Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a 2023 United States Artists Fellow, and recently celebrated her debut as choreographer for the New York Metropolitan Opera, El Niño (2024). She is an awardee of the prestigious Dance Magazine Harkness Award (2020) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2020). Saunders is a three time NY Dance & Performance/Bessie Awardee and an inaugural recipient of 3 distinguishing fellowships in dance, including Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2017), the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2018), and the DanceUSA Artist Fellowship (2019).

Her practice has been forging my physical and energetic bodies  to conjure transformative moments in space and time. Her art poses and processes questions, such as: What might freedom, a reality that elevates culture, life, wisdom, the intangible and mysterious, look like? Can we achieve it?

Marjani is a part of a multi-platformed collective vision called 7NMS (pronounced seven names), with composer and sound designer Everett Saunders. The work of 7NMS houses the Art, the Studios, and the Creative Incubator that is Art x Power- which is dedicated to building resilient futures for Black Artists, by creating pathways towards long-term, fiscal and creative wellness. The creative duo architects of the project, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist, which premiered at Abrons Arts Center in 2022. 7NMS are recipients of New Music USA Award (2021), the MAP Fund (2020) and the National Dance Project Production & Touring award, for this work. In 2023, PROPHET had its Los Angeles premiere, at the REDCAT ROY AND EDNA DISNEY/CALARTS THEATER (REDCAT), and traveled to the Musuem of Contemporary Arts Chicago, May 2024.

Humbly, Saunders embraces the depth of her career and craft as a divine opportunity and command to listen, serve, and transform. She defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving, irreverent conjurers. With joy, Saunders’ most creative, commanding and rewarding practice is as a Mother, which operates inextricably alongside her visioning as an artist.

Megan Williams’ career spans 40 years as dancer, choreographer, educator and repetiteur.

AUNTS is a roving platform for dance and performance based on the core values of inclusivity, collectivity, and resource sharing. The collective was founded by Jmy James Kidd and Rebecca Brooks in 2005, co-organized by Liliana Dirks-Goodman and Laurie Berg from 2009-2020, and is currently organized by jess pretty. 

AUNTS is a creative and collaborative performance project. Through the AUNTS apparatus, artists (from the NYC contemporary dance community and beyond) come together to share the same space at the same time, negotiating the simultaneous presentation of their work in relationship to one another. Often taking the form of an immersive live event, audiences are free to move through AUNTS, engaging with as many or as few of its offerings as they like, choosing their own path through the event and creating their own experiences through chance encounters. The whole could be viewed as a work independent from, but no more/less important than, its individual constituent parts.

Since 2005, AUNTS has organized over 80 events and hosted more than 600 artists from multiple disciplines at various points in their careers. AUNTS has organized pop-up performances and residencies at dozens of spaces all over NYC, nationally and internationally including The New Museum, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Whitney Museum, ACE Hotel, Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), Beach Sessions Rockaway, Berkeley Art Museum (CA), The Chocolate Factory, La MaMa, Movement Research, TAMTAMTAM (Berlin, Germany), NADA, The American Dance Festival, Chashama, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council @ Governor’s Island, and Arts@Renaissance a part of St. Nick’s Alliance (Greenpoint, Brooklyn).