—EMERGENYC ALUMNI—

Adrienne Nordin Manan, 2013 Adriana Nordin Manan is a Malaysian translator working between the English, Malay, and Spanish languages. She has translated short stories, essays, and poetry. Born, raised, and based in Kuala Lumpur, Adriana is fascinated by the expanse of stories as mirrors of society and monuments to the human condition. In 2019, her translation of “Pengap” by Lokman Hakim was shortlisted for The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a first for Malay language submissions in the history of the Prize. She is also a writer, playwright, researcher, and occasional art critic.

Aimée Lutkin, 2010 Aimée works as a writer in New York, and performed with Magnet sketch team Chico Splits and is now on team Just Karen, and has also performed her one person character show Peggy’s Orchard at the theater. She was on UCB Lloyd night team This Old House, wrote and performed in the running show The Bride of Murdery Heights and directed the webs series iteration. She’s studied sketch writing, performance and improv at Upright Citizens Brigade, The PIT, the Meisner technique at Maggie Flanigan Studios, and worked with performance art company The Wooster Group as a teaching

Aisha Jordan, 2008 Aisha Jordan is an Actor, Writer, and Producer in new media with a B.A. from The New School and M.A. in Arts and Politics from NYU. She’s a Podcast Producer at Lifetime and A&E for I Love a Lifetime Movie, The Table is Ours, and Origins of Hip Hop and Staff Writer at Black Nerd Problems. She’s Co-Executive Producer of the newly formed Village Park Productions with sketch comedy series #HashtagTheShow. Jordan was featured in Title X’s PSA on reproductive rights, and HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness. She’s a member of the Writer’s Guild of America East.

Alejandro Chellet, 2018 Alejandro Chellet is a multidisciplinary artist and social practitioner in cultural and permacultural networks. He was born in Mexico City raised in a family of artists and performers, he currently lives between Upstate NY where he practices permaculture and NYC-CDMX where he is also a cultural producer curating and providing exhibition space for other artists. His artwork functions in close relation with the audience primarily making use of waste, public space, architecture and performance: addressing the misplaced core principles of coexistence, the loss of connection with Nature cycles, and the political and environmental context of urban societies.

Alex Rodabaugh, 2013 Alex Rodabaugh creates performances within the lineage of dance and choreography. Alex’s work includes found performance, dance generated from numerical scores, improvisation, and both found and written text, with a primary focus on framing. Pointing toward the performance of everyday interaction, mass spectacle, illegible manipulation and modes of disorientation and control, these performances question good faith and reveal manifestations of power. alexrodabaugh.work

Alicia Raquel Morales, 2014 Alicia Raquel Morales is a dancer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural organizer. Their aesthetic is quirky, queer, “spanglish,” Boricua, urban, nerdy and working class. Alicia grew up building altars, listening to and making up stories that straddle “real” and unseen worlds, and watching formal and informal ritual work. A child of street dance, these practices shape Alicia’s world view and style. In pandemic times, they have brought their dance practice back outdoors. Alicia is a former Dancing Futures and Skylab Artist in Residence, and a Brooklyn Arts Fund and NYFA Bridge Fund Recipient. They have danced with

Ama BE, 2018 Ama BE (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring dimensions of embodiment through ritual-adjacent performance, digital and screen-based media, She probes porous distinctions between materiality, sentience and memory as it relates to migrations. ​Centering her Ghanaian heritage and American upbringing, she interrogates materials with antithetical ties to hegemonic trade, spirituality, and healing through the use of tobacco, sugarcane, palm oil, (bodies of) water, and lace in her practice. Her practice obscures definitions of time, presence, and embodiment, to evaluate the effects of commodification on literal and conceptual bodies and develop conceptual frameworks for “African futurist” performativity/ performance art.

Amalia Oliva Rojas, 2020 Amalia Oliva Rojas is a Mexican poet, performer, and theater artivist based in Nueva York. Her work centers and archives the stories, myths, and legends told by her family, her community, and fellow immigrant women. Raised by oral storytellers, Amalia strives with her collection of work to leave future generations stories of heartache, radical joy, and hope. She is a proud alumnus of the Vassar College Powerhouse Theater Apprentice Program and CUNY Lehman College. Recent credits include  A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Succeed in the Myth-Making Business (Theater Accident and The Exposition Review-Journal). During her time at EMERGE, Amalia

Amelia Uzategui Bonilla, 2009 Amelia (she/they) creates curriculum and performances influenced by decoloniality and Postmigranten subjectivities. Born in Peru, and raised in California, they have collaborated with Anna Halprin, the Tamalpa Institute, Tino Sehgal, Marina Abramović, Luna Dance Institute, NAKA Dance Theater, and Cunamacué. They completed a BFA in Dance at the Juilliard School and an MA in Contemporary Dance Education at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. Currently based in Frankfurt, Germany, Amelia serves on the board of ID_Frankfurt e.V. (Independent Dance and Performance) and co-leads the Tanzhaus Frankfurt Rhein-Main. FB @AmeliaUzateguiBonilla IG @sin_adjetivoameliauzategui.com

Ana Laura Ramírez Ramos, 2017 Ana Laura is a Mexican artivist and cabaret performer who enjoys making humor. Based in Mexico City, she is the founder of the cabaret company Parafernalia Teatro (2011) and a member of Las Reinas Chulas Cabaret y Derechos Humanos AC (2013). She is a FONCA Scenic Creators scholarship holder (2017). IG @AnaLauraRRTwitter @AnaLauraRR 

Ana María Agüero Jahannes, 2019 Ana María Agüero Jahannes is a space-maker, handicrafter, and acrobatic dancer based in Brooklyn and New Orleans who illuminates the potentiality of Black imagination and intelligence. She examines how people worldwide fashion their environments and how that reflects the way they see themselves.  

