Leslie Parker is a dance artist, director, improviser, and performer born in the traditional homeland of the Dakhóta, Anishinaabe people also known as Twin Cities, MN. Her upbringing in the neighborhood known as the Rondo community led to cultivating multiple home art bases in Brooklyn, NY and St. Paul, MN while holding a BFA from Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance, and a MFA in Dance from Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and The Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany. As a dance creative, she highlights unique individual contributions, digs into collective memory to engage with the world more imaginatively and embodies an aesthetic that encompasses an organic physical/movement hybrid influenced by the Black and African Diaspora: Traditional W. African, Black/African American vernacular/social dance, Improvisation, and Contemporary/Modern technique derived from and exchanged across multiple continents. She has received a 2017 Bessie award for Outstanding performer as part of Skeleton Architecture, a  2022 McKnight Fellowship for Choreographers, and is a Jerome Artist Fellow 2019 – 2021. Parker initiated Leslie Parker Dance Project, LLC as a means to experience dance art more intuitively. As an educator, she led and facilitated classes as a guest assistant professor at Carleton College, a lecturer at University of Minnesota and as a guest artist instructor at various institutions in the US. Her most recent multi-year work, Call to Remember, is rooted, researched, and performed through residencies, stage performances and workshops across the US, including, Minneapolis, MN, at Walker Art Center, Pillsbury House Theatre, and Pangea World Theatre, San Francisco, CA, at CounterPulse, New York, New York at Danspace Project, Tallahassee, FL, at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Philadelphia, PA, at BOOM. Call to Remember and latest iteration, Divination Tools: imagine home is funded by National Dance Project/nefa, National Performance Network Creation Fund, National Performance Development Fund and National Performance Network Community Engagement Fund, Minnesota Regional Arts Council and Minnesota State Arts Board.

For more detailed information, go to www.leslieparkerdance.com.

Gillian Walsh is a choreographer and performer from NY. Her work has been presented by Gropius Bau, The Watermill Center, Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Performa and others.

Wendell Gray II is a dance artist, choreographer, and educator currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been presented at Coffey Street Studios, Kinosaito Arts Center, Gibney, University of the Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, Chez Bushwick, and Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. Most recently, he presented “The People Show” as a part of Sighlines Dance Festival in late Spring 2023. Additionally, he was a STUFFED Artist in Residence in 2021 at Judson Church as well as a Work Up 6.0 Artist in 2020 at Gibney. Wendell has also set work on companies such as Michiyaya Dance, Pennsylvania Ballet II + Philadanco II, and Periapsis Music and Dance. As a performer, Wendell has worked with choreographers such as Tere O’Connor, Joanna Kotze, Pavel Zustiak, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Maria Bauman, Jonah Bokaer, I-Ling Liu, Christal Brown, Esther Baker- Tarpaga, Janeill Cooper, and J Bouey. He is a BFA graduate of the University of the Arts (15’) under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield was raised in Atlanta, GA. More info at wenings.com

Anna Sperber is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. Her work has been described by The New York Times as “immediately compelling” and “wonderfully strange” with “moments of theatrical magic.” Sperber received a 2022 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Choreographer / Creator for Bow Echo (2021). Her work has been presented and commissioned by The Kitchen, The Joyce Theater UNLEASHED, The Chocolate Factory, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Roulette, Gibney Dance, and Dance Theater Workshop in New York City, as well as by the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC. Sperber has received fellowships and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco Italy, the Marble House Project, as a Schonberg Fellow at Dance The Yard, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance DiP (Dance in Process), Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island, and Movement Research. Her interdisciplinary collaborations with esteemed experimental composers and live musicians as well as visual designers are crucial to the integration of visual and sonic landscapes with the moving body in her work. Sperber was a co-founder of classclassclass, designed to nurture new dance teachers while offering reduced class rates, and was a co-curator of the 2008 Movement Research Spring Festival. She has taught as a guest artist at American Dance Festival, Movement Research, Gibney Dance, Hunter College, George Washington University, and Wayne State University. Sperber founded and ran BRAZIL, a studio and intimate performance space in Bushwick, Brooklyn from 2004 to 2014 and Sunset Space from 2019-2020.