Kendra J. Ross is a Detroit native working as a dancer, choreographer, teaching artist, facilitator and community organizer in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. As a dancer, Kendra has worked with Urban Bush Women, Ase Dance Theater Collective, MBDance, Moving Spirits Dance Company, Movement of the People Dance Company and as a guest artist with Oyu Oro. Kendra’s choreographic work has been presented at Florida A&M University, the off Broadway show 7 Sins, Museu de Arte in Salvador, Brazil, Dixon Place, Ailey Citigroup Theater, and Actors Fund Theater. She has been an Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Studios for Dance, The Neighborhood Project Through 651Arts, and The Laundromat Project. Kendra serves as the Founder/Director of STooPS, an outdoors-based community building event that uses art strengthen ties between different entities in Bed-Stuy. She is also a teaching artist at Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As an avid student of folkloric traditions of the African Diaspora, my work is grounded in the Ghanian concept of Sankofa—looking back in order to move forward. I am working to develop a Sankofic praxis to collect embodied research that employs Black History as a springboard for imagining all aspects of community—art, culture, movements, people, lifestyles etc. This process will help me to not only navigate my contemporary life as a Black woman but also invite others to learn from the enriching lessons of these forms. Through intentional partnerships with collaborators, community members, especially elders, local organizations and businesses, I will work to collect, share, and interpret their stories. I will continue creating a collaborative archiving of history and culture with the development of my project, the Sankofa Residency. Through my artistic expression, I want to help shape the future of my community by interpreting and reimagining the narratives. My work is to dance Afrofuturism in action.

Photo by Bostock Images.

MX Oops is a multimedia performance artist and educator whose work centers hybridity, encouraging ecstatic disobedience as a path toward embodied wellness. Their creative practice links urban arts [breaking, house, vogue femme, rap, dj, vj, fashion], somatic studies [yoga, thai yoga massage, energy healing, sound baths], media and gender studies. Through this transdisciplinary approach, their work questions whether consciousness itself is the primary medium.

A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, trained in various forms of energy healing, they completed a BA in dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Dance, Multimedia Performance, and Somatic Studies in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College CUNY. www.mxoops.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

During this fellowship I will develop UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL, a party and multimedia performance that uses the vibrant aesthetics of queer nightlife culture to reveal how cognitive bias connects us all. This piece tells the story of humanity coming to grips with our collective inheritance, a ramshackle meshwork of cognitive processes evolved to survive, not for self-awareness. An interdisciplinary approach invites the audience to meditate on what might be unfinished about human cognition and how these biases keep us from building a better world together.

With support from the National Performance Network Creation Fun, this work will be developed in the Live Feed Residency at New York Live Arts toward a Spring 2024 premiere. Additionally, this fellowship period will incubate [NONFATAL_ERROR], a multimedia ensemble of artists engaged in collaborative world-building. Ensemble members work in dance, new media, interactive video projection design, sound design, voice, and costume, fashion, sculpture and more. These mediums come together to welcome party people into a lush world of queer becoming.

Valerie Oliveiro is a dance and performance maker based in the Twin Cities and from Singapore. While they currently engage movement as their primary motor for expression, they also engage in other expressions, such as design, writing, drawing and photography, as generative, complexly relational proposals. Their choreographic work has been presented at Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Hair+Nails Gallery and Bryant Lake Bowl and Cowles Center and has been supported by Minnesota State Arts Board, MRAC, Jerome Foundation and MAP Fund. Currently, they are a Co-Artistic Director at Red Eye Theater, ensemble member at Lighting Rod (QTBIPOC-led performance organism) and co-run a small performance incubator MOVO SPACE.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Valerie is creating new work in 2023/2024 and will foreground their own artistic research in North America and Asia.

Photo credit: Valerie Oliveiro.

Margaret Ogas is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in the Twin Cities. Using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in dance and informed by Chicana cultural sensibilities, her works tell surreal everyday stories through a collage of movement, text and sound. Ogas has been presented by the Walker Art Center, Candy Box Dance Festival, Red Eye Theater, Center for Performing Arts, FD13, Mizna, Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio and others. She was awarded a 2022 Next Step Fund grant by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and was a 2021 Naked Stages Fellow at Pillsbury House + Theatre.