Anazé Izquierdo, 2014 Anazé Izquierdo (Ana Carolina Izquierdo) : is a peruvian genderqueer brooklyn based visual, performance artist-activist and organizer born and raised in Lima, Peru. / February 23, 1990 . Anazé as an organizer is the founder of “Encuentro / Espacio abierto a libre performance”, an international performance art festival in Lima, Perú. Organizer and founder of “Dinámicas de Intercambio”, open debate and lectures about performance art and semantics. Anazé completed EMERGENYC, an artist-activist fellowship at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, an investigation in technique, somatics, improvisation, composition and other areas in MELT Program in

Andre Ignacio Dimapilis, 2015 Andre Ignacio Dimapilis (he/him) is a Filipinx-American culture-bearing performance artist, sound facilitator, and peaceful warrior. My art-making in theatre, sound, movement, text, building relationships and rituals are in harmony with the truths that I live as Filipinx-American, a male POC living in the current times working towards social and racial justice. I have created performance art focused on representing the Filipinx-American experience and its vast diaspora. I am the founder of Kalayaan Sound LLC. Kalayaan is the Filipinx word for freedom, using sound from indigenous and traditional instruments for participants to re-connect and re-member the freedom

Andrea Ambam, 2020 Andrea Ambam is an NYC-based artist, actress, and playwright whose roots sprout from Cameroon. As a politically engaged theatre artist who believes in the art’s potential for movement building and transformative justice, her current work centers Black lives and embodied ethnography. She is a 2020 Artist-in-Residence for Anna Deavere Smith’s class “One Person Shows,” a 2020 EmergeNYC Fellow, a fellow at Girls Write Now, and a 10-time national champion in public speaking and dramatic performance where she has been awarded “Top Speaker in the Nation” three times. She has performed at, written for, and/or been commissioned as

Anel Rakhimzanova, 2020 Anel Rakhimzhanova researches neo-colonial surveillance infrastructure and algorithmic discriminatory mechanisms. As a part of EMERGE 2020 cohort, she engaged with the Xinjiang victims database and the violence around evidence creation. She is currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at New York University, focusing on human/technology/capital/labor/ideology movements across One Belt One Road, transnational Silk Road revival initiative.  

Angela Veronica Wong, 2018 Angela Veronica Wong is a poet, writer, artist, and educator based in NYC. She is the author of elsa: an unauthorized autobiography (Black Radish 2017). Chapbooks include the Poetry Society of America New York Fellowship winning Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter. Poems have been anthologized in Please Excuse This Poem: 100 poems for the next generation and Best American Poetry (collaboration with Amy Lawless). Fiction has appeared Denver Quarterly and other journals. Performance work has been featured in independent galleries in Buffalo, Toronto, and New York City. Twitter @avwusesherwords angelaveronicawong.com

Angelica Monteiro, 2021 Angelica Monteiro (she/her) is a storyteller, educator, and movement artist from the Brazilian Amazon. Her art comes from the complexity of growing up between the rainforest and the urban landscape while also crossing continental borders. She combines movements from the umbrella of street dances, Amazonian traditions, visionary fiction, and poetry to create her embodied storytelling methodology. Angelica is passionate about creating bridges instead of borders through her art. She has a BA in Dance and Education from Universidade Federal do Pará (Brazil) and an MFA in Dance and Social Justice from the University of Texas at Austin

Anooj Bhandari, 2017 Anooj is a community organizer and multi-disciplinary performance artist, combining curiosity around spaces of transition, waiting, conflict, contest, and unknown, with histories of community organizing and movement building in an attempt to decolonize and reconstruct concepts of dignity and love. Anooj is an abolitionist who believes that friendship is the playground for understanding, embodying, and manifesting surveillance-free space, and uses his playwriting practice to uplift narratives that reveal the wonder of holding lonely questions within companionship. Within his live performance practice, Anooj likes to contend with what it means to have a body through poetics, body-horror/body-nonsense, and movement.

Anoushka Ratnarajah, 2012 Anoushka Ratnarajah (she/her) is a queer bi-racial woman, and an artivist, writer and performer. She has an MA in Arts Politics at NYU and was a fellow in the Hemispheric Institute’s Emerging Artist Program. She is currently collaborating on “Capital, Alice!” an anti-capitalist Alice in Wonderland musical with Lucid Dream Productions in Vancouver, Canada. IG @the_noush

Anthonywash.Rosado, 2015  Anthonywash.Rosado is a queer Afro-Boricua storytraveler and Nuyorican cultural curator. As of 2013, he/she/they produced free and public multimedia art salons at Make The Road NY, May Day Space, Starr Bar, Brooklyn Fire Proof, Five Myles Gallery, Rush Arts Philanthropic, and David & Schweitzer. Rosado was Artist in Residence at Chez Bushwick, Movement Research, The Hemispheric Institute, The Loisaida Center, Arts East NY, and El Museo De Los Sures. Rosado published literary work for Arts in Bushwick, Posture Magazine, The Tenth Magazine, and Imagining: A Gibney Journal. As their curatorial practice fellow, Rosado curated “ARCANUM,” the 2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship

Arantxa Araujo, 2017 Arantxa is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist with a background in neuroscience based in NYC interested in repetition and duration to access heightened states of awareness. Their work explores biobehavioral research, gender constructions and politics of migration; its affects and consequences in the construction of identity. They hold an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College. CONACYT scholarship holder, 2012. FB @ArantxaAraujoIG @ArantxaAraujo Twitter @ArantxaAraujoarantxaaraujo.com

Arian Nakhaie, 2018 Fihi Ma Fihi’s (“FMF”) founder Arian Nakhaie has 15+ years in a variety of roles, industries and countries which culminated in its creation. The organization is named after and based on the spirit of 13th-century mystic, jurist and poet Rumi’s philosophical treatise, which translates as “Signs of the Unseen”. The idea is that the truest answers come from a deeper internal space, an “Unseen realm”, so to speak. Rumi said “the wound is where the light enters.” Many times people run from their problems, staying in denial. If a wound is neglected, it festers and can lead

Ariel Speedwagon, 2010 Ariel Speedwagon’s work has been seen extensively on Broadway, Lafayette, Fulton, Chrystie, Avenue A, Leonard, and many other fine streets and avenues throughout New York City. Trained as a modern dancer, Ariel’s inherently interdisciplinary work has taken many forms — interactive sculpture, modern dance and dance theater, drag performance and burlesque, collective mapmaking, clowning, and video art. Most interested in the intersections of storytelling, participatory environments, magic, and democratizing knowledge, Ariel has tap danced about limericks, lectured about unicorns, made slapstick about apartheid, and built telephones that tell secrets. arielspeedwagon.com (in retirement)

Arun Storrs, 2008 Arun was five years old. She was cast as Wendy in her kindergarten’s production of Peter Pan and got to walk the plank off a boat built with furry blocks. Arun received a degree in Theater and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale, performing original works at the Baryshnikov Art Center with the Yale Dance Theater program. She created original works as part of NYU’s EMERGENYC inaugural program for young artists of color and starred in the indie-comedy horror bromance, Ninja Zombies (released domestically and internationally). Most recently, you can see her in the upcoming film A

Ashley Brockington, 2015 Ashley Brockington’s (she/her) New York City chapter started in 2001. Her first theater family was Circus Amok, a politically-minded queer circus that provides free art to the people. In 2006, Ashley joined the Femmes of the WOW café theater collective where she produced orginal work and produced cabarets for a demi-decade. After acquiring a theater degree from Brooklyn College, she joined forces with the New York Neo-Futurists, writing 2-minute plays for a lower east side audience. Presently, Ashley lives on the high seas as The Charmer for Virgin Voyages. Her specialties: tarot, astrology and being charming AF.

