz photo book released in 2006 and she was invited to choreograph the players scene in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 70 anniversary season of Hamlet. Presently, she is working on part 2 of her documentary about the B girl lifestyle entitled “All The Ladies Say”.  She proudly references her Latino culture and its presence in Hip-hop and has performed her original music at festivals such as Momma’s Hip-hop Kitchen and NJPAC’s Alternate Routes.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Hip Hop Dance Practices
Hip Hop Dance Practices Continued

LINKS:
www.fullcirclesouljahs.com  
www.alltheladiessay.com  
www.larokasoul.com

Juliette is a dancer, teacher and choreographer who has worked in and out of New York City since graduating from Sarah Lawrence College (BA) in 1993. As a dancer she has performed for many choreographers appearing most frequently in the works of Deborah Hay, John Jasperse, and Vicky Shick. She has been on the faculty of Hunter College, The George Washington University and Fordham University. Juliette has taught throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. Juliette has an on-going teaching practice at Movement Research in New York City and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. This is her second year teaching at The New School. Last year Juliette curated the Danspace Project Platform “Back To New York City”. Juliette has received two New York Dance and Performance Awards (i.e. “Bessies”). The first, in 2002 was for outstanding artistic achievement in the work of John Jasperse, and the second, in 2008, was for her evening-length work, Anna, Ikea and I. Juliette's last evening-length work, The Making of Americans, premiered at the former Dance Theater Workshop in April of this year.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Choreographic Research, Continued
Contemporary Dance Practices
Improvisation as Art and Physical Practice
Moving with Somatics
Performance

Jennifer Nugent is a performer, educator, mother, and partner. Jennifer addresses her body, mind and being through questioning. She articulates internal experiences through performance and teaching; augmenting these practices by sharing and refining ideas in front of others—a transmission of spoken and gestural language. Her dancing is profoundly inspired by all her teachers and experiences. Jennifer has been performing in NYC since 1998 with many artists and companies including Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Paul Matteson, David Dorfman Dance, Martha Clarke, Gerri Houlihan & Dancers, Mary Street Dance Theater, Body & Soul Dance Theater, Barbara Sloan, Race Dance, Bill Young, Beth Gill, Joanna Kotzke, Annie-B Parsons, Donna Uchizono, Tendayi Kuumba, and many others. She is currently dancing with Faye Driscoll and teaches at Movement Research and Sarah Lawrence College.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contemporary Dance Practices, Continued

LINKS:
Jennifer on Instagram

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s practice is conceptual and process based, fluidly moving within the creative realms of live art performance, video, sculpture, and poetry. Through rooted ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures and crafts perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.

jaamil is the recipient of awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund award, 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency, 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and consecutive 2016-2020 USArtists International Awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, was released Spring 2022. Black Body Amnesia: LIVE, the performance reading, is a live theatrical event that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people negotiating the psychic lifeworlds of living inside the American context. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of performers including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, DJ Maij, and features original sound compositions by Everett-Asis Saunders. In this new work, kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a performance device. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests, and how they then archive these personal freedom narratives to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Guest Artist Residency Spring 2025

LINKS:
Jaamil's website

Darian M. Parker is a choreographer, performer and teacher, specializing in West African dance forms from Guinea, Mali and the Casamance region of Senegal. His work has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Harlem Stage Fund for New Work, and the New Haven Arts Council. His performance credits include Step-Up 3D, the G’Bassikolo Mexican Tour and the Fats Waller US tour. He has also performed with artists such as Meshell N’Degeocello, Jason Moran and Maija Garcia, and has been a member of Kouman Kele African Dance Company, Kouffin Keneke African Dance Company, Sewee African Dance Company, and Harambee Dance Company (Assistant Artistic Director). He has completed teaching residencies at SUNY Purchase, among many other institutions, and he currently serves on the faculty of Cumbe Center for African and Diaspora Dance in Brooklyn, NY. Recently, he joined the guest faculty of the Eugene Lang Dance Program at The New School for Social Research. He is also an adjunct professor of West African dance at Sarah Lawrence College. Among his many teachers are Nzingha Camara, Aly Tatchol Camara, Sandella Malloy, Esther Grant-Walker, Mouminatou Camara, Ismael Kouyate, Marie Basse-Wiles and Ibrahim Doumbia.

Dr. Parker’s devotion to teaching extends beyond dance. He is an adjunct professor in NYU’s Division of Applied Undergraduate Studies, where he teaches courses in anthropology, and supervises an eclectic mix of senior research projects and internships (e.g. creative writing, real estate, marketing and management). He is the author of Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2015), and “The Haze”, which appears in Pedagogies in the Flesh (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Dr. Parker is also the Founder and CEO of Parker Academics, a Manhattan-based test prep and tutoring company that takes a whole-person approach to learning (www.parkeracademics.com). He is an active member of the Yale Alumni Association, where he interviews prospective undergraduate admits, and sits on the board of Y-Apply, an organization that identifies talented public school students and gives them the resources to apply to top tier colleges and universities. Dr. Parker also holds memberships in the Amateur Astronomers Association and the American Anthropological Association.

PhD, Anthropology and African American Studies, M.Phil, Anthropology, and MA, African American Studies, Yale University
BA, English Literature and BA, Anthropology, UCLA

COURSES TAUGHT:
Trio of Contemporary Dance Practices
West African Dance Practices

Katy Pyle is a choreographer and dancer whose works explore their own complex relationship to ballet.

Pyle graduated summa cum laude from Hollins University with a BA in Multimedia Performance Art in '02, and from the high school conservatory program at North Carolina School of the Arts in '99, majoring in Ballet and Contemporary.

Pyle then moved to New York City and danced in the works of Ivy Baldwin, Faye Driscoll, John Jasperse, Xavier Le Roy, Karinne Keithley, Jennifer Monson, Anna Sperber, Katie Workum, and Young Jean Lee, among many others. Simultaneously, Pyle created their own work alongside collaborators Eleanor Hullihan, Rebecca Brooks and Jules Skloot. Evening length works: “Salute to Ex-Best Friends,”asubtout (Pyle & Eleanor Hullihan), Galapagos, 2005; “The Lady Centaur Show,” asubtout, PS 122, 2007; “THE WAY: You Make Me Feel,” Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 2010; and “COVERS,” The Bushwick Starr, 2012.

In 2011, Pyle founded the Ballez to insert the herstory and lineage of lesbian, queer and transgender people into the ballet canon through the creation of large-scale story ballets, open classes, and public engagement. Major works include “The Firebird, a Ballez,” at Danspace Project in Spring (with a reprise that Fall) 2013, “Variations on Virtuosity, a Gala with the Stars of the Ballez” at American Realness at Abrons Arts Center in January 2015, and “Sleeping Beauty & the Beast,” at La Mama in Spring 2016. Pyle also choreographed “Slavic Goddesses,” at the Kitchen, January 26-28, 2017. "Giselle of Loneliness," Pyle's 3rd story-ballet, premiered June 10, 2021 at The Joyce Theater to a livestream audience.

Ballez Class began at Brooklyn Arts Exchange in 2011, and Pyle has since brought the class to Gibney Dance, Slippery Rock University (Pennsylvania), Stolt Scenkonst and MDT (Stockholm), SCDT (Northampton), LGBTQ Center at BSP (Kingston), Princeton, Yale, Movement Research, Allied Media Conference (Detroit), CounterPULSE (San Francisco), University Musical Society (Ann Arbor), Irreverent Dance (London), Beyond Tolerance Youth Conference (NYC), New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Berea College's bell hooks Center.

Pyle has studied ballet with Janet Panetta for a decade and currently teaches technique informed by that lineage, alongside the lens of their own queerness and inclusive politics, at Eugene Lang College at the New School, Marymount Manhattan College, and for professional dancers at Gibney Dance. Pyle has set Ballez work on students through Guest Artist Residencies at Mason Gross at Rutgers, the conservatory at Marymount, Bowdoin College, Whitman College, Eugene Lang and Beloit College.

Pyle has garnered support for the company from the Hodder Fund, United Artists, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, Mertz Gilmore, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and over 1000 individual donors. Pyle was a 2013-2015 Artist in Residence at BAX, and has received residencies through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Mount Tremper Arts, Rockbridge Artist’s Exchange, the Bushwick Starr, the Dragon’s Egg, Abrons Arts Center, and La Mama, ETC.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance A; Ballet Practices; Ballet Practices, Continued

LINKS:
http://www.ballez.org/press-media/

Stacy Matthew Spence is a New York City based choreographer, dancer, and teacher. He was born in Lake Charles, LA. and received an M.F.A. from Tisch School of the Arts. Stacy’s choreography has been commissioned by The High Line, Vega as North Star (El Norte es Sur) 2019 with visual artist Ronny Quevedo; Danspace Project, This home is us 2017, and Eden as we recall 2012; Tisch School of the Arts, among the scapes and fields 2009; Edge at London Contemporary Dance School, I just wanted to be close to you 2006; The University of New Mexico, Adjusted Space 2007; and the OtherShore Dance Company, small earthquakes along the way 2008. His work has been included in Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Platform 2012: Parallels for Danspace Project, and in co/motion directed by Margeret Peak as part of Jason Moran’s Whitney Biennial: Bleed. As well Stacy has performed at The Museum of Modern Art, NY in Deborah Hay’s Blues, as part of Ralph Lemon’s One Fine Day ; and in Polly Motley and Molly Davies’ Critical State at The Helen Day Arts Center, VT.

