Angie Pittman is a New York based Bessie award-winning dance artist, dance maker, and dance educator. Her work has been performed at The Kitchen, Gibney Dance, BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, STooPS, The Domestic Performance Agency, The KnockDown Center(Sunday Service), The Invisible Dog(Catch 73), and Danspace Project. Angie is currently working as a collaborator and dance artist with Adam Linder, devynn emory/beastproductions, Anna Sperber, Stephanie Acosta, and Donna Uchizono Company. Angie has had the pleasure of dancing in work by Ralph Lemon, Tere O’Connor, Jennifer Monson, Kim Brandt, Tess Dworman, Antonio Ramos, Jasmine Hearn, Jonathan Gonzalez, and many others. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how the body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power. Angiepittman.com
iele paloumpis is a dance artist, death doula and intuitive space-holder. their work is rooted in kinesthetic awareness and ancestral healing practices – all within a trauma-informed framework that centers social justice.Choreographic works have been shown through the Chocolate Factory Theater, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New York Live Arts, Dixon Place, the Flea Theater, Movement Research, Painted Bride Art Center, and Franklin Street Works, among others. iele is excited to premiere their newest evening length work, “In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky” at Danspace Project this coming May 21st, 22nd and 23rd, 2020. iele received a BA from Hollins University in 2006 and was awarded end of life doula certifications from Mount Sinai, Valley Hospice, and the Quality of Life Care, LLC Accompanying the Dying Program between 2014-16. As a disabled, queer, trans survivor from a working class background, iele empathizes across multiple axes of oppression and brings this awareness to their work a dance artist and death doula.
Jaime Shearn Coan is a writer, editor, and PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is completing a dissertation titled Metamorphosis Theater: Performance at the Intersection of HIV/AIDS, Race, and Sexuality. A current 2019-2020 CUNY/Schomburg Center Archival Dissertation Year Fellow, Jaime previously served as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at The Center for the Humanities, CUNY and has taught literature, composition, and creative writing at City College, Hunter College, and Queens College, CUNY. Jaime’s writing has appeared in publications including TDR: The Drama Review, Critical Correspondence, Drain Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, Movement Research Performance Journal, Gulf Coast, On Curating, Women & Performance, and Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement. Jaime is a co-editor of the Danspace Project 2016 Platform catalogue: Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now and author of the chapbook Turn it Over, published by Argos Books.
devynn emory is a mixed Lenape/Blackfoot choreographer and dance artist living in Lenapehoking. emory’s company devynnemory/beastproductions sources from multiple in-between states of being both in their body as a transgender person, and in their work in multiple realms of liminality as a healer/bodyworker and emergency/hospice Nurse. emory was institutionally trained in rigorous classical lineages of line and exactitude. They have thus committed to formalism as a tool for structural reclamation, investigation and decolonization of pattern making. In addition to making choreographic work they lead ceremony, movement and writing workshops, and engage in somatic practices releasing grief concerning trauma and death and dying.
Maura Nguyen Donohue appreciates the kinship of two teen sons and many other sibling spirits. She is Associate Professor of Dance and Faculty Associate for Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. She has been making, writing about and curating performance works in NYC since 1994. She has served on The Bessies, as well as the Boards of Movement Research, the Congress on Research in Dance and Dance Theater Workshop. She has a BA in Anthropology and Dance (‘92) and an MFA in Dance (‘08) from Smith College.
Jasmine Hearn is a native Houstonian holding their BA in dance from Point Park University. A Brooklyn based performer, curator, director, choreographer, organizer, and teaching artist, she is currently a company member with Urban Bush Women and a 2019 Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Fellow. She collaborates with Alisha B. Wormsley, Solange Knowles, BANDportier, and Vanessa German. hey have also worked and performed with David Dorfman Dance, Alesandra Seutin’s vocabdance, Kate Watson-Wallace, STAYCEE PEARL dance project, Marjani Forté-Saunders, will rawls, Tara Aisha Willis, Jennifer Myers, Helen Simoneau Danse, Lovie Olivia, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, and with Nick Mauss as a part of exhibition, TRANSMISSIONS, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Jasmine has received a 2017 Bessie Award for her performance with Skeleton Architecture, and has also shared her work at Danspace Project, BAAD!, New York Live Arts, La Mama Theater, and The Camargo Foundation.