Ashley Marinaccio, 2008 Ash Marinaccio (she/her) iscurrently a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY GraduateCenter, writing a dissertation on nonfiction/documentary theatre-making inwar zones. She is a multidisciplinary documentarian working in theatre,photography, and film. Ash is the creator ofDocbloc (docbloc.org), which brings together documentary artists workingacross genres. Learn more about Ash: ashmarinaccio.com and ashmarinacciophotography.com IG @ashmarinaccio

Aya Aziz, 2013 Aya Aziz is a songwriter and performance artist based between New York and Beirut, Lebanon. Aya wrote and performed her first full production, Sitting Regal by the Window, in 2014 at the Metro Al-Madina Theater in Beirut. The show then featured in both the Fringe and Planet Connections Theater Festivity festivals in New York. The re-written iteration of the show, now titled Eh Dah? Questions for my father was produced by the Hypokrit Theatre Company the following year and taken to the summer 2016 New York Musical Festival. There at NYMF, Eh Dah? won the award for Most Outstanding Book and Aya

Azure D. Osborne-Lee, 2014 Azure D. Osborne-Lee (he/they) is a multi-award-winning Black queer & trans  theatre maker from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. He holds an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice (2011) from Royal Central School of Speech & Drama as well as an MA in Women’s & Gender Studies (2008) and a BA in English & Spanish from The University of Texas at Austin (2005). Recipient of Waterwell New Works Lab’s 2021 Commission, Kilroys List 2020 playwright, recipient of Parity Productions’ 2018 Annual Commission, Winner of Downtown Urban Arts Festival’s 2018 Best Play Award, and the 2015 Mario Fratti-Fred

Beatrice Glow, 2008 Beatrice Glow (she/her) is an interdisciplinary and multisensory artist working in service of public history and just futures. Through diasporic and decolonial lens, she interrogates the visual languages of luxury and power derived through the exploitation of botanical life. Her solo exhibitions include Once the Smoke Clears, Baltimore Museum of Art, 2022, Forts and Flowers, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taiwan, 2019, and Aromérica Parfumeur, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile, 2016. Her work has been supported by Yale-NUS College, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, and the Fulbright

Bekah Dinnerstein, 2008

Bex Kwan, 2016 Bex Kwan Bex Kwan is a multimedia artist, organizer, social worker, and athlete. They are a core trainer with the Anti Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA). Bex is currently in collaboration with Sophia Mak (EMERGE’16) creating performances which unearth secret histories of foreignness, family mythologies, and kinship in East Asian communities in the United States. IG @soandbex soandbex.com

Bloom Osuala, 2020 Bloom is a multidisciplinary creative activist based in NYC who explores the relationship between systemic oppression, trauma, and emotional abuse among women/woman-identified people in Africana Diaspora. Through song, poetry, and performance, Bloom researches the manifestations of this intersection in the body and in art/creative expression. 

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, 2008 (and Invited Alumni Faculty, 2015–16) Creator, showrunner, writet, and executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins debuts as TV creator of FX’s Kindred, a chilling adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s seminal 1979 sci-fi novel. Previous TV roles include consulting producer on HBO’s Watchmen and Prime Video’s Outer Range. Considered one of the most important American playwrights working today, Jacobs-Jenkins’ works include An Octoroon, Girls, Gloria, Appropriate, and Everybody. Residency Five playwright at the Signature Theatre, with new world premiere scheduled for spring 2023. Awards: Obie, Charles Wintour, and Tennessee Williams awards; a MacArthur “Genius” Grant; 2020 Guggenheim and 2020 USA

C. Meranda Flachs-Surmanek, 2018 C. Meranda Flachs-Surmanek (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artivist (theatre-maker, visual artist, poet and organizer) living between Virginia and New York. They are a 2022 MFA/MS Candidate in Theatre: Directing & Public Dialogue and Urban & Regional Planning at Virginia Tech. 2018-19: Artist-in-Residence at Queens Library with ProjectArt, Fellow at The Performance Project at University Settlement and Participant in Theater of Change: Artistry, Law, and Activism with Broadway Advocacy Coalition at Columbia Law School. From 2017-18, they participated in the Mitchell Art Gallery’s Artist-in-Residence program, The Art & Law Program, and the C4AA’s Art Action Academy. courtneysurmanek.comIG

C. Tai Tai, 2020 C. Tai Tai (she/her) is a performance and installation artist based in Chicago, with roots in New York and California. Historically, she danced under the name, Tina Wang.Identity, fragility, and resilience are key themes in her work, which draws on her experience as a Taiwanese citizen raised in Latin America. By immersing the body around the objects of menial labor, she challenges assumptions about where these objects belong, who belongs with them, and their relationship to living bodies. She is currently in the MFA program for Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. IG @taitaistudiostinawang.net

Camilo Godoy, 2014 Camilo Godoy is an artist and educator born in Bogotá, Colombia and based in New York, United States. He was a 2018 Session Artist, Recess; 2018 Artist-in-Residence, Leslie-Lohman Museum; 2018 Artist-in-Residence, coleção moraes-barbosa; 2017 Artist-in-Residence, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP); 2015-2017 Artist-in-Residence, Movement Research; among others. His work has been presented in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, CUE, Danspace Project, New York; Mousonturm, Frankfurt; Moody Center, Houston; Toronto Biennial, Toronto; UNSW Galleries, Sydney; among others. camilogodoy.com

Candace Hudert, 2021 Candace Hudert (any pronouns) is a multidisciplinary mess-maker and artist from Richmond, VA. From creating video games, to directing theatre, to writing for animation and more, his work is clown and queer. It aims to stretch the world into something more caring, more attentive, more curious, more liberated, and more playful. Xe studied directing at Sarah Lawrence College and the National Theater Institute, physical theatre at Accademia dell’Arte in Arezzo, Italy, and clowning at Mooseburger Clown Arts Camp. Writing: https://candacehudert.wixsite.com/writer & Games: https://whatnames.itch.io/ Candace’s Website 