He has received grants and residencies that include Movement Research Parent Residency 2020, Workspace Artist-in-Residence, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council NY; Manhattan Community Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY; New York Live Arts Studio Series Residency; Artist Residency at Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, France; Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.

Stacy danced with The Trisha Brown Dance Company from 1997-2006, and he continues to be involved with the company through teaching and the re-staging of Trisha's work. He has also taught nationally and internationally at institutions such as The New School, Barnard College, Tisch School of the Arts, Manhattan Marymount College, London Contemporary Dance School, Centre National de Danse Contemporaine, and Movement Research. Currently, Stacy is on faculty at The New School in New York City, working on a re staging project at Juilliard and is the Educational Director for Trisha Brown Dance Company.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contemporary Dance Practices and Performance with Juliette Mapp and Stacy Spence (2021 Lang Summer Dance Intensive)
Contemporary Dance Practices, Continued
Performance

Rebecca Stenn, dancer, choreographer, educator, writer, painter has been hailed in The New York Times as an artist who possesses “wit, concision and gutsy passion.” Stenn’s acclaimed group, Rebecca Stenn Company, has performed in over 50 cities, including such venues as The Copenhagen Festival, The Edinburgh Festival, The Joyce Theater, BAM Fisher, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, The International Festival of Arts and Ideas, The Annenberg Center and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival among others. The company has received support from the NEA, NYSCA, The Joyce Theater Foundation and The American Music Center. As a principal dancer with MOMIX, Stenn performed in over 30 countries, appeared as a featured performer in films for Italian, Spanish and French television and assisted in the choreography of and performed in productions at the Munich Stats Opera and the Emmy Award Winning PBS special Pictures at an Exhibition. Stenn is a founding member of the duet company Pilobolus Too, with whom she toured throughout the world, creating and performing numerous works for the repertoire. She has written as a contributing editor for Dancemagazine, has worked for The National Young Arts Foundation choreographing numerous seasons at The Kennedy Center, and has acted as Dance Mentor for the Open Stages program through TDF. Stenn is currently on faculty at The New School and Princeton University and is Choreographer-in-Residence at Dartmouth College. Recent projects include the choreography for the new multi-media opera Cracked Orlando at the Juilliard School, a production of Stravinsky’s Petrushka in collaboration with choreographer John Heginbotham and the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra and the completion of the Elusive Bird Trilogy at the Gowanus Loft. The book she co-authored, A Life in Dance: A Practical Guide, was released summer of 2017. Stenn most recently exhibited her paintings in the show Lyrical Narratives and Abstractions at Agora Gallery in Chelsea, where she is on the roster of represented artists. She holds a BFA from The Juilliard School and MFA from The University of Wisconsin.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Choreographic Research, Continued
Dance Making
I Have a Dream: Harlem Dance and Education
Performance Workshop
Practical Side of Performance

LINKS:
www.rebeccastenncompany.com
Articles about Rebecca:
Chelsea Choreographers Confront the Pandemic, in the Country and on Zoom
Shifting Course During The Pandemic: Rebecca Stenn, Contemporary Choreographer and Dancer, Turns to Painting
Artist Profile #157, Life as a Modern Dancer
Dance Enthusiast
Huffington Post
Redfern Art Center
Reviews:
New York Times
Dance Informa 

Sasha Welsh is a choreographer, dancer and educator whose work explores states of awareness, memory and imagination, and the limitations and possibilities of the human body.

As an educator, Sasha is passionate about teaching anatomy, somatics and dance conditioning in innovative ways that empower the next generation of dancers to move beyond the limitations of the current paradigm. She has studied anatomy and neuromuscular preparation for dance with Irene Dowd since 2005, and has participated in Dowd’s choreographic teachings as an assistant/demonstrator for Spirals, Volutes, The Dynamic Trunk, Orbits, and The Turnout Dance.  She has taught at the University of the Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, DeSales University, Temple University, Swarthmore College and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX).

Sasha's choreography has been performed in venues such as Movement Research at the Judson Church, Fridays at Noon at the 92nd Street Y, Dance Conversations at the Flea, Dixon Place, Performance Mix at Joyce Soho, AUNTS, the INOVA galleries (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, and Studio 303 (Montreal). As a performer, Sasha has most recently collaborated with Siri Peterson and Deborah Black, and performed for Laurie Berg and Megan Byrne in New York. She also traveled to Japan to collaborate and improvise with Noriko Kato at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center.

Sasha earned her MFA at Temple University and her BA at Swarthmore College, received a Professional Diploma in Dance Studies from the Laban Centre in London, and is a fully certified Pilates instructor with more than ten years of teaching experience.

For six years, Sasha also hosted a performance salon known as Ulla's House in her Brooklyn apartment. Ulla’s House was an under-the-radar laboratory venue/event that encouraged true risk-taking and supported the development of experimental new projects and ideas. Ulla’s House supported the work of over 70 performing artists in various stages of their careers.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Experiential Anatomy

Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and dancer born in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He started his professional career as a dancer for the DAMA, a traditional African dance company. In 1993, he founded his own Burkina Faso-based troupe, Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dances with western contemporary dance. Mr. Badolo has danced with world-renowned contemporary African dance company Salia ni Seydou, worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier, and performed with the National Ballet of Burkina. He and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the widely-screened film Movement (R)evolution Africa which documents the continent’s emergent experimental dance scene. Since moving to New York in 2009, Badolo has created a number of projects commissioned and presented by Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, 92Y, the Museum of Art & Design, and the sprawling River to River Festival (R2R). He has collaborated with nora chipaumire, Ralph Lemon, Reggie Wilson, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women. He was the Harkness Foundation Artist-in-Residence at BAM Fisher and was commissioned by BAM to create Yimbégré, an evening-length work for presentation in the 2015 Next Wave Festival. Yimbégré will be presented at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, August 24-28, 2016. He is teaching at Bennington in spring 2016.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Souleymane Badolo Repertory: A New Voice in African Dance

LINKS:
Time Out NY / Souleymane Badolo Talks Politics, Faith and His New Dance Work Yimbégré
New York Times / In Badolo's Yimbégré, Men Jesting and Ranting
New York Times / Souleymane Badolo at The River to River Festival
Financial Times / James Brown: Get on The Good Foot
New York Times / The Apollo Presents James Brown: Get on The Good Foot
 

Ivy Baldwin is a NY-based choreographer and founder of Ivy Baldwin Dance. Current projects include a site-specific work, Keen (Part 1), commissioned by and presented at the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, CT in May 2016 and Keen (Part 2), a new work commissioned by the Abrons Arts Center, Chocolate Factory, and the Joyce to premiere in 2017 at Abrons Arts Center. Since 1999, her work has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research, Dixon Place, Dance New Amsterdam, Barnard College, and The Wooden Floor. Ivy Baldwin Dance has also been presented by Tanz im August Festival (Germany), Dans Contemporan Festival (Romania), Lincoln Center Out of Doors, New Museum, P.S 122, Danspace Project, La MaMa, E.T.C., Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and Appel Farm Performing Arts Center, among others. Baldwin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and is the recipient of two Bogliasco Foundation Fellowships. She has been an artist-in-residence with BAM, Movement Research, Sugar Salon, Abrons Arts Center, and ArtistNe(s)t in Romania, and her work has been supported by residencies through the Abrons Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Kaatsbaan International Dance Center. Baldwin has received funding from the Jerome Foundation, William and Karen Tell Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, NYFA BUILD, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Dugas Family Foundation. Baldwin has been on faculty at The New School, Barnard College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, Long Island University, and North Carolina School of the Arts, and is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts (MFA) and North Carolina School of the Arts (BFA).