Margaret is a core collaborator and performer with the Taja Will Ensemble. She has also performed for Laurie Van Weiren, Chris Schlicting, Sequoia Hauck and others. Margaret is a teaching artist, specializing in modern technique, improvisation, and composition. She is currently a youth instructor at Young Dance. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am a dancer and improviser who is interested in the way choreography can be used to tell stories and traverse the messy, layered nature of identity.

My dances weave personal narrative and thoughtful aesthetic choices to connect with audiences through humor and heartfelt storytelling, intentionally blending the everyday with the surreal. I am inspired by the political spirit of the Chicano art movement and the vibrancy of communities I find myself within and around.

During this fellowship, I will root into my choreographic practice, taking time to develop my voice and experiment in interdisciplinary modes. I will build on my connections with BIPOC and queer artists to develop and present a new ensemble work.

Photo by Caroline Yang.

Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez is a Costa Rican/American artist working in the fields of choreography, film, installation, and sound. Núñez is a Mellon Foundation Grant Recipient 23′, a Princeton University Arts Fellow 22’, a Jerome Hill Fellow 22’, a Dance/USA Fellow 22’, and a Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellow 18’. His work been presented by Abrons Arts Center, The Joyce Theater, Princeton University, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research at The Judson Church, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, CUE Art Foundation, Performance Mix Festival, and Battery Dance Festival, among others. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Art In America, The Brooklyn Rail and The Dance Enthusiast. He’s been an Artist In Residence at Loghaven Artist Residency, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research. In 2023, Núñez was selected by the Art In America as one of 20 New Talent artists on a global scale. The same year, he was nominated for a “Bessie,” The New York Dance and Performance Awards in the Best Performer category.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My practice comprises three elements: physicality (named vortex), sound and audio description.

Vortex centers movement in circular motion supported by diaphragmatic breathing. It is born out of the principle that the human body is 70% water and has a 95% level of oxygen. By moving the body in circles, water and air rotate, causing internal whirlwinds and tornadoes that renew energy. Vortex teaches principles of proprioception to Visually Impaired dancers using the sagittal, transverse and frontal planes safely.

Music and sound are created with a frequency of 432 Hz, known as the frequency of the universe. It allows the body to re energize through the power of the creative source.

My Audio Description is manifested through storytelling, song and poetry as a form of resistance, preservation, cultural continuity, and perseverance of my indigenous identity.

Photo by Sam Polcer for Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

Hamilton’s work expands on themes at the intersection of race and Disability. She uses elements of her training in traditional West-African and Postmodern Dance, as well different access practices, mainly Audio Description, as an integral part of the creative process and final product of everything she makes.

Hamilton’s work as a performance maker has been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space New York, New York Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD). As a performer, Hamilton has worked with Skeleton Architecture, Maria Bauman/MBDance, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and Gesel Mason Performance Projects.

Hamilton has taught dance at several colleges and has been a special education teacher in the New York public school system for the past 12 years. As a Disability Arts consultant, she has worked with the Mellon Foundation, ArtSpeak, Dance USA, The Shed and Movement Research.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am currently working on two different projects:

An Immersive, multidisciplinary installation and performance titled How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up, which explores the growth, use and medicalization of cotton as a historical thread between Blackness and Disability. This piece utilizes a multimedia design, multiple Audio Descriptors and a performance structure that can reconfigure every night based on the performer's changing needs.

A trio between myself, a D/deaf movement artist and an ASL interpreter. In this trio, we will utilize a narrow platform as a stage, and embody the conflicts that can arise when certain existing access practices contradict, or exist at the expense of one another. Through the rigor of dancing with and thinking through the differences of our specific Disabilities and where they meet, we will also move towards the tangible and/or utopian longing to find a space that can attend to the needs of every-body.

Photo by Travis Magee.

Efraín Rozas is a Peruvian interdisciplinary artist, researcher and robotics maker. His work was described as “An incredible physical presence that transformed the stage into a soundscape” by the New York Times, “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” by The New Yorker, and “A deep psychonautic dive” by Wire Magazine. He was a resident at The Kitchen in 2021. He is a recipient of the NY State Council on the Arts/ Wavefarm Media Arts Assistance Fund, Jerome Foundation/Harvestworks New Works Commission, and Knockdown Center (NYC) residency for time-based art.