International dancer, singer, songwriter, Tendayi Kuumba is a graduate of North Atlanta High School of Performing Arts and Spelman College. Choreographic solo/collaborative past works include Prague Effects, Heroin’e, FLUXX & Unidentified Fly Objects. Formally a touring company member of Urban Bush Women, she has worked with ASE Dance Theater Collective, Marjani Forté Saunders, Jim Findlay’s Electric Lucifer workshop & Philadelphia Operas’ We Shall Not be Moved directed by Bill T. Jones. She’s received acclaids for music releases of Jazz EP “Just A Matter of Time” and single “Incog-negro”. Recently she toured as 1 of 2 back up singer/dancers on the American Utopia World Tour for Grammy Nominated artist David Byrne, as well as debut as a band/cast member of David Byrne’s American Utopia. She generates and co-creates artistic space “The Golden Ratio” in Brooklyn, NY alongside partner in life and art, Greg Purnell. She gives thanks and blessings for life, love, breath, and the pursuit of happiness through creativity.
Benedict Nguyen is a dancer, writer, and curator based in the South Bronx, NY. Their writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, Culturebot, and Shondaland, among others. Benedict has recently performed in DapperQ Fashion Week and in works by John Jasperse, José Rivera Jr., Sally Silvers, and Monstah Black. As the 2019 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at ISSUE Project Room, they developed a multidisciplinary platform “soft bodies in hard places.” They provide administrative support for Donna Uchizono and Jennifer Monson and John Jasperse. They publish a biweekly-ish newsletter “first quarter moon slush” and are sometimes online @xbennyboo.
Composer and vocal artist Samita Sinha combines experimentation and tradition (North Indian classical music, embodied practices, and folk and ritual music in several languages) to create new forms of music/ sound performance and collaboration, and a language of voice and body. Her work has been commissioned by Asia Society, Performance Space 122 and Invisible Dog Art Center, the Rubin Museum and presented at the Kitchen, Wexner Center for the Arts, Danspace, National Sawdust, and PICA, among others. She has collaborated with Ralph Lemon, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Fiona Templeton, Sekou Sundiata, Daria Fain and Robert Kocik, and Robert Ashley, as well as Sunny Jain and Grey Mcmurray (with whom she is part of the “uniquely-aligned trio” (NPR) Tongues in Trees). Sinha teaches voice extensively.
Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum works at the juncture of experimental music and dance. Raised in the hills of Western Massachusetts, her ancestors wove their voices into the tuneful stories of the Broadway stage. She draws from this lineage while grappling with sinews of American mythology buried its unseen anatomy. Her work has been presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Danspace Project, AUNTS, Temple University, School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, and Pliegues y Despliegues Festival in Bogotá, Colombia. She has worked with artists Yoshiko Chuma & the School of Hard Knocks, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik, Jennifer Monson, Levi Gonzalez, Emily Johnson/CATALYST, Andy Luo & lily bo shapiro, Juliana May, DOING AND UNDOING collective, and Hadar Ahuvia, among others. She is a former organizer with CLASSCLASSCLASS and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. Most recently she collaborated with Jasmine Hearn and Danspace Project’s Lydia Bell on the 2019 “collective terrain/s” platform and was a 2017-18 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. She attended Oberlin College & Conservatory of Music.
Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky… a filament in gold leaf (written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili), SYNCOPE, and the forthcoming No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Recent work appears in e-flux, BOMB Magazine, Social Text, and other publications. Asiya is a 2019-2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist-in-Residence, a 2019-2020 writer-in-residence at Danspace Project, and a 2020 resident at the Foundation Jan Michalski. Asiya lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School.