COURSES TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

J. Bouey is out here doing their best, damnit! Currently moving on pandemic timing and prioritizing rest, J. is finding their way back to joy. J. is the founder of The Dance Union Podcast, a recent 2021-2022 Jerome Fellow, and is a current Movement Research Artist in Residence. J. Bouey was most recently a Gibney Spotlight artist, Artist-In-Residence at CPR – Center for Performance Research, and 2021 Bogliasco Fellow. J. was also a 2018 Movement Research Van Lier Fellow, and former dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. Determined to manifest the dreams dreamt in their youth, J. is assuming this responsibility because these dreams sustained them when the sun didn’t shine or shined too bright to see.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Trio of Contemporary Dance Practices

LINKS:
Most Recent Performance
Most Recent Digital Project
Waacking/Punking History

Michelle Boulé is a choreographer, performer, teacher and Certified BodyTalk practitioner based in New York.  Her work has been shown at American Realness, ISSUE Project Room (Emerging Artist Commission), Mount Tremper Arts Festival, Dance and Process at The Kitchen, Movement Research at Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, Catch Performance Series, Food for Thought at Danspace Project, and at Gertrudes iealis teatris in Latvia. She is currently continuing work on a trio commissioned by Danspace Project that will premiere in April 2015. A short site-specific iteration was shown at ‘Come Together: Surviving Sandy’, a 100,000-square-foot art show at Industry City. Her collaborative duo with composer/cellist Okkyung Lee was most recently featured as the closing set for (((send + receive))) festival in Winnipeg, Canada, and has also been shown at The Stone and as part of ISSUE Project Room’s 10th Anniversary Season in 2013. Boulé has been a choreographic assistant and performance coach for Deborah Hay solo adaptations, including an adaptation presented by El Auditorio in Tenerife, Spain. She has also choreographed works for the Latvian Academy of Culture, University of Oregon, and University of Illinois. Her choreography has received support from the Boekelheide Award, Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants and Brooklyn Arts Exchange Space Grant. She is a 2015-16 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Extended Life Artist-in-Residence, and she has also had residencies at Movement Research (2012-14), DanceHouse in Dublin, Ireland (2010), and at SKITE in Caen, France (2010). In 2002, she was a DanceWeb scholarship recipient at Impulstanz in Vienna.  As a performer, she has collaborated with Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People since 2001, receiving a New York Dance and Performance Award “Bessie” for her performance as James Dean and collaboration in the creation of “Last Meadow.” Other artists she has worked with include John Jasperse, John Scott, Deborah Hay (William Forsythe commission “If I Sing to You”), David Wampach, Donna Uchizono, Neal Medlyn, Christine Elmo, Neal Beasley, Beth Gill, Judith Sanchez-Ruiz, Doug Varone (Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Opera Colorado), Gabriel Masson, and playwright/director Rosie Goldensohn. She is part of the teaching faculty at The New School and at Movement Research in New York.  She has also been faculty at Hollins University and the University of Illinois, as well as a guest teacher at dance institutions in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.  She received her B.F.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contemporary Dance Practices
Moving with Somatics
Performance 

Website:
www.michelleboule.com/

Lacina Coulibaly was born in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. His professional dance career, deeply rooted in traditional African dances, later merged with contemporary influences to create a uniquely African choreographic expression.

In 1995, Lacina created the Cie Kongo Bâ Teria with Souleymane Badolo and Ousseni Sako. One of their Vin Nem (2001) toured the world and won international awards .Vin Nem toured more than 30 cities in Europe in 2002 and throughout the United States in 2004 on the Movement (R)Evolution tour. Coulibaly is a featured artist in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa, on the emergent experimental African dance scene. Lacina has toured in Africa, Europe and the US collaborated and worked with Nora Chipuamire, Kota Yamakazi, Emily Coates, Daria Fain, Wendy Jehlen, Salia ni Seydou, Faso Danse Theatre etc. He has taught in faculty and worked as well with universities like Brown University, Yale University, University of Florida, Cornell University, New School, UCLA, Sarah Lawrence and so on.

Coulibaly’s unique blend of traditional and modern influences results in dynamic intellectual and artistic processes that intrigue and inspire young artists, and audiences. Lacina’s choreography often provokes questions of the (dis)integration of the traditional and the contemporary. He is Co-founder/director of Compagnie Siniyasigui.

COURSES TAUGHT:
West African Dance Practices

Faye Driscoll is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director whose work is rooted in an obsession with the problem of being “somebody” in a world of other “somebodies.” She began making her own work in 2005, aiming to create immersive worlds of perceptual disorientation, where awkward virtuosic bodies teeter on the edge of high art and slapstick. These investigations gave rise to a wide range of works including: LONELINESS (2006), WOW MOM, WOW (2007), 837 VENICE BOULEVARD (2008, Bessie Award), THERE IS SO MUCH MAD IN ME (2010), YOU’RE ME (2012), and THANK YOU FOR COMING: ATTENDANCE (2014), the first in a series of works that propose performance as a shared political act, where performer and audience co-create reality. Driscoll is creating the second piece, THANK YOU FOR COMING: PLAY, which focuses on the consumption and fabrication of stories to make our lives cohere.  It premieres at Wexner Center for the Arts in September 2016 and at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in November 2016. Her work has been presented across the country at places such as Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, ICA/Boston, Danspace Project, and American Dance Festival, and internationally in Argentina, France, and Croatia.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance

LINKS:
www.fayedriscoll.com

photo © Ann Hamilton, ONEEVERYONE • Faye

Jeanine Durning is a dance artist working at the intersection of choreography and performance, creating solo and group works since 1998. Her current research is based on a practice she developed called nonstopping and has manifested as two companion works based on nonstop moving and nonstop speaking: To Being and inging. Durning has received numerous awards in support of her work, including a New York Foundation for the Arts award and the Alpert Award for Choreography, and has been a Movement Research Artist in Residence (2013-2015) and a Gibney Dance DiP Resident. Durning has a dedicated teaching practice, and has taught throughout NYC, across the US and in Europe. She has been commissioned to create original work, and since 2002 has created over twenty works for companies, performers, and institutions, including most recently for Toronto Dance Theatre. As a performer, Jeanine has collaborated with many choreographers of diverse creative concerns and priorities. Since 2005, Durning has worked on and off with choreographer Deborah Hay in the capacities of performer, choreographic assistant, coach, and most recently, from 2011-2013, as consultant to the Motion Bank (a project of the Forsythe Company), on Ms. Hay’s choreographic and scoring practices.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

LINKS:
www.jeaninedurning.com
Articles on inging:
Movement Research / Critical Correspondence
New Yorker / The Sheer Power of Talking Incessantly
Walker Art Center Blog / Jeanine Durning - What are words for
Recent interviews:
blue ceiling dancer Blog
Reviews on To Being:
Brooklyn Rail / Pushing Past Ourselves
New York Times / Jeanine Durning's To Being

 

Keely Garfield has been hailed in The New York Times as an artist “working at the height of her powers”, and her work has been described as, “Resonantly individual, defiantly uncategorizable, an emanation of things deep within”, Garfield’s acclaimed company, KeelyGarfield Dance has been widely presented at many theaters and festivals both nationally and internationally, and garnered four New York Dance and Performance Awards a.k.a. Bessies. Alongside her choreographies for KGD, the British-born choreographer, dancer, teacher, and curator has created work for ballet dancers, antique puppets, musical theater, children, students, and MTV.  Highlights include: Deep (The Joyce Theater),Disturbing The Peace (Zenon Dance Company, MN), Iron Lung (Groundworks Dancetheater, OH), and Disturbulance (Dance Theater Workshop),Scent of Mental Love (A film for Radio Bremen/Canal Arte), Limerence, Twin Pines & WOW (Danspace Project), Telling The Bees (The Chocolate Factory).  Her latest work, Pow, will premiere at The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival in February 2016.  Additionally, Keely holds an MFA in choreography and has been on the faculty at many colleges and universities, is an E-RYT 500 yoga teacher and a Urban Zen Integrative Therapist (UZIT) working in oncology and hospice, and specializes in wellness for dancers.   Keely has taught before in the Lang Dance program, creating a repertory work, Heartwood, in 2010 and teaching Choreographic Research Continued in Fall 2012.

COURSES TAUGHT: 
Choreographic Research Continued
Advanced Performance
Performance Workshop

LINKS: 
Dance Up Close: Keely Garfield on What is Dance in 2015?
Telling the Bees (2013)
Heartwood - Keely's work for Lang Dance students, Spring 2010

Gerard & Kelly (Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) have collaborated since 2003 to create project-based installations and performances interrogating the formation of the couple and the critical potential of intimacy. Driven by an inquiry of their own partnership, the duo uses choreography, video, and sculpture to address questions of sexuality, memory and the formation of queer consciousness. Their work has been exhibited internationally at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; and The Kitchen, New York, among other institutions. Their ongoing performance series Modern Living, in collaboration with L.A. Dance Project, was recently presented by The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, in association with Art Production Fund. Gerard & Kelly have received numerous recognitions for their work, including the New England Foundation for the Arts (2015), Art Matters grant (2014), and the 2014 Juried Award from the New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessies. Gerard & Kelly completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2010, and received their MFAs in 2013 from the Interdisciplinary Studio in the UCLA Department of Art. 

