Pedra Pepa (they/them) is a Venezuelan, queer Latinx performance artist, as well as a teaching artist with Pillsbury House Theatre and Upstream Arts. They have performed and produced over ten Drag Story Hours at multiple Twin Cities locations, supported by a Minnesota Center for Humanities grant. Doña Pepa, Pedra’s drag/burlesque persona and choreographic lens, has graced stages locally (First Avenue Mainroom, Minneapolis Burlesque Festival, Lush, Gay 90’s, University of Minnesota) and in Puerto Rico. Noche Bomba, which incorporates Doña Pepa, was presented by 20% Theatre’s Q-STAGE and will tour to Winona State University in April 2019. Solo-versions were performed at Walker Art Center’s Choreographers’ Evening and at Galería Oro in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Pedra’s newest work, Holy Doña, will premiere at Red Eye Theatre’s 2019 New Works 4 Weeks Festival. Initial research for this project has been shared at 1er Coloquio sobre Hombres+ y Masculinidades in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Fellowship Statement

I am Pedra Pepa. I am a queer, gender-fuck, Venezuelan immigrant, Latinx, brown performance maker in Minneapolis.

My choreographic work is deeply personal, it is about my everyday experience, the coexistence of my oppressions and my identities. I create work that denounces current injustices. The work begins within me, then I transfer it to and cultivate it with other performers. I play with movement expression, singing, sound-making, draglesque, and visual media to create specific imagery, supported by costumes and props. I am interested in facilitating emotional journeys for audiences to ride with me and the performers.

“Draglesque” is my current solo research, a larger-than-life expression/explosion of gender, where my body transcends all social parameters. A space of radical freedom and self-love. This process is how I finesse and craft my skills as I mold my character(s). It is both a celebration and a transgression

Photo by Nic LaFrance.

Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly (he/him) is the artistic director of New Brooklyn Theatre. In 2009 he founded the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory. The two companies merged in 2018. Raja has been awarded a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), and, twice, the Princess Grace Award (2017, 2018). He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a BA in Dance and English from Connecticut College. Raja has been awarded a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award, a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard, a DanceWEB Scholarship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, a HERE Arts Fellowship, a 2018 Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University.

Fellowship Statement

I am obsessed with the development of popular culture over the last thirty years. My work unabashedly appropriates the structures, themes, and aesthetics found in reality television, celebrity culture, and social media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook), then deconstructs it into new works which combine dance, theatre, and visual media. My aim is to challenge audiences to recognize their own implication in popular media: how media has trained and molded their desires, relationships, and identities. My movement-based performances combine fashion shows, gallery exhibitions, drag, stand-up comedy, minstrel shows, and stage-plays into a single, overwhelming, over-saturated Gesamtkunstwerk in which artists and audiences experience their shared humanity. I rehumanize our over-mediated experience of reality.

Photo by Thomas Dunn.

Jasmine Hearn (she/they) is a performer, director, choreographer, organizer, and teaching artist. A native Houstonian, she graduated magna cum laude from Point Park University with her BA in Dance. She currently collaborates with filmmaker and visual artist, Alisha B. Wormsley. Jasmine has worked and performed with David Dorfman Dance, Alesandra Seutin (UK), Solange Knowles, Kate Watson-Wallace, STAYCEE PEARL dance project, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jenn Meridian, Helen Simoneau Danse, Lovie Olivia, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Nick Mauss (as part of the performance cast of TRANSMISSIONS—an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art).



Jasmine is a 2018/2019 Movement Research artist-in-residence, was a 2018 Dancing While Black fellow, and was awarded a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance as a part of Skeleton Architecture. They also received artist residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, and Dance Source Houston. Jasmine is a vessel and storyteller using dance and sound as materials to make, teach, and perform around the world.

Fellowship Statement

The body of my work is rooted in the belief, born of language from my work with Marjani Forté-Saunders, Tara Aisha Willis, and Staycee Pearl, that I am a vessel for ancestry and spirt to speak through. I offer work that remembers and honors past, speaks of present, and prepares community for future. As a choreographer, dancer, sound-maker, and performer, I am investigating how the body is able to use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth. I use dance and sound as materials to conjure an environment to be experienced. I ask, “How can the body and voice act as bridges that connect communities with their individual truths and how these truths live together. Working as a freelance artist, I have had many opportunities to engage with community—teaching dance and movement classes, facilitating spaces for movement/sound exploration, performing in multidisciplinary projects, and creating intimate, immersive performance experiences. I am committed to the facilitating environments that gives space for folks to connect with their fantasies and feelings.

Photo courtesy of Whitney Browne Photography.

Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a mother, choreographer, performer, a collaborative artist, community organizer and a three-time Bessie award winning choreographer and performer for her latest work, Memoirs of a... Unicorn. Marjani is an inaugural recipient of the UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship and a two-time Princess Grace Foundation awardee. Her work has been incubated in residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center (MANCC), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Extended Life Residency, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, CUNY Dance Initiative, 651 Arts and Movement Research. Marjani has produced seven award-winning works in steady collaboration with her partner and composer Everett Asis Saunders (New Music USA Awardee) over the last ten years. Humbly, she defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving and irreverent conjurers!

Fellowship Statement

My storytelling is intended to thicken the common narratives of people of the African Diaspora, and stir up visions for human liberation. What might freedom, a reality that elevates culture, look like? I commit to the work of shifting and visioning through art. I dance to tap my heart and my prolific imagination, to ignite vision or desire for ontological integrity and ascension in my audiences. In dance, I can imagine my own liberation and engage a fantasy of free-being as a plausible reality. With Memoirs of a.. Unicorn, developed in collaboration with composer Everett Saunders, I've centered on thoughtfully sharing the work such that it reflects our core values:

• To echo and affirm the work of local community organizers
• To be malleable in design for unconventional spaces and limited resources
• And to explore and affirm the complexity of blackness as a unifying, expansive, cross-cultural concept and network.

Photo by Ian Douglas.