Past
Grantees

Leslie Parker is a dance artist, director, improviser, educator, and performer born in the traditional homeland of the Dakhóta people also known as Twin Cities, MN. Her multiple home/art-bases mainly include the lands of the Lenape peoples (Brooklyn, NY), and Saint Paul, MN. Leslie holds a BFA from Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University and an MFA in Dance from Hollins University in partnership with the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, and The Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany. As a dance creative, Leslie highlights unique individual contributions, digs into collective memory to engage with the world more imaginatively, and embodies an aesthetic that encompasses an organic form influenced by the Black and African Diaspora: Traditional West African, Black/African American vernacular/social dance, Improvisation, and Contemporary/Modern techniques derived from multiple continents. She received a 2017 Bessie award for Outstanding performer, a 2022 McKnight Fellowship for Choreographers, and a 2021 NDP Production grant. Leslie received a 2019-2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in dance. For more details, go to www.leslieparkerdance.com.

While at Camargo, Leslie will explore more deeply the practice of Black Dance Improvisation. As an opportunity to participate in a collective of international artists specializing in various forms of art and whose lived experiences reflect multicultural lives, her practice will include workshops stemming from collective learning to cultivate generative processes inspired by personal narratives. Leslie’s exploration prioritizes the futurity of Blackness and dance through collective remembrance as an embodied experience.

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.

(b. Costa Rica) Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez is a Visually Impaired choreographer and Disability advocate based in NYC. His work traces the ideological narratives contained in immigrant and disabled bodies. Nunez is a Dance/USA Fellow 2022, a Princeton University Arts Fellow 2022, and a Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellow 2018. His performances have been presented by The Joyce Theater, The Brooklyn Museum-The Immigrant Artist Biennale, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research at The Judson Church, and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. He has held residencies at Danspace Project, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Kitchen, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research. In 2020, Núñez was invited by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs to share his story as a disabled and formally undocumented immigrant during Immigrant Heritage Week. Núñez received his green card in 2018 and continues to be an advocate for undocumented, disabled immigrants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kendra J. Bostock 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.