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performing Genders

LINKS:
www.gerardandkelly.com

Beth Gill is a choreographer based in New York City since 2005. Combining experimental and traditional approaches, she makes formal and exacting works centered around acts of obsession and transformation. Gill is the proud recipient of multiple awards: Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art and two “Bessies”. At 40 years old she has produced six commissioned evening length works met with critical acclaim. She has toured nationally and internationally and been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Choreographic Research, Continued
Guest Artist Residency
Performance

LINKS: 
Beth’s website

Miguel Gutierrez lives in Brooklyn and makes performances. His most recent work is the Age & Beauty series, a meditation on queerness, artmaking and middle age that has been presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, American Realness, CounterPulse, Festival Transameriques, Kampnagel, the Fisher Center for the Arts at Bard College, New York Live Arts, Crossing the Line Festival, Luminaria/San Antonio Museum of Art, Centre National de Danse and Centre Pompidou. His work has received support from MAP Fund, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation and Creative Capital, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, United States Artists, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Lambent Foundation. He has choreographed music videos for Diane Cluck, Holcombe Waller and Le Tigre, has released two albums as The Belleville, and has sung with Antony and the Johnsons, My Robot Friend, Justin Vivian Bond and Nick Hallett. His book WHEN YOU RISE UP is available from 53rd State Press. He writes a blog at Stargayze.com and several of his other writings are accessible via his website. He invented DEEP AEROBICS, and he is a Feldenkrais Method practitioner.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Choreographic Research Continued

LINKS:
www.miguelgutierrez.org

Patricia Hoffbauer, a Brazilian-born New York-based dance artist, has been making performance work since the late 1980s. Her piece “Para-Dice” was presented by Danspace Project in 2010 & 2013. She was a 2015 Gibney Dance Center DIP artist and her “Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People” premiered in September of 2015 on four of the Center’s studios simultaneously with 14 performers. She has taught at Hunter College and Princeton University’s Lewis Art Center, among other schools, and is now fulltime assistant professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Art’s Open Arts Program. This year she is a Movement Research Artist in Residency. Her writings have appeared at The New Museum book “New Visions,” edited by Ella Shohat and Coco Fusco; “writings on Dance,” Movement Research Performance Journal, and PAJ. She isa contributing writer to the upcoming “Bodies as Archive” book by the Pew foundation. Hoffbauer curated an evening of the “Judson at 50 Platform” at Danspace Project. She is a founding member of Yvonne Rainer’s “Raindears” and has been part of the creation of six original full-evening pieces by Yvonne Rainer.  Hoffbauer’s new project “Getting Away with Murder” had its first iteration at Gibney Dance Center this past May, was shown at Weisacres and will be presented by La MaMa on in June 2017.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

K.J. Holmes, a Brooklyn based danceartist/actor/singer/writer, travels nationally and internationally teaching/performing/creating. K.J. has been exploring improvisation as process and performance since 1981. She has collaborated extensively with Julie Carr, Simone Fort, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson and Image Lab, Steve Paxton; has performed in the work of Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Xavier Le Roy, Lance Gries, Mark Dendy, Melinda Ring, Karinne Keithley Syers, among many others; was cast in Matthew Barney’s new film Redoubt; collaborates with drummer Jeremy Carlstedt in L.I.P. (Love Is Power, MLKjr.); teaches at NYU/ETW, The Juilliard School, Sarah Lawrence College and Movement Research; studies include Body Mind Centering(r)(1995-99 certification program, William Esper Studio (Meisner acting with master teacher Terry Knickerbocker, 208-2009),Satya Yoga (with Sondra Loring, 2006-07, Ayurveda’s World (2016-17) and continues to study voice with the coaching of Richard Armstrong. K.J. is currently devising a new piece titled 900 Bees Are Humming, a multi disciplinary work exploring life, death and transformation. Her work has been presented by many venues including The Chocolate Factory, PS122, Danspace Project, Mana Contemporary Chicago, The Belfry, Chashama, Dixon Place.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contact Improvisation Practices
Trio of Contemporary Dance Practices

Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York City, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a Bessie Award for their piece Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders. He also revived THEM, his 1985 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane for which he was awarded his second Bessie Award. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels and Platform 2016: Lost and Found, both at Danspace Project. He is a recipient of the 2016 Herb Alpert, a 2015 Doris Duke Impact and a 2013 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artists Awards.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance A
Lang at Judson
Guest Artist Residency (Spring 2017)

LINKS:
Artforum: Danspace Project to Launch Largest Curatorial Program in its History July 2016
New York Times: IHJ Interview about Platform 2012: Parallels
Artforum: IHJ, 500 Words about THEM, September 2010

John Jasperse has been working as a dance artist in New York City since graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1985.  He founded John Jasperse Company, later renamed John Jasperse Projects, in 1989 and has since created 17 evening-length works through this non-profit structure as well as numerous commissions for other companies including Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Batsheva Dance Company, and Lyon Opera Ballet. John Jasperse Projects has been presented in 24 US cities and 29 countries by presenters including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, American Dance Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, Dance Umbrella London, Montpellier Danse, and Tanz im August Berlin.  He is the recipient of a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award, two Bessie awards (in 2014 and 2001), and multiple fellowships from US Artists, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Tides/Lambent Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts in additional to numerous grants and awards for John Jasperse Projects.  He has been on the faculty and taught at many distinguished institutions nationally and internationally, including Hollins University MFA, UC Davis, Movement Research, PARTS (Brussels, Belgium), SEAD (Salzburg, Austria), Centre National de la Danse (Lyon, France), and Danscentrum (Stockholm, Sweden).  Jasperse is co-founder of CPR - Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, NY.  Jasperse was recently appointed as Director of Dance at Sarah Lawrence College beginning in Fall 2016.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Guest Artist Residency (2013) 

LINKS:
http://www.johnjasperse.org/

Jon Kinzel has presented his work, including numerous commissions and solo shows, in a variety of national and international venues. His critically praised solo Responsible Ballet (2009) premiered at the La MaMa Moves Festival followed by, Responsible Ballet and What We Need Is a Bench to Put Books On (2010), a multigenerational ensemble piece produced by The Kitchen and completed with a Movement Research Artist In Residence grant (2009-2011), and a Martha Duffy Memorial Fellowship at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (2009-10); Someone Once Called Me A Sound Man (2013) at The Chocolate Factory (received Best of 2013 in Artforum); hurry (2013) at Danspace Project, co-created with Jean Butler; The Generalist (2013) at the Dublin Dance Festival; Provision Provision (2015) at La MaMa; COWHAND CON MAN (2015) at Gibney Dance/Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center; Atlantic Terminus (2016) at The Invisible Dog; and a collaboration with Tillett Lighting Design and OHNY. He has received support from the Harkness, Puffin, and Mertz Gilmore foundations, and was given The 2012 Artist Award from the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Recent residencies include Gibney Dance Center, The Yard, and New York Live Arts. He curated DoublePlus in 2014 and the Movement Research Festival in 2010, and, his visual art has been featured in publications such as SCHIZM Magazine and the MR Performance Journal. He was a Movement Dramaturg for John Kelly’s Time No Line (2016), and Patricia Hoffbauer’s Getting Away with Murder (2017). As a director, collaborator, improvisor, and or performer he’s worked with Jodi Melnick, Vicky Shick, Cathy Weis, Jennifer Miller, Nicolas Dumit Estevez and Luis Lara Malvacias, Seline Baumgartner, Enrico Wey, Emily Coates, Jeremy Nelson, Creach/Koester, John Jasperse, Shelly Mars, Lance Gries, KJ Holmes, OtherShore Dance Co, Susan Braham, Jennifer Monson, Yoshiko Chuma, Sally Silvers, Michael Whaites, Susan Sgorbati, Keith Thompson, Cydney Wilkes, Jeanine Durning, Sandra Burton, Mike Taylor, Matthew Barney in the film series The Cremaster Cycle at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Rachid Ouramdane as a guest soloist at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, Susan Rethorst in the revival of Beau Regard at Danspace Project, John Kelly in the revival of Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, an Obie Award-winning production, and in Moondrunk presented by Lincoln Center; and with composers Vivian Stoll, Jonathan Bepler, Nora Laudani, and Jim Dawson, visual artists Bob Ajar, Neil Goldberg, Corban Walker, Jarrod Beck, and Nina Katan, and designers Cynthia Rowley, and Liz Collins. He has taught at Barnard College, New York University’s Experimental Theater Wing, Yale University, George Washington University, Amherst College, Vassar College, Emerson College, Dance House in Dublin, TsEKh in Moscow, and The Merce Cunningham Trust. He has been a frequent guest critic in both graduate and undergraduate programs at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and ITP/Interactive Telecommunications Program. This has involved looking at how to apply computational thinking to the craft of choreography, among other cross-disciplinary queries. Currently, he is on the faculty of Lincoln Center Education, and Movement Research.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contemporary Dance Practices, Continued