Carlos Monroy, 2012 An immigrant in São Paulo, Brazil, Carlos Monroy (Bogotá, 1984) is a Colombian visual and performance artist with a tropical-Andean heart. His performances and installations question the boundaries between so-called highbrow, popular, and mass culture repertoires, revealing colonial structures of power and thinking, as well as the institutional boundaries performance art practices have come to acquire inside the art world. Monroy completed a bachelor’s degree in Arts at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia (2008) and an MFA at Universidade de São Paulo USP, Brazil (2014). In 2017, he won the research prize award of the 32º MGLC

Carolina Tapias Guzmán, 2011 Carolina is a theatre teaching artist and cultural worker whose practice of theater and performance focuses on collective artistic creation that links the personal with its context. Victoria holds a Fine Arts degree from the National University of Colombia, and an MA in Applied Theatre and Performance from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has led educational programs at the Cartoon National School, the National Museum and the Children and Development Corporation in Colombia. Currently, Victoria is a collaborator of Madalenas Teatro das Oprimidas.

Carolina Teixeira, 2021 Carolina Teixeira is a Brazilian artist, performer, and political activist. She is a disabled woman and her work concerns the phenomenon of Disability as a political instrument of art and resistance. The anti-forms, the bodiedness collapse, and the politics of access are the artistic context of her Prosthetic Poetics. karullina8.wixsite.com/meusite

Chelsea Gregory, 2016 Chelsea Gregory is a dance theater artist, cultural organizer and facilitator who weaves embodied arts together with equity work, community building, healing and restorative practices. She is inspired by working with brilliant folks like Urban Bush Women, Artists Co-Creating Real Equity, Cornerstone Theater Company, PowerTools for Progress, PopUP Theatrics and others that bring about radical change through creative process. FB @chelsea.m.gregorychelseagregory.com

Chris Tyler, 2012 Chris is a Los Angeles-based playwright and performing artist examining the intersections of popular culture, collective action and digital identity. Recent projects include the Make America series (Ars Nova), Their food tastes better when they see us starving (The Brick), flesh failure (The Civilians’ R&D Group), R*NT (University Settlement), and TOTAL REJECTS LIVE!!! (Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival). His performance style has been called “equal parts hilarious and chilling” (Fusion), “precise-yet-butchered” (Out Magazine) and “so cute” (Taylor Swift). AB: Brown University.

Christian Cruz, 2021 Christian Cruz is a conceptual artist, educator, and independent arts writer. Cruz is the creator of Dallas Performance Art Index and of Artist Mama Fund. In 2021, she was awarded grants from NALAC, PAAL, Aurora Dallas, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She’s currently in residence with INVERSE // Momentary. She’s a mother and a survivor. IG @tejanastorieschristiancruzperformance.com

Clare Barron, 2008 Clare Barron is a playwright and performer from Wenatchee, Washington. Her plays include DANCE NATION, which was the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Relentless Award, and recently received its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York City and the Almeida Theatre in London. Other plays include YOU GOT OLDER (Obie Award), and I’LL NEVER LOVE AGAIN.

Clarivel Ruiz, 2017 We, the daughter from the land called Kiskeya Ayiti (aka Hispaniola aka Dominican Republic and Haiti), a land colonized but never conquered, raised in New York City on the ancestral bones and covered shrines of the Lenape people. Founder, Dominicans Love Haitians Movement, an art practice developed to heal wounds created by racial divides and historical myths. Educational Equity coach at CSS, Metro NYU. Asé. IG @dominicanslovehaitiansmovement

Clark Stoeckley 2010 Clark Stoeckley is an interdisciplinary artist and activist working in photography, drawing, mural painting, performance, video, and interactive media. His latest work includes photographs of stray cats in the Middle East and vibrant geometrical abstract murals. As a courtroom artist, he authored a graphic novel, The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning. He earned an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Art from Brooklyn College and a BFA in Studio Art from Webster University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art & Graphic Design at the American University of Kuwait. IG @clark_stoeckly | feral_feline_photography clarkstoeckly.com

Claudia Sofía Garriga López, 2010 Claudia Sofía Garriga-López is an Assistant Professor of Queer and Trans Latinx Studies in the Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies of California State University, Chico. After participating in EMERGE Claudia went on to be a part of the Art and Resistance course in San Cristóbal de las Casas, México. She is thrilled to be a part of the hemi family because there are always events, programs, and people, that bring politics and art together in meaningful ways.

Courtney Brown, 2016 Courtney Brown is an artist, organizer, curator and non-profit administrator with a background in grant writing, proposal development, campaign strategy and donor relations. Her performance work is grounded in ritual, autobiography, endurance and memory. She scores performative systems that allow for the exploration of time through embodied relationships focusing on the liminal space between art and the real. Brown has performed at the 2015 Bronx Museum of Art as part of the ITINERANT Performance Art Festival and Art League Houston during the 2014 Houston International Performance Art Biennal. She has presented work in formal and alternative spaces

Courtney Frances Fallon, 2020 Courtney Frances Fallon is a writer, director, artist, and performer living in Brooklyn. Growing up in Buffalo, she identified solely as a writer but her artistic practices expanded with her two first major projects: “You Know This Girl” – a one-person play she wrote, directed, and performed – and her “Vagina Postcards” series inspired by her research for the play. She now works in whatever format will best serve the concept. She’s interested in art as political action and recently expanded into urban interventions including installation and projection mapping. She is a proud member of the

Cristóbal Guerra, 2021 Cristóbal Guerra (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist from San Juan, PR. With a background in film and screenwriting, his current work fluctuates between or combines photography, video and text seeking to create and explore inner multiplicities, drawing from a Caribbean upbringing and a queer political identity. IG @farifos cristobalguerra.com

Damariz Damken, 2019 Damariz Damken is an artivist from the Rio Grande Valley Frontera of South Texas. She graduated from New York University in May 2019 with a concentration in Politics, Rights, and Development and Latin American Studies. Growing up on both sides of the border as a first-generation citizen from a Mexican immigrant family and daughter of undocumented parents, her work explores fronterizx landscapes to reclaim and deconstruct hemispheric border imaginaries as an approach to social justice and human rights. IG @damarizzd

Daniel Giordano, 2015 Daniel Giordano (he/him) was born in 1988. He lives and works in Newburgh, NY. Giordano earned his MFA from the University of Delaware. Solo exhibitions include the Rosenberg Gallery, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY; Wil Aballe Art Projects, BC, Canada; and Sardine, Brooklyn, NY. Group exhibitions include JDJ, New York, NY; Anonymous, New York, NY; Mother, Beacon, NY; and Morgan Lehman, New York, NY. He is a recipient of the AIM fellowship at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Giordano’s work has been featured in Art Spiel, Canadian Art, Cultured Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The New

Danyele Brown, 2020 Danyele is a Black biracial, transwoman set-maker from Virginia, working at the intersection of performance, social practice, and sculpture. She creates her multidisciplinary, time-based sets by merging and cycling roles as performer, organizer and sculptress. Currently Danyele organizes with For The Gworls around Black trans health and housing justice, and she holds a Public Engagement Fellowship at Dia Art Foundation (2019-2021). Danyele has shown work at the Anderson Family Collection, FABnyc, Dance Place, Performance Space NY. She is represented by the House of Nina Oricci and received her BA in African American Studies from Stanford University (2019).

