Vie Boheme, a Motown native who blossomed creatively in Pittsburgh and refined in Minneapolis, is a multimodal artist, choreographer, dancer, and singer. Her choreographic work has been presented at Intermedia Arts, the Guthrie Theater, the Southern Theater, the Walker Art Center, Dance Alloy Theater, and the Kauffman Center.  She received a Cultural Community Partnership Award from the Minnesota State Arts Board in support of her most recent work, CENTERPLAY, and is a former co-creative director, vocal artist, and choreographer for Stokley Williams, founding front man of Mint Condition. She was a founding member of The August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble (Top 25 to Watch, Dance Magazine, 2012) and also a former dance artist with Camille A. Brown & Dancers and TU Dance. Boheme’s recent TedxMinneapolis talk, Is Performing Art Worth the Struggle?, is available for viewing. She is a Vinyasa, Yin and fitness yoga instructor with her own signature teaching philosophy, CoreKinetics Yoga; and a Teaching Specialist in the Dance Department at the University of Minnesota.

Fellowship Statement

I am a multimodal artist; a choreographer, singer, dancer, actress, poet and a writer. I design theatrical performance experiences that weave all of these mediums. I bring athletic agility to vocal performance by singing and dancing in unison, eliminating the boundary between the visual and audio experience. I also weave sentiment and storytelling through poetry and monologues. Each performance piece is designed to give a glimpse into the sometimes dark and complex emotional spaces people experience that seem elusive and ever present.

My work is acknowledgement and expression of the experiences of African American women. Multilayered, interwoven, shining light filtered through many cultural layers.

Ephrat Asherie is a NYC based b-girl, performer, choreographer and director, and a 2016 Bessie Award Winner for Innovative Achievement in Dance. Asherie has received numerous awards to support her work including Dance Magazine’s Inaugural Harkness Promise Award, a Jacob’s Pillow Fellowship at the Tilles Center, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and a National Dance Project award. The live performance chapter of her new project UnderScored is being commissioned by Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum and will premiere in 2021. She is honored to have been mentored by Richard Santiago (aka Break Easy) and to have worked and collaborated with Dorrance Dance, Doug Elkins, Rennie Harris, Bill Irwin, Gus Solomons Jr., and Buddha Stretch. Asherie is a co-founding member of the all-female house dance collective MAWU and is forever grateful to NYC’s underground dance community for inspiring her to pursue a life as an artist.

Fellowship Statement

My work is rooted in the complex rhythmic, physical, cultural, and spiritual lineages of New York City's underground dance community, a community I have been fortunate to be a part of for almost two decades. The performers I collaborate with are all part of the underground scene and we share, not only common movement languages (including breaking, hip hop, house, and vogue) but also an interest in exploring unconventional ways of remixing dances in various contexts, including creating for the stage. Implicit in working in these Latinx and African American vernacular forms is an ongoing conversation around the systemic racism that plagues this country, the struggles of the LGBTQIA+ community, joy as a form of resistance and resilience, and the commodification of culture as a means to make communities of color invisible. The underground dance scene and NYC’s complex labyrinth of cultural collisions inspired my hybrid approach to movement, which is integral to my work.

Photo by Claudia Celestino

Sanjit Sethi (elected 2020) is an artist, educator, curator, and cultural leader whose work across local, national, and international contexts has focused on the intersections of culture, equity, education, and community. For over two decades, he has worked across higher education, philanthropy, public practice, and institutional transformation, advancing equity-centered strategies and supporting artists, cultural workers, and creative communities.

Sethi is currently the Head of Campus at Green School Bali and has served as President of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His previous roles include Director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University; Director of the Center for Art and Public Life, Barclay Simpson Professor, and Chair of Community Arts at California College of the Arts; and Executive Director of the Santa Fe Art Institute. He has also taught at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology; MIT; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sethi is regularly invited to contribute to critical dialogues on culture, equity, education, philanthropy, and community. His public work explores the role of creative leadership and its relationship to addressing inequity and building more just and imaginative communities.

Sethi received a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Georgia, and an MS in Advanced Visual Studies from MIT. He has received grants and fellowships from organizations including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Fulbright Program. As an artist and curator, his projects have addressed memory, migration, place, and public life through work including Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance, Richmond Voting Stories, The Gypsy Bridge Project, Spiked: The Unpublished Political Cartoons of Rob Rogers, and 6.13.89: The Cancelling of the Mapplethorpe Exhibition.