He has performed at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Levitation Festival, Museum of Contemporary art of Lima and Central Park Summerstage Fania Records 50th anniversary. His album Roza Cruz with his Latin American experimental project La Mecánica Popular was named one of the best Latin American albums of the decade by Zona Sucia and Estereofonía. Featured at CNN, BBC, Washington Post, Daily News, and NPR. He holds a PhD from NYU and published the book Fusión: A Soundtrack for Peru.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested in synesthesia, the cross-pollination of the senses, and polyrhythm. I want to generate pieces across time/space contexts that use polyrhythm and synesthesia as tools to generate a state of contemplation. For this I will develop a series of pieces that combine robotics, video, music, performance art and sculpture.

Photo by Juan Pablo Aragón.

Marcela Michelle is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, facilitator, and producer based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce. Her artistic practice spans mediums and genres, engaging dance, music, physical and scripted theatre, design, burlesque, literature, construction, performance, theory, composition, devising, and the culinary arts. Her work has historically been concerned with identity, simultaneity, im/mutability, euphemism, and expectations of “truth” in queer performance. She is the Executive Artistic Director of Lightning Rod - a leading QTGNC focused arts organism in the Twin Cities. Her original work as been presented by Walker Art Center (Choreographer’s Evening), Red Eye Theater (NW4W), Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio, Northern Spark, Right Here Showcase, The Minneapolis Burlesque Festival, Wanderlust Productions, and 20% Theatre Company, where she worked in many capacities from 2015 to 2021, ultimately serving as Artistic Director in its final years. She is a 2019 mentee of The National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation (Pangea World Theatre/Art2Action), and a member of Actor’s Equity.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am arriving at this fellowship in my 31st year. Virgo Sun, Gemini Moon. Venus in Libra, Mars in Cancer. I know so much of Transition and am a new Student of Time. Southern child, eldest cousin. Self-named, Wed, I feed. Without apology, a new score. Autonomous entrances and exits. Available to possession and exorcism, avoidant of martyrdom and apotheosis. Curbed censor, encouraged teacher. Naming, creating, re-naming, re-creating. Of course there will be New Works Multi-Cross-Trans-Inter-Extra Disciplinary (eek). Of course the humor the wink the glint the cheek the nod the glance the smile the ode homage collage décolletage. An Icon in the making, hunny. Always gild the lily, why else be Gay? I'm over joy resistance rage. Down with meaning and conjuring and proselytizing didactics. Here’s to the dilettante the liar the raccoon the conduit the Transsexual aesthete. The charlatan dances and still we clap laugh cry eat come. It’s all in the making every second even now.

Photo by Steve Campbell (Locomotofx).

A.P. Looze is a transgender multi-disciplinary artist whose creative practice supports them to turn toward the history of pain in their family and this nation in order to end lineages of violence and open up portals to love. Their original solo performances have included The Ways I Wished to Love Her at Pillsbury House + Theater, Foray Softly at The Guthrie, The Grief Experiments through 20% Theatre Company, A Dream of Brightness at the Red Eye Theater, God Made Me Crooked at Queertopia, and Finding Loaded Guns in Weird Places at Pleasure Rebel. Their tennis-inspired music video musical C’Mon Baby Stroke It premiered at Trylon Cinema in 2021. They were a 2016 20% Theatre Q-Stage Fellow, a 2018 Pillsbury House + Theater Naked Stages Fellow, a 2019 Northern Lights Artist on the Verge Fellow, and part of the 2022 Red Eye Theater Isolated Acts Cohort.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use this fellowship to deepen my contemplative practice and continue to explore decoloniality, making interdisciplinary work inspired by spiritual/economic/political liberation. For the past ten years, I have explored questions of embodiment as a trans person. As my gender’s boundaries dissolve, I am more interested in surrendering to the vast pluriverse of non-human wisdom. This fellowship will support my work with the Akashic Records, a realm of consciousness that holds unconditional love for all souls. The Records have provided insights through music, poetic words, and imagery that I have integrated into recent performance and installation work. I will continue to open the Records, holding pressing questions related to whiteness, embodiment and decoloniality. I will follow the inspiration of what emerges to create new multi-disciplinary work in collaboration with my creative process and spiritual explorations.