Joanna Kotze received the 2013 “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer. Her choreography has been presented at Baryshnikov Arts Center, American Dance Institute, Danspace Project, Bard College, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, NYLA Studio Series, DNA, MR at Judson, Roulette, and other venues and galleries, and in Canada at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. She has had commissions from Toronto Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury, Zenon Dance and James Sewell Ballet and has created works on students at The New School, Barnard, Purchase, Southern Utah University and Miami University (OH). Joanna has received support from the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation, Jerome Foundation, NYFA BUILD, Brooklyn Arts Council, Yellowhouse, and the FCA Emergency Grant. She was a 2013-2015 Movement Research AIR and a 2014 Process Space resident at LMCC. She has had residencies at the Camargo Foundation, Jacob’s Pillow, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Djerassi and the Bogliasco Foundation. She danced with Wally Cardona from 2000-2010 and has worked closely with Kimberly Bartosik, Netta Yerushalmy and Sam Kim. Joanna is also on faculty at Movement Research and Gibney Dance and has taught at NYU’s Tisch, The New School, LIU and ADF. She has studied Klein technique with Barbara Mahler since 2003, is originally from South Africa and has a BA in Architecture from Miami University.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

LINKS:
www.joannakotze.com

Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith have been making experimental dances in New York since 2006. Their work is unique in that it is an equal collaboration between the two choreographers, always performed by Molly and Eleanor. Body Comes Apart, their latest work, premiered March 6-9th at New York Live Arts and was documented by the New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division. It will be remounted at New York Live Arts in January 2020 through Live Artery. Recent works include: Basketball (PS122 and Baryshnikov Arts Center for COIL 2017), Rude World (PS122 and The Chocolate Factory Theater for COIL 2015), Tulip (Roulette, 2013; Judson Now at Danspace Project, 2012), and Beautiful Bone (The Chocolate Factory Theater, 2012).

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance

LINKS:
https://www.mollyandeleanor.com/

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a dance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from The College at Brockport and grew up in Albany, NY. He has collaborated with and performed for Beth Gill, Netta Yerushalmy, Jonathan Gonzalez, Tere O’Connor, Karl Rogers, David Dorfman Dance, Ambika Raina, Catherine Galasso, Monica Bill Barnes, Tammy Carrasco, and Joanna Kotze.

His teaching practice has brought him to The American Dance Festival, Rutgers University, New York University, University of the Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, Pageant and Mark Morris Dance Center. His work has been produced by: New York Live Arts, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Danspace Project's Draftwork Series, BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church and The Center for Performance Research.

He received the 2021-23 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, was selected as a 2019 Center for Performance Research Artist in Residence, and was a 2019-21 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Performance & Residency Program recipient. Most recently, he was listed on Dance Magazine’s 2023 ‘25 to Watch’ list, and was nominated for two NY Dance & Performance Bessie Awards.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance Workshop

LINKS:
Jordan’s website

Born and raised in California, Deborah Lohse is a choreographer/performer living and working in New York City. Her work has been presented in theaters, public spaces and festivals across the U.S. and Mexico including Dancenow NYC at Joe’s Pub, American Dance Festival, Chicago Contemporary Circus Festival, La Mama Moves, United Solo Theater Festival and the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place. She has received commissions from New Chamber Ballet, Women In Motion, Mantra Percussion, Dancenow NYC, Island Moving Company  and SUNY Purchase as well as artist residencies from The Yard, Marble House Project, Acadia Summer Arts Program, Djerassi Resident Artist Program and SILO. As a performer, Lohse has worked with Joe Goode, Kevin Wynn, Michael Preston, Barbara Karger, Anne Kauffman, Susanne Bocanegra, Monica Bill Barnes and currently dances with Doug Elkins, The Bang Group, Ballez, Cori Olinghouse and LMnO3. Lohse has a BA in Dance as well as a BA in Theater from the University of California.

COURSES TAUGHT: 
Introduction to Ballet Practices

LINKS:
www.deborahlohse.com

top photo credit: Jordan Matter
bottom photo credit: Elyssa Goodman

Nia Love. Choreographer, dancer, instillation artist, activist, mother, grandmother, warrior and educator, continues to expand and destabilize conversations on intersectionality, transnationalism, Blackness and tools of embodied memory.

At the very early part of her career, Love was invited to apprentice with the world renowned Ballet Nacional de Cuba in Havana, Cuba ('78). She is a graduate of Howard University with a BFA and an MFA from Florida State University, with honors and distinctions for her academic and artistic excellence.  Love worked in Japan with Min Tanka, one of the most celebrated Butoh masters on his Poe Project, written and conceived by Susan Sontag. In 2001, Nia was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship (2001-2003) as a lecturer/researcher in Ghana, Mali and Togo. Her own work has been presented at Black Choreographers Moving Towards the 21st Century, Bates Dance Festival, Alvin Ailey under the NDCL as the 2013 choreographer awardee, Harlem Stage, Tanzanian- Time 2 Dance Festival in conjunction with the Suitcase Fund and many others.

Love Teaches, performs and guest lectures at some of the most distinguished art and educational institutions and festivals throughout the USA and abroad, including American Dance Festival, Fordham/Ailey BFA, Texas Woman's University, Princeton, Hunter College, NYU Tish School of The Arts, Visa2Dance- Dar Es Salaam- Tanzanian Dance Festival, Williams College, Smith College, Sarah Lawrence College, Florida A&M, Florida State University, Columbia University, Barnard College, the University of Ghana at Legon. Love continues to perform, create work, teach and research nationally and internationally. Her Newly investigated and performed project entitled S(oil) was made possible, in part, by the Africa and Middle East Cultural Partnerships Program of the Suitcase Fund, an initiative of New York Live Arts and most recently a CUNY Dance Initative Grant (CDI-'14). She was most recently awarded the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence (2015-2016).

Love's continues to explore the power of femenisim, the BLM movement, critical construction through racical theory, gesture and semiotics as a way to expand her own personhood and cultural acuity. 

COURSES TAUGHT:
Introduction to Contemporary Dance Practices
Contemporary Dance Practices, Continued
Dance Without Walls
Performance

Website:
www.nia-love.com

Melanie Maar is a New York based dance artist from Vienna Austria. Her work grows out of improvising and exploring intimacy between movement and sound, energy and material, animalism and humanism, feminism and objectism, the personal and the communal, resonance and struggle within changing contexts.

Maar was awarded the 2015 Grant to Artists of The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, has been a Movement Research Artist in Residence and a Kitchen Works in Process artist. Her choreographies have been commissioned by venues like Danspace Project, Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, as well as Laboratory Arte Alameda Mexico, Impuls Tanz, Vienna and Tanzfabrik Berlin.

She is collaborating with sound artists Christian Schröder, Kenta Nagai, the performance collective Masters of Ceremony and within composer Anthony Braxton’s Pine Top Aerial Project. She co-curated the 2013 Moving Sounds Festival for The Austrian Cultural Forum NY and the Movement Research Festival 2010. In New York Maar has performed for and studied with artists like luciana achugar, RoseAnne Spradlin, Janet Panetta, Daria Fain, Walter Dundervill and Luis Lara Malvacias. She is faculty at Movement Research and teaches and mentors internationally, recently at Laboratorio Somático Escénico Mexico, The Danish National Dance School, Pieter L.A., and Tanzhotel Vienna.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Improvisation in Art and Physical Practice

Diane Madden is a performer, choreographer, director and teacher based in NYC. Currently Associate Artistic Director of the Trisha Brown Company, she has contributed to the creation and performance of Trisha Brown’s work since 1980. She performs, teaches and lectures with the company and curates the work for site-specific programs. Through the talents of dancers both within the company and from internationally known schools and companies, she enjoys keeping Brown’s rich range of choreography alive on stages and alternative sites worldwide. Madden has developed an approach to teaching dance that weaves anatomically grounded technique with improvisation, composition and performance skills. Her students range from dance artist professionals, through college students to artists from other disciplines including actors, singers, visual artists and composers. She has been a visiting teacher at P.A.R.T.S., Brussels, BE since 2007. Madden has presented her solo and collaborative choreography abroad and at home, most recently in “Sundays on Broadway” at WeisAcres, December 2017. In August 2018 she returns to Mahler and LeWitt Studios, Spoleto, IT to collaborate with filmmaker Matthew Burdis. The resulting work will be screened at “Sundays on Broadway” October 2018. Madden has had the pleasure of working with choreographers Jerome Bel, Polly Motley, Lance Gries, Vicky Shick, Juliette Mapp and Cathy Weis. Since 2006, Madden has been greatly influenced by her study and practice of Aikido with Fuminori Onuma. The Princess Grace Foundation has recognized Madden with two awards, in 1986 and again in 1994 for sustained achievement. She also received a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) in 1989. In 2012 NYC’s Movement Research honored her, along with the original cast, for Brown’s Set and Reset (1983) collaboration with Rauschenberg and Laurie Anderson.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contemporary Dance Practices

Images © Tim Smyth

Kyle Marshall is a choreographer, performer, teacher and artistic director of Kyle Marshall Choreography (KMC), a dance company that sees the dancing body as a container of history, an igniter of social reform and a site of celebration. Since inception in 2014, KMC has performed at venues including: Chelsea Factory, BAM Next Wave Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Actors Fund Arts Center, NJPAC, Little Island, and Roulette. Kyle has received choreographic and dance film commissions from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, "Dance on the Lawn", Montclair's Dance Festival, Harlem Stage and THE SHED.