David Sierra, 2017 David Sierra is an artist, scholar, and writer practicing and researching performance and production in many contexts. Sierra reads and writes about sex, science, fiction, and language. Her artistic practices are concerned with embodied experiences of movement and sound in procedural settings, horror, and medical technology. She holds a BA in English literature and gender studies from Columbia University and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch. Sierra currently works as the Artist Programs Coordinator at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and Digital Media Editor for Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.

Denae Hannah, 2012 Denae Hannah, a native of Fort Worth, Texas, is a performance artist, social entrepreneur, and Artistic Director and CEO of Denae Dance Theatre. She received her B.A. in Drama from Stanford University and M.F.A. in Performance and Choreography from Florida State University. Ms. Hannah was a 2012 EMERGENYC artist and a 2012-2013 Commissioned Artist at Stanford University. Her work was performed for Parent’s Weekend and for the Dance Division’s winter dance concert “Performing Past, Fast Forward: The Body in 3D.” gabrielgtorres.com

Dennis Redmoon Darkeem, 2012 I am inspired to create art work based on the familiar objects that I view through my daily travels. I ultimately set out to express a meaningful story about events in my life and those found with the communities I work. I utilize different media in the creation of my work. This allows for great versatility and a rich viewer experience as the eye uncovers the multiple layers that often characterize mixed media art. Much of my art has focused on issues like institutionalized racism and classism, jarring stereotypes, and displacement of people of color. dennisredmoondarkeem.com

Doménica García, 2019 Doménica García is an Ecuadorian video and performance artist based in NY. She obtained a BFA in Film at the School of Visual Arts, 2018. Her work dives into a process of introspection, breaking down the personal and discovering the universal. By juxtaposing the radical and the ordinary, she gives greater relevance to the day to day experience. domenicagarcia.com

Dominic Cinnamon Bradley, 2012 Raised in the crunk-era “Dirty South,” Dominic Cinnamon Bradley (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based Black disabled queer visual artist, writer, and performer. In 2021 they were a RiseOut Activist-in-Residence fellow focusing on creating resources and conversation about mental health on behalf of BIPOC LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers. Currently, Dominic is co-editing a book on disability artistry as well as designing a writing workshop series on disenfranchised grief. Follow Dominic on Instagram (@domdoesdreams) and check out their website: www.domdoesdreams.com.

Edgar Javier Ulloa Luján, 2015 Édgar J. Ulloa Luján is a performance artist and poet from Ciudad Juárez, México. He founded a pioneer multimedia poetry blog Mi Juaritos. His performances negotiate border politics, cultural memory, trauma, immigration, and violence in addition to instigating audience and public participation. Ulloa has performed in PEN World Voices Festival–PEN America, México Now Festival in NYC, and The Poetry Festival in México City. Ulloa’s work was included by CONACULTA in the first national anthology of visual poetry in México. He was the 2016 Emerge-Surface-Be Poetry Fellow from the Poetry Project in NYC.

Edward Mcwilliams, 2008

Effie Nkrumah, 2017 Effie Nkrumah is an interdisciplinary artist and poet of Ghanaian descent brought up in Sydney, Australia. She has worked creatively between Sydney, Accra, and New York granting her a unique sense of humour, aesthetic & keen observation. She holds an MA in Arts Politics from NYU. Twitter @benumahbenumah.com

Elena Rose Light, 2017 Elena Rose Light (they/she) is a choreographer, performer, and cultural worker originally from Southern California (Micqanaqa’n) currently splitting time between Brooklyn (Lenapehoking) and Giessen, Germany. Their choreographic work is rooted in the potential for somatic empathy to reorganize systems of thought and governance. Their performances have been presented by Abrons Arts Center, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, The Current Sessions, University Settlement, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. Recent honors and residencies include the danceWEB scholarship at ImPulsTanz, LiftOFF, LANDING, Chez Bushwick, and EMERGENYC. They collaborate on producing/administrative projects with Anna

Elyla Barahona, 2020 Elyla is a cochónx barro-mestiza, a non-binary performance artist and activist. Their work often moves between video-performance, installations, photo-performance, experimental theatre, radical activism and site specific political interventions. Elyla is the first Nicaraguan artist to receive an Emerging Artist grant by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in 2018. They’ve presented their work for The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU Encuentros in 2014, 2016, and 2019. Biennials include the IX/X Biennial of Nicaragua, IX/X Central American Biennials and the XII Biennial of Havana, Cuba. They are a member and founder of Operación Queer (2013) collective formed

Emilio Martínez Poppe, 2018 Emilio Martínez Poppe is an artist working across installation, performance, participatory projects, and research-based collaborative projects. Their work engages collectivity, its practices, and lived/speculative legacies of belonging through spatial or linguistic formations. Emilio has exhibited their work at FIERMAN, the Queens Museum, CUE Art Foundation, and Flux Factory in New York City; Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond, in Amsterdam. They have been an artist in residence at Abrons Arts Center and Pratt Institute; and a fellow at The Laundromat Project. Emilio is currently an MFA-MCP dual-degree candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of

Emily Waters, 2019 Emily Waters is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist grounded in a Black theater tradition that explores the roles of witness and testimony in collective and intergenerational healing. In 2020 Emily created a solo-short commissioned by All for One Theater Company and was part of the inaugural cohort of Black Revolutionary Theater Workshop’s Revolution Now! residency. In June 2021 Emily will premier their new work, Look Back At It, as part of The Shed’s open call program. This show has roots in the questions Emily explored during her time as an Emerge fellow. How do we remember? Who do