Kyle is a recipient of a 2020 Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award and 2018 NYJuried “Bessie” Award. As a teacher, Kyle has conducted masterclasses, creative workshops, set choreography at schools including; ADF, Rutgers University, Ailey/Fordham University, Sarah Lawerence College, County Prep High School, and Bloomfield College. He is currently a Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence at Princeton University and is in residence at the Center for Ballet and Arts at NYU. Additional residencies for KMC include MANA Contemporary, 92nd st Y, CPR, and Jamaica Performing Arts Center. Kyle dances with the Trisha Brown Dance Company and has also worked with doug elkins choreography etc and Tiffany Mills. Kyle graduated from Rutgers University with a BFA in Dance and resides in Jersey City.

COURSE TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

Photo credit: Tony Turner
Hair + Makeup: Edo Tastic

Juliana F. May is a New York City native with a dual degree in Dance and Art History from Oberlin College. May first studied improvisation and composition for seven years with Laurie J. Roth at the Trevor Day School in NYC. Since 2002, May has created nine works, including seven evening-length pieces with commissions and presentations from The Chocolate Factory Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, Barnard College, The New School, Joyce SoHo, The International Contemporary Ensemble (I.C.E.), The American Realness Festival and The Repertory Project, a Cleveland-based company. May has received multiple residencies through The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, Gibney Dance Center, Dance Theater Workshop and Movement Research. May has received generous support from The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Map Fund and The Jerome Foundation. May also served as Dramaturge for Miguel Gutierrez’s And lose the name of action 2012. In April of 2012 New York Live Arts awarded May the inaugural Jeff Duncan award for early career choreographers. May holds an MFA in Choreography from the University Wisconsin in Milwaukee. May received a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography  as well as a 2016 Fellowship in Choreography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. 

COURSES TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

Originally from Zurich, Switzerland, Yvonne Meier has lived and worked in New York City since 1979, where she became a member of the original group around Performance Space 122, regularly collaborating with Ishmael Houston-Jones and many others in the US and Europe. Her work, spanning anywhere from big spectacles to quiet solos, has been supported by three Fellowships in Choreography from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Inter Arts, Franklin Furnace and Pro Helvetia. The American Master Piece program of the NEA has supported the upcoming recreation of her performance-instillation work, The Shining. She has received three “Bessie” Awards for her works The Shining (1993 and 2011) and Stolen (2009). She has twice been supported through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence program. Meier has been teaching Releasing Technique and Authentic Movement nationally and internationally for the last 30 years. After a life-long commitment to improvisation she has developed her own improvisation technique known as Scores. Meier also teaches children’s dance classes in NY Public Schools through Movement Research’s Dance Makers program.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance

A sense of becoming, or metamorphosis, permeates the works of performance and media artist Dean Moss. An interdisciplinary choreographer, and video maker, his practice investigates the experience of assimilation. He seeks, meditating the fluidity of self and the perception of other, pathways for the release of tension caused by the histories and abuses of power. These works manifest through transcultural, mixed media performance collaborations often incorporating audience participation. 

Past premieres include: johnbrown (2014), a work which used its presentation and pre-performance production to reflect not only on the controversial legacy of the white abolitionist but also the racial, gender and generational processes at play in the inquiry; Nameless forest (2011), a collaboration with Korean sculptor and installation artist Sungmyung Chun - referencing Chun’s imagery the performance investigated existential narratives while engaging the audience in experiential rites of passage; Kisaeng becomes you (2009), with Korean traditional and modern dance choreographer Yoon Jin Kim - where audience members were invited to embody the discipline and poetry of kisaeng - artist/courtesans of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty; and figures on a field (2005) with the visual artist Laylah Ali - featured embodied scenes based on her paintings, interrupted and dissected by a docent led audience tour of the performance.  Moss’ most recent premiere is titled Petra (2018). An autobiographical meditation on desire, the work examines race, sex, and power through the lens of service and unrequited love.

Moss is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography; the Doris Duke Impact Award in Theatre; a Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artists Grant; plus fellowships in Choreography and Multidisciplinary Works from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His performance concoctions have been presented by the New York Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Walker Art Center, and The Kitchen, among others. He was awarded a “Bessie” for his work Spooky action at a distance. In 2014 he conceived and developed, THE AWARD: a non-monetary mentoring initiative for experimental dance artists. 

Moss was the Curator of Dance and Performance at The Kitchen from 1999-2004 and a Curatorial Advisor until 2009. He has lectured internationally including at Tokyo University of the Arts, Kookmin University in Seoul, and for three years at Harvard University in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies for which he received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. More recently he was Resident Faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has recently joined the dance faculty at Princeton University. He is currently deepening his collaborative practice though compositional and conceptual facilitation, and visual design, with various artists.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Choreographic Research, Continued
Guest Artist Residency Spring 2020

Sarah Michelson’s work has been presented and commissioned by BAM, PS 122, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research, LMCC’s River to River Festival, The Walker Art Center, On the Boards, Chapter Arts (Cardiff, Wales); and has toured to Cutting Edge Festival, Frankfurt; Venice Biennale; SommerSzene, Salzburg; Tanz im August, Berlin; and Zuercher Theater Spektakel, Zurich, where she received the Der Foerder prize for best work at the festival.

She has created several evening-length works and modular works including R2R attempt 2 for LMCC’s River to River Festival (2016); For James Tyson for the Kitchen (2015); tournamento for the Walker Art Center (2015); 4 for The Whitney Museum of American Art (2014); Devotion Study #3 (work in progress) MoMA for the Some sweet day series curated by Ralph Lemon (2012); Not a Lecture/Performance Crossing the Line Festival, FIAF, Tinker Auditorium, New York (2012); Devotion Study #1, The American Dancer The Whitney Museum of American Art (2012); Devotion, which premiered at The Kitchen (2011) and toured to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, ODC Theater, San Francisco, and On the Boards, Seattle; Dover Beach, which premiered at Chapter Arts (Sept 2008) and The Kitchen (2009); DOGS (2006), commissioned by BAM; and Daylight, Daylight (for Seattle) and Daylight (for Minneapolis) (2005) commissioned by The Walker for the opening of the first season in the center's expanded building. Sarah has created commissioned works for Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project (2002); Lyon Opera Ballet (2005); Transitions Dance Co, Laban Center London (2006); and CanDoCo, London (2010).

Michelson was awarded two Bessies for choreography and one for Visual Design; a Doris Duke Artists Award, the 2012 Bucksbaum Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship 2009, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award 2008, the 2006 Alpert Award in Dance, a NYFA Fellowship; and support from Altria, Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, NYFA BUILD, Mid-Atlantic’s USAI, AMC Live Music for Dance, MAP Fund, the DNA Project, NEFA’s National Dance Project, NPN, Sophie and Leonard Davis Fund, Yellow House Fund, and Arts International.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Sarah Michelson Studio Practice (2013)
Choreographic Research, Continued (2014)
Guest Artist Residency (2015)

Eiko Otake is a choreographer, director, performer, teacher, and writer who, for over forty years, has partnered with Takashi Koma Otake as Eiko & Koma. To date, Eiko & Koma have created 46 interdisciplinary performance works on their own bodies, three pieces for other dancers, seven “media dances” (dances specially created for the camera), and seven video documentaries. From 2009 to 2012 Eiko & Koma presented a multi-venue, multi-faceted Retrospective Project that included creating new performance works, installations, exhibitions, and media works; restaging old works; presenting media showings, panels and lectures; as well as publishing a comprehensive monograph of their works. Eiko & Koma have received a MacArthur Fellowship (1996), the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004), the Dance Magazine Award (2006), and the first United States Artists Fellowship (2006). Eiko is a Founding Fellow of the Center for Creative Research and has taught at Wesleyan University. 

COURSES TAUGHT:
Guest Artist Residency: Private Body/Public Place
Delicious Movement: for Reflecting on Nakedness

LINKS:
www.eikoandkoma.org

Janet Panetta has been teaching professional ballet classes for contemporary dancers since 1973.  She currently works with P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels) and with Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wupperthal. In addition, she teaches at Impulstanz in Vienna  each summer.  She is the artistic director of International Dance Dialogues, a program that hosts many European artists workshops and lectures, and the recipient of the Martha Hill Dance Fund Mid-Career Achievement Award in 2008.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Ballet Practices, Continued

LINKS:
Janet Panetta Closes Studio but Doesn’t Sit Down. New York Times, December 10, 2010.
NYPL Oral History Project Interview with Janet Panetta

Jimena Paz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She’s currently developing a project on foreignness, co-created with Vicky Shick and Ralph Lemon that will premiere at the Chocolate Factory in April 2017. She has had the pleasure to work with Lance Gries, Vicky Shick, Susan Rethorst, the Stephen Petronio Company (‘99–‘06), Juliette Mapp, Constanza Macras (Germany), Iris Scaccheri (Argentina), Martha Clake, Liz Gerring, Antonio Ramos, Burt Barr, Sabrina Farji (Spain-Argentina), Virginie Yassef (France). 

A Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner, Jimena works on somatic approaches to dance. She is on faculty at Movement Research, The New School's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and teaches internationally. Her teaching activities in the past include, the American Dance Festival, Dance New Amsterdam, former Trisha Brown Studio, Movement Research, Barnard College, Princeton University, Tisch NYU, University of California Irvine, SEAD, Tanzquartier Wien and the Danish Conservatory for the Performing Arts.

She was Artist in Residence at and New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013/14), The Yard (2012) Movement Research (2007/09), Dance House (Ireland, 2009), DTW's Outer/Space creative residency (2008). She has shown work at venues including, Danspaceproject,  New York Live Arts, Jacob's Pillow, Dance New Amsterdam, Judson Church, 92nd Street YHMA, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, SUNY Purchase, Princeton University and Centro Cultural Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina).

She has an M.F.A. in Dance, Holllins University (2009). And is a Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner (2006).

COURSES TAUGHT: 
Introduction to Contemporary Dance Practices
Contemporary Dance Practices
Moving with Somatics

photos (top to bottom):
Rauschenberg Foundation; Anja Hitzenberger

Molly Poerstel is a dance artist whose choreographic works include:  Are we a Fossil, and of facings? (Gibney Dance, 2016), Stolen Grounds (Gibney DoublePlus, 2014), This Person is a Country (Nayang Fine Arts Academy, 2014), The Highlands (Food for Thought Dancespace Project, 2014), Hungry Ghost (Judson Memorial Church, 2013) and Do Beast (NYLA Fresh Tracks, 2012).

As a performer she has been active in the New York City dance community for the past sixteen years, and within this time she has worked with: Mark Jarecke, David Dorfman Dance Company (05-09) Susan Rethorst, Alex Escalante, Hilary Clark, Larissa Valez-Jackson, RoseAnne Spradlin and Jeanine During, among others.

Poerstel has studied anatomy with Irene Dowd,  Body Mind Centering, and various somatic practices, all of which influence her process as a dance maker and teacher. As a teaching artist, she has taught dance technique at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, SUNY Purchase Dance Conservatory, the Dalton School and the Nanyang Fine Arts Academy in Singapore.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contemporary Dance Practices
Movement Research Performance

LINKS: 
New York Times review of Are We a Fossil, and of facings?
Culturebot review
Infinitebody review

Kayvon Pourazar is of Persian origin, and spent his formative years in Iran, Trurkey & England. He has performed in the works of Juliana May, Juliette Mapp, Yasuko Yokoshi, Donna Uchizono, Gwen Welliver, Beth Gill, K.J. Holmes, John Jasperse, Doug Varone, Levi Gonzalez, Wil Swanson, Gabriel Masson, John Malashock, Jennifer Monson and Jodi Melnick. Kayvon's work has been shown in mixed-bill programs at The Kitchen, PS122, Roulette, Cunningham Studios, CPR, Catch, AUNTS and Dixon Place. In 2010 he received a Bessie Award for Performance. Pourazar graduated with a BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase in May 2000. He currently serves as Faculty member for Movement Research, has served as Adjunct Faculty at The New School and Bennington College and as guest artist teacher at Tsekh Russia and the Universities of Nebraska, Vermont, Maryland and Sacramento State. He is currently dancing in the works of Juliana May, Juliette Mapp, Levi Gonzalez and RoseAnne Spradlin. He has lived in New York City since 2000, navigating a rich landscape of artists and dancemakers as a dancer and collaborator. He teaches regularly, he occasionally ventures to make his own dances and spends much of his time exploring a self-guided, interoceptive somatic practice of his own.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Contemporary Dance Practices
Introduction to Contemporary Dance Practices

jess pretty is on a quest for pleasure that transcends time and the spaces she claims to reside in. within her research she choreographs, performs, collaborates with other artists (will rawls, katie workum, cynthia oliver, leslie cuyjet, dianne mcintyre, jennifer monson and niall jones) and has a teaching practice in new york city (as well as universities around the u.s.) where she moved after receiving an mfa in dance and queer studies from the university of illinois at urbana champaign. her free time is filled curating methodologies for living past survival through being as unapologetically black as possible.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance

Vicky Shick has been involved in the New York Dance Community for four decades. She has been making dances since the late eighties, collaborating with various performers, artists and sound designers. For six years she was a member of the Trisha Brown Company and has staged several of Brown’s pieces at colleges, companies and festivals. She has also performed with many other choreographers and created student pieces at several universities, most recently at Yale. In the NYC area, she teaches mostly at Movement Research, for the Trisha Brown Company, and for 15 years at Hunter College. She has taught internationally including in her hometown, Budapest. Just before the pandemic, she returned from a teaching /work-making residency in San Francisco at Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab. She was a two-time Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a two-time Bessie recipient, a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a DiP grantee at Gibney Dance Center.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Moving with Somatics
Susan Rethorst Restaging Project
2022 Guest Artist Residency

Sally Silvers is a Guggenheim Foundation and “Bessie” award-winning choreographer who has been making work since the 1980’s. She has an on-going fascination with the poetic as well as the social meanings of movement – to offer a no-holds-barred exploration of movement possibilities often tilted toward the awkward and unexpected.  As the Artistic Director of Sally Silvers & Dancers she has toured & taught nationally and internationally, has been reviewed extensively in The New York Times and profiled in The New Yorker where she was anointed “queen of intelligent quirk”. Her work, Bonobo Milkshake, was chosen by The New York Times as one of the top 3 pieces seen in New York in 2012.   She has had articles, essays, and poems published in magazines, chapbooks, journals and anthologies and she choreographed 3 musicals for the Sundance Theater Festival.  She is the co-director of 2 award-winning dance films & her work has been recorded and archived by the New York City Performing Arts Library. She is also known for several large dance community curatorial projects: TalkTalkWalkWalk (combining dance artists and poets) and Surprise Every Time (a festival of“live choreography’ – making work live in front of the audience on the spot). From 2005 to 2011 she danced in the new and historical works of Yvonne Rainer.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance

LINKS:
Sally's website

Pavan ‘PMT’ Thimmaiah, founder of PMT House of Dance (est. 2001), is an award-winning artist who broke with family tradition to realize his dream of becoming a professional dancer. Pavan has since enjoyed a career highlighted by being the first Indian American to choreograph for a major recording artist and for network TV. Articles about his work have been featured in Dance Teacher Magazine, Dance Magazine, The NY Times, Dance Europe, The Dance Gazette, & Staten Island Advance.

Pavan is best known as the resident choreographer for the Today Show since 2010. Additionally, Pavan has choreographed for artists Vanilla Ice, Macy Gray, Harry Connick Jr, Alex Feder, Matt Palmer, Zia Victoria, Apache Indian, XYZ Affair & others. His other choreography credits include New Year’s Eve in Times Square, the Clio Award winning tribute to MCA of the Beastie Boys, 1st Place Apollo Champion (choreographer), Conan O’Brien, Comedy Central & MTV and NBA halftime shows. He choreographed the first ever NY Fashion Week Runway show at the USS Intrepid for fashion designer Chi-Zhang.

Pavan’s proudest achievements have come through his work with the dance community as a practitioner, teacher and leader. He helped usher in Sessions and Jams as essential elements of dance education. His collaborations with legends like Ken Swift, Don ‘Campbellock Campbell and James ‘Cricket’ Colter created opportunities for the Street Styles at a time when stereotypes led many to avoid hosting and supporting these types of events and classes. As a teacher and practitioner, he has helped students at UC Irvine, NYU, Peridance, Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey Extension, PMT & schools nationwide. Proudly, he has mentored careers while ushering in dancers of varying backgrounds to be inspired by the culture and energy of Hip Hop.

As the Artistic Director and Composer of PMT Dance Company, his work has been presented by The International Dance Festival, the Canadian National Exhibition, the Bollywood Movie Awards & for Sundance Channel’s “Young Revolutionaries,” among other venues through out the US and Canada.

COURSE TAUGHT:
Hip Hop Dance Practices

David Thomson has worked as a collaborative artist in the fields of music, dance, theater and performance with such artists as Mel Wong, Jane Comfort, Bebe Miller (’83-’86; ’03-’06), Trisha Brown (‘87-‘93), Susan Rethorst, Remy Charlip, David Roussève, Ralph Lemon ('99-'10), Muna Tseng, Sekou Sundiata, Marta Renzi, Sally Silvers, Reggie Wilson, Tracie Morris, Meg Stuart, Dean Moss/Layla Ali, Alain Buffard, Daria Faïn, Deborah Hay, Tere O’Connor, Yanira Castro, Beth Gill, Marina Abramović, Yvonne Rainer and Maria Hassabi among many others.  Thomson has performed downtown, Off Broadway and in London with the acclaimed a cappella performance group Hot Mouth. His own work has been presented by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark's Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Roulette and Movement Research at Judson Church.  Thomson is a Bessie award-winning artist, a 2012 USA Ford Fellow, 2013 NYFA Fellow in Choreography, 2014 MacDowell Fellow and 2016 Yaddo Fellow. An ongoing advocate for dance and the empowerment of artists, he was one of the founding members of Dancer’s Forum and has served on the boards of Bebe Miller/Gotham Dance, Dance Theater Workshop and presently New York Live Arts. He holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

LINKS:
www.davidhamiltonthomson.com/wordpress/

Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Gibney, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, La Mama Courthouse, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she serves as Head of Movement for Theater at Professional Performing Arts School and has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, MIT, and University of the Arts. She is a 2022-2023 Smack Mellon Artist-in-Residence and 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. She has been a 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Movement Research Performance

LINKS:
www.ogemdiude.com/
IG: @gemgemdi

Photo by Elyse Mertz

My process as a choreographer and performer compounds dance and text, and my subjects are both marginal and popular. By juxtaposing humor and gravity, speech and movement, song and silence, I create performances that enable the audience to learn about themselves as they learn about me. My work has been commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, The Whitney Museum, The Shed, The Public Theater, and Performance Space New York. I've toured nationally and internationally in England, Norway, Macedonia and Serbia. In 2019, I published two books of performance texts, "Album" (Wendy's Subway) and "Mariana Valencia's Bouquet" (3 Hole Press); I'm a founding member of the No Total reading group and I've been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence (2016-17). I've received a Bessie Award for Outstanding "Breakout" Choreographer (2018), I'm a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient (2018), a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow (2014-15), and was a Whitney Biennial artist (2019). My performance collaborations include works by Jules Gimbrone, Elizabeth Orr, Kate Brandt, Kim Brant, AK Burns, Guadalupe Rosales, Juliana May, Em Rooney, robbinschilds, Kim Brandt, Morgan Bassichis, Fia Backstrom and MPA. I received my BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2006) with a concentration in dance and ethnography.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance
Textual Strategies in Performance

LINKS:
www.marianavalencia.work
New York Times Feature

Photo credits: Maria Baranove

Larissa Velez-Jackson (LVJ) is a NYC-based choreographer and multi-platform artist. She uses improvisation as a main tool for research and creation. Her practices yield dance, sound, speech, and deep humor, making contemporary art’s critical discourse accessible to audiences. LVJ has presented work at numerous NYC venues such as: Bushwick Starr, Roulette, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Art and Design, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, American Realness Festival at Abrons Arts Center, and The Chocolate Factory Theater. In 2011, she launched a song-and-dance collaboration with her husband Jon Velez-Jackson called Yackez. Yackez most recently presented their two act theatrical event at New York Live Arts in March 2017. Described in New York Magazine’s blog, Bedford and Bowery, “Whether it’s rapping, dancing, or throwing down in the (wrestling) ring, their work is high-energy, silly, odd, and even chaotic at times, going from spectacle to cartoon to pop culture critique and back again.”

The year 2016, Velez-Jackson’s tenth year of making experimental dance, fulfilled the famous Martha Graham adage “it takes ten years to make a dancer,” or in this case a choreographer. In 2016, LVJ was awarded the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Art’s “Grant to Artists” award, The Award (mentoring initiative 2016-2017), a Gibney Dance Center DIP residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space residency (for Yackez), Mount Tremper Arts Watershed residency (for Yackez), and was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer. After which she was a choreographic Artist in Residence at the historic Harkness Dance Center at 92Y from 2017-18. She has been a Movement Research Artist in Residence from 2018-2020 and prepares for a new commission with the Chocolate Factory Theater in 2022, researching self and community care and healing through her newly named Star Pû Method (f.k.a Star Crap Method). This new work for LVJ Performance Co. is also supported by the Shonberg Fellowship at The Yard in Martha's Vineyard as well as most recently, a Caroline Hearst Choreographic Fellowship at Princeton University (2021-2022).

LVJ is a Boricua-American originally from Newark, New Jersey, and a recent cancer survivor, committed to the healing and transformative potential of art and integrated body/mind practice. She is honored to have most recently been awarded Dance/NYC's Disability. Dance. Artistry Residency for 2022.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance 

LINKS: 
https://vimeo.com/147207384
larissavelez.com
yackez.com
instagram: @larissatwitta

Ni’Ja has been a student and practitioner of indigenous African ritual and resistance forms for over ten years, creating and performing work that reflects the sacred in street, conceptual, and indigenous performance. Ni’Ja’s work engages a nexus of postmodern and African Diasporic performance practices, through the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and spirit.  Ni-Ja is a 2015 Bogliasco Fellow, 2013-2015 Movement Research Artist in Residence, 2014-2015 artist in residence at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and Creative Capital "On Our Radar" artist.  Ni’Ja’s creative and scholarly works include collaborations with leading artists in multiple genres such as Allison Knowles, La Pocha Nostra, April Berry, Marjani Forté and Darrell Jones, and with Brazilian and American organizations as a titled capoeirista. A noted innovating practitioner of the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic and accomplished improviser, Whitson enjoys ongoing collaboration with award-winning artist Sharon Bridgforth, currently as a touring member of Bridgforth’s River See.  

COURSES TAUGHT:
Capoeira Practices

Reggie Wilson is Executive and Artistic Director, Choreographer and Performer of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group.  His work draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and is combined with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he sometimes refers to as "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances." 

He has lectured, taught and conducted workshops and community projects, and had his work presented nationally & internationally. Wilson is a recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance's McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001), is a 2002 BESSIE recipient, and is a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project, a Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop, and in recognition of his creative contributions to the field, was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow, as well as being a recipient of the 2009 Herb Alpert Award in Dance. In 2012 he was named a Wesleyan University’s Creative Campus Fellow, received an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; And received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his successful work Moses(es) that premiered in 2013. His newest work CITIZEN premieres fall 2016 (FringeArts – World; BAM NextWave 2016 - NYC) and tours through 2017.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Advanced Performance
Guest Artist Residency (Spring 2018)

LINKS:
Fist and Heel Website 
On Reggie Wilson and Moses(es): A Special Section by Susan Manning, The Drama Review (TDR) Spring 2015, Vol. 59, No. 1

photo credit: Antoine Tempé

Lauded by Brian Seibert of The New York Times as “thrilling and rare,” Katie Workum began making dances in New York City in 1997. Her work slips between multiple forms: improvised and set movement, scripted text, songs and live music. In addition to making set work, since 2013 Workum has made Authentic Movement and improvisational forms a bedrock of her work. She melds improvisational performance and practice together as an alternate, feminist model of working and presenting work. In 2023 she premiered the dance theater piece Monster Mourning with Weena Pauly in 2023 at Kestrels, NY. She was an artist in residence at Center for Performance Research, NYC and Marble House Project, VT for the development of a new work Anna, Darrin, David, Eleanor, Jess, Katie, Leslie & Weena at The Foley Gallery in 2020. She has been presented by Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) with Jacob’s Pillow Dance, Danspace Project, Mount Tremper Arts, The Chocolate Factory, PS122’s Catch/Coil, Gibney In the Works/American Realness, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, The Wassaic Project Summer Festival, Movement Research/Judson Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, The Kitchen, Movement Research at Judson Church, Dance New Amsterdam, 92nd St Y, Symphony Space, Galapagos Art Space, GAle GAtes, et. al., WAX, and others. She has been an Artist in Residence at MASS MoCA (2015), Chez Bushwick (2014), Dance New Amsterdam (2008, 2009), Mount Tremper Arts (2010, 2014), Tribeca Performing Arts Center (2006), and The Kitchen (2005). Workum holds a Master’s in Dance Education at New York University and has taught at BKSD, School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Dance New Amsterdam, Barnard College, New York University Experimental Theater Wing, and Lehman College.

COURSES TAUGHT:
Performance

LINKS:
katieworkum.org

Nami Yamamoto, originally from Matsuyama, Japan, graduated from New York University in 1993 with a MA in Dance Education. Since then her work has been presented in New York and elsewhere. Her work has been funded by Creative Capital, Jim Henson Foundation, Manhattan Community Arts Fund from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Suitcase Fund from Dance Theater Workshop, Puffin Foundation and Parent/Choreographer Grant from Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She has been nurtured and inspired by her residency experience at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is a Movement Research Artist in Residence in 2014-2016.   

COURSES TAUGHT:
Introduction to Contemporary Dance Practices
Movement Research Performance

LINKS:
www.namiyamamoto.com