Emma Alabaster, 2014 Born and raised in Brooklyn, Emma Alabaster works as a musician, composer, cultural organizer, and educator throughout New York City. Emma performs under her name and with decibelists. She music-directed poet Cornelius Eady’s band, Rough Magic and has collaborated with many artists as a bassist and vocalist. Emma is a Teaching Artist in public schools, and was a 2017 Lincoln Center Boro-Linc Artist-in-Residence. As a member-leader with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ,) Emma creates cultural work and leads songs in meetings and in the streets to support and sustain social movements. emmaalabaster.com

Estrellx Supernova, 2016 Estrellx/EHQS embodies a they/them energetics and straddles the roles of choreographer, performer, curator, writer and somatic entrepreneur. They have many diasporic roots and call themselves the Cosmic Energetic Orchestrator of The Universe of Rhizomatic Tenderness (TUoRT), an emerging ecosystem and social enterprise being choreographed by and for the financial, spiritual, erotic, and artistic empowerment of Queer, Trans Creatives of the Global Majority and Allies. Choreographically, Estrellx integrates club spaces as sites of generative dissonance and asks, “Are we celebrating or mourning or both? What do you really want and how exactly do you want it?” IG @corporealidades.sutiles

Fernanda Coppel, 2008 Fernanda Coppel (she/her) is a Mexican/American playwright and screenwriter. Her play King Liz received its world premiere at Second Stage Theater in 2015. King Liz was published by Samuel French and has recently been optioned by ABC Signature and 42 for television. Fernanda will be penning the pilot. Her professional New York debut, Chimichangas and Zoloft premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2012 and is published by Samuel French. Fernanda received the New Play Commission from Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2015 where she wrote her latest play: AYA or Dear Lover. She’s currently working on a

  Flora Mendoza, 2009 Flora Mendoza, SAG-AFTRA, is a mezzo-soprano and voice actor. Graduating with distinction from Yale in Latin American Studies for a thesis on nueva canción, Flora studied at the Yale School of Music and co-founded Teatro de Yale. In the Bay Area, she performs with the SF Symphony Chorus, Capella SF, and originated the role of The Owl in Opera Cultura’s adaptation of Bless Me, Ultima. She received an MPA from NYU as a Goldberg Fellow in Public Service & Philanthropy. As an advocate, Flora led the Polyphony Foundation before joining Change Research, a public benefit company,

Fontaine Capel, 2020 Fontaine Capel is a New York City born-and-based interdisciplinary artist, facilitator, and educator. Capel has presented performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, and the Jewish Museum; has exhibited work at galleries and project spaces in the U.S. and abroad; has attended residencies at Residencia Corazón (La Plata, Argentina), ACRE, and the Chicago Artists Coalition; and has been awarded international travel grants, including a fellowship from the Cuba One Foundation. Capel has led and collaborated on many public projects, including founding alternative art spaces Hume Chicago and Sill Space Projects, and co-organizing

Francheska Alcántara, 2016 Francheska is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from The Bronx who looks at domestic life and signifiers of Caribbean culture and the diaspora to explore slippages of identity, fragmentation, and longing. They graduated with a MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and hold a BFA in Painting from Hunter College and a BA in Art History from Old Dominion University. In addition, she’s a U.S. Navy veteran. Alcántara has exhibited and performed work at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum, La Mama Theater, Grace Exhibition Space, and BronxArtSpace.

Frantz Jerome, 2008 An inaugural EMERGENYC cohort (2008) and 2050 Legacy ensemble member, Frantz Jerome collaborated with The Hemispheric Institute and participated in two Encuentros in São Paulo, Brazil (2013) and Montreal, Canada (2014). Frantz was invited to perform Spoken Word poetry by Harry Belafonte at The Interdependence Day Conference sponsored by DEMOS in Berlin, Germany (2010). He is a founding member of the artivist performance collective The Peace Poets, and staff writer for the PoC geek cultural editorial, Black Nerd Problems. Frantz holds a BA in Writing and Democracy from The New School. FB @freeverses IG @truevillainy Twitter @gymnasticpen

Gabriel Torres, 2020 Gabriel Torres is a Colombian, NYC-based, multidisciplinary artist and community organizer. Gabriel works at the intersection of theatre performance, film and community development. He has directed productions in Colombia, NYC and Hong Kong. During his time at Emerge, Gabriel investigated links between his ancestry and his present time, and how trauma affects those connections. IG @gabrielgtorrestgabrielgtorres.com

Gabriela Espinosa, 2015 Gabriela es creadora interdisciplinaria e intérprete de las artes escénicas, y ejerce como artista educadora y gestora cultural en Chile y Latinoamérica. Ha desarrollado una carrera creativa y artivista vinculada a temáticas e intervenciones socio-políticas. Se titula en Teatro en la Universidad Católica de Chile para luego especializarse en espacio público, pedagogía del oprimido, política y performance, y educación artística comunitaria. Actualmente ejerce su práctica en el norte de Chile trabajando en proyectos que vinculan arte y educación, colaborando con movimientos feministas y organizaciones afrodescendientes y es la actual profesora de Teatro del único Liceo Artístico de

Garrett Sager, 2021 Garrett Sager (a.k.a. Melissabeth) (he/they/she) is a multidisciplinary artist with roots in theater and cabaret. His work often explores topics like pop culture and identity, queer time, and the creation of new genders via performance. Garrett is currently a member of the inaugural M.A. in Human Rights and the Arts cohort at Bard College. Learn more at garrettsager.com. IG @moomoo_magic garrettsager.combit.ly/wearequeerandnow

Getenesh Berhe, 2012 Getenesh Berhe is an Eritrean-Canadian actor and performance artist. Upon completion of training at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Hemispheric Institute at NYU, she began working as a theatre artist in various new works and Off-Off-Broadway productions. IG @getenesh

Gethsemane Herron-Coward, 2016 Gethsemane Herron-Coward is a poet/playwright from Washington, D.C. She has developed work with JAG Productions, The Hearth, Magic Time@Judson, and Playwright’s Playground at Classical Theatre of Harlem. She is alumna of 24Hour Plays-Nationals and The Fire This Time Festival. She has held residencies at The Virginia Center of the Creative Arts and the Millay Colony, where she was the recipient of the Yasmin Scholarship. She has been a finalist for Space on Ryder Farm, among others. She holds a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MFA from Columbia University.

Girino (aka LUA), 2017 Girino (aka Lua) is a Brazilian video & movement artist and scholar based in Brooklyn, and current PhD candidate at NYU’s Performance Studies. Their work happens amidst performance art, expanded cinema, contemporary dance, independent documentaries and undocumented phenomena. They are drawn to insurgent transgendering, prehensive performances, racial speculativity, precarious consistencies, abyssal subjectivities, micropolitical glitches, insistent choreographies and general delinquency. girino.net

Giseli Vasconcelos, 2013 Giseli is a cultural worker and interdisciplinary artist from Brazil based in US. She has been organizing festivals, workshops, exhibitions and publications that discuss media and technology related to the Brazilian scene of art and activism. Most of the projects are collaborative process that highlights practices on tactical media and radical pedagogies related to internet culture. Her work has already been presented in Quito (LabSurLab), Amsterdam (N5M), New Delhi (Sarai), Vienna (MQ21), Berlin (Radical Networks), São Paulo (31st Biennial of São Paulo, Sesc Pompeia), Rio de Janeiro (Capacete, Lastro). Twitter @gizz7comumlab.org

Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N., 2017 Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N. is the author of Warcries, and the poetic sequel Warcrimes as well as the photographic essay book Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): I Give of Myself  based on the five year iterations of Ain’t I a Woman (?/!).  They are a finalist for the CUE Foundation’s 2022 Public Programs Fellowship, as well as the 2020 Pushcart Nominee, 2018-2019 Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient, the 2018 Ragdale Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship Recipient, 2017 EMERGENYC Hemispheric Institute Fellow and the 2013- 2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow. They published the articles “Talking with My

Grace Taylor Rae, 2019 Grace Taylor Rae is an artist who works in movement, language and form. She graduated from Williams College with a BA in English and Philosophy in 2013. Grace creates through multidimensional linguistics, liberatory geometries and embodied narrative. Her work is guided by frameworks that affirm love, consent and reparative ecology. In EMERGE ’19 she focused her process in reimagining-as-healing the intersections of birth, memory, matter and time. Grace lives on unceded Abenaki territory (Upper Valley, Vermont).  IG @grace_living_designMedium @Grace.Living.Design

Guy Yedwab, 2013 Guy Yedwab ran a small theater company when the 2008 financial crisis propelled him into community organizing through the League of Independent Theater, an advocacy organization for small-sized theaters. As Managing Director, Guy led their work on union codes, endorsements in electoral campaigns, legislative advocacy, and social justice work. Guy is also a member of Brooklyn Community Board 6’s Economic, Waterfront, Community Development & Housing Committee. Now, he is pursuing a J.D. degree and a Master’s in Public Affairs and Politics from Rutgers University, where he recently received an Eagleton Fellowship in Politics and Government.

Heather Morowitz, 2010 For the last ten years, Heather Morowitz has worked as a web and traditional based creative production designer and concept artist in the creative and advertising industry on projects ranging in size and complexity, published for national and global audiences. Heather has also worked with media companies wearing multiple hats, leading and assisting in various capacities from digital to traditional production. Heather been fortunate to work with a wealth of talented people at high end producing companies, learning and growing alongside each of them. zmonsoon.com

Helen Gutowski, 2015 Helen Gutowski is a performing artist, writer, and activist working in the experimental theater, post modern dance, performance art, poetry, and academic theory. Alumnus of the EmergeNYC program (2015.) BFA in Acting from the Experimental Theater Wing, NYU (2013) and MA in Performance Studies, NYU (2018.) She honors the Siksika Nation as well as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory for their contributions to this performance, to science, and to society. References also include Ken Burns’ The West.

Irisdelia Garcia, 2020 Irisdelia Garcia (she/they) is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist from The Bronx, NY. Her work centers Puerto Rican history, embodiment in gender, colonialism, and digital storytelling. She is a member of Queer and Now’s Digital Cabarets, digital humanities lab IRLHumanities, and a collaborator of La Pocha Nostra. Garcia is currently a director and editor for Ping Chong and Company. Garcia was an inaugural Generation NYZ Fellow for Ping Chong + Company (2019-2020). She holds a BA in English with a concentration in Digital Humanities at Amherst College and a Multicultural Theater Practice Certificate through the Five College

Isadora Frost, 2019 Isadora Frost (Brasil, 1985) graduated from PUC São Paulo in 2009 with a degree in Performance Art and Dance. In 2014, Frost completed her degree in Fine Arts at The San Francisco Art Institute. In 2018, she received a Masters degree in Photography from Parsons School of Design at The New School and was an EmergeNYC participant at NYU 2019. Frost’s work mixes media and deals with the relationship between the body, space, and communities. Since 2008, her work has been featured internationally in Brazil, San Francisco, New Zealand, India, New York, Russia, China, Munich, London, and

Jadele McPherson, 2011 Jadele McPherson is an artist-scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of sound and healing, mutual aid, and performance in Florida, Haiti and Cuba. McPherson is currently a PhD student in the CUNY Graduate Center Anthropology Department and teaching fellow with the Mellon Seminar for Collaborative Research and Engagement where she is researching how sound impacts wellness, climate change & environmental sustainability. As a founder of Lukumi Arts (2008), an experimental theatre company focused on Afro-Cuban arts, she wrote and produced La Sirene: Rutas de Azúcar which debuted at JACK (2016), in the HERE Arts SANCTUARY series,

janet e. dandridge, 2019 janet e. dandridge is an Interdisciplinary Artivist who encourages awareness and discourse around, as well as solutions to, ideologies that perpetuate injustice.  janet intersplices theatrical performance, photography, empirical data, identity politics, and whimsy into a keen reflection on social constructs and governing policies.  Primarily using performance art, interactive installations, and abstract photography, janet examines trauma and resilience, geometric therapy, normalized racism, Otherness, and the power of Black women.  As an example of her work, in Amendment: Knell of a Nation (AKN), janet uses her body as a beacon of strength to physically remove the dehumanizing and marginalizing

Janine Renee Cunningham, 2018 Brooklyn based organizer and theater-maker, Janine Renee Cunningham has presented work at the Prelude Festival and On the Boards, among others. She holds a BA in International Studies from Portland State University and is completing her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College. janinereneecunningham.com

Jasmine Hayden, 2021 Jasmine is a queer Black, Mexican Indigenous multidisciplinary artist, healer, social equity facilitator & consultant, and soul embodied leadership coach. She embraces co-creative multidimensionality and expresses her artistry through singing, dance, modeling, acting, directing, and film production, fusing genres & styles into cultural artifacts of celebration, empowerment, magic, remembrance, & unity. She founded a theatre for social change company in 2015 and since then has merged various art forms to catalyze social & spiritual awakening and transformation through self & community expression. From leading programs & trainings within higher institutions and non-profit sectors in the reams of

Jason Wang, 2021 Jason Wang (they/he) is a Queer Chinese-American playwright, actor, and game developer from Queens, NY. He is currently wrapping up his education at NYU Tisch Drama’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School. Their EmergeNYC project was “Ranked Choice Dating”- a video game where you can attempt to get down and dirty with Eric Adams, Andrew Yang, and more. (You can download it for free on itch.io!). Special shoutout to collaborator Candace Hudert ’21 🙂 IG @flybippo @rathousegames   

Jennif(f)er Tamayo, 2016 Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer currently living and working on Patwin and Ohlone lands. JT is the daughter of Nancy, Flora, Leonor, Sol, and Ana. Her poetry and art collections include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011), Poems are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof Books 2013), DORA/ANA/GUATAVIT@ (RSH 2016), YOU DA ONE (2017 Noemi Books & Letras Latinas’s Akrilica Series), and to kill the future in the present (Green Lantern Press 2018). She’s a Cancer sun & Leo rising. IG @lxs_revoltosxsjennifertamayo.com

Jennifer Celestin, 2013 Jennifer Celestin is a writer, performer, and facilitator from Brooklyn, NY. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. in Humanities at NYU and an M.F.A. in Fiction at CUNY: Queens College. She has performed at numerous venues in NYC and her publication credits include No Dear, Magazine and The Hawai’i Review. She knows ou kapab leer esto. Li invite’ou to her multilingual imaginación.

Jesse Phillips-Fein, 2012 Jesse Phillips-Fein is a Brooklyn born and based dancer, choreographer, educator and mama. Her work has been presented at venues in New York, New Jersey, Colorado and Maine, and her writing on dance and race is published in several anthologies. IG @jesse_phlllips_feinTwitter @JessePFein 

John Maria Gutierrez, 2021; Reaearch Fellow 2023 John Maria Gutierrez is a multidisciplinary artist who performs on screen and stage nationally and internationally. From Washington Heights, a hood of NYC, his/their works weave movement, music, singing in English and Spanish, and experimental theater to unwind a complex urban disparity brought on by social and systemic failings. johnmariagutierrez.com

Jonathan McCrory, 2010 Jonathan McCrory (he/him) is an Obie Award-winning, Harlem-based artist who has served as Executive Artistic Director at National Black Theatre since 2012. He has directed numerous professional productions and concerts which include: A Drop Of Midnight, The Gathering: A Sonic Ringshout, How the Light Gets In, Klook and Iron John, Dead and Breathing, and Last Laugh. He was acknowledged as a finalist for the The Hermitage Major Theater Award and as an exceptional leader through Craine’s New York Business 2020 Notable LGBTQ Leaders and Executives. In 2013, he was awarded the Emerging Producer Award by the National

Jordan Elizabeth Reed, 2021 Jordan Elizabeth Reed is an Afro-Indigenous-Boricua theater, burlesque, and performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Since childhood, she has been a lover of art, singing, and performing. Originally from Western Mass, she is a 2017 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BA in Theater, a Minor in Political Science and a Certificate in Multicultural Theater. Currently, she does work acting, singing, devising, producing, curating, dramaturging, costume designing, and writing. Reed enjoys creating work that creates spaces of healing and community exploring movement, ancestry, gender, ensemble, horror, comedy, sensuality, ritual, body positivity, and glamour.

José Pérez IV, 2008 JOSÉ PÉREZ IV (he/him) is a fight choreographer, playwright, and actor. He is currently the Resident Fight Director of Pittsburgh Public Theater. His artistic focus is primarily creating original fight productions and facilitating processes that support mental health. Artistic Director of Big Storm Performance Company. MFA Performance Pedagogy University of Pittsburgh, BFA Drama NYU. Society of American Fight Directors member since 2009. IG @jose.perez.ivjosepereziv.com

Joyce LeeAnn Joseph, 2015 Joyce LeeAnn Joseph is a certified archivist and an interdisciplinary artist whose work aims to redefine the archive as a space for healing and transformation. In 2017, Joyce LeeAnn emancipated her labor by cultivating Archival Alchemy®, a small business that provides services to support the development, management, preservation, and interpretation of archives. She supports Weeksville Heritage Center by serving as the Public Programs Manager for The Legacy Project. archivalalchemy.com

Juju Angeles, 2009 Occupying Ohlone Territory (Oakland, CA), Juju is mothering, homeschooling, working with plants, and supporting people through their pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum journey. She graduated with a degree and a lot of debt from a Creative Writing program and facilitated spaces encouraging “marginalized” communities to tell their own stories. As an AfroTaino person, they are reclaiming and remembering their traditional practice as a form of decolonization. In 2014, they started Babymamahood, an online platform to dismantle, reimagine, and reclaim solo parenting for women and people of color in the hood. IG @Babymamahood babymamahood.com

Julha Franz, 2019 Coming from a place of sexual and gender liberation, Julha Franz (Brazil, 1993) pushes boundaries with her own body. Through the language of performance art, she creates new forms of imposed body and social identities. She has been awarded artistic residencies in Venice, Italy, 2017, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015 and 2014. She has participated in collective exhibitions, mainly art performance festivals, such as VERBO – Galeria Vermelho (where she participated in two consecutive editions in 2017 and 2018). In 2018, she was nominated for the French Aliance Contemporary Art Award. IG @julhafranz  

Julia Cavagna, 2016 Julia Cavagna is an Argentinian teacher,  actress and director based in the United States. She studied Sociology and classical and physical theater (EMAD, Belisario and Movement Theater Studio) where she learned about creating original collective work. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in acting in Buenos Aires (EMAD) and kept learning from different directors and mentors, who provided her with a wide variety of techniques and resources that oriented her career to the world of performative/non lineal Theater. She has participated in the Third Annual BEAT Festival at the Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Navy Yard with Fixed Agency Private (I) directed by Peter Musante.

Julia Patinella, 2017 Julia Patinella (she/her) is a multilingual singer and songwriter currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. After years of immersion as a Flamenco singer in southern Spain, Julia has developed several original musical projects in Spanish, Sicilian and English, that draw from her roots, her experience as a first-generation American woman, and urgent socio-political themes. In her performances, she brings forth an expansive repertoire steeped in history and folk traditions, and a rich, guttural voice that carries the raw emotions of protest, the longing for freedom, and the uncompromising commitment to sing every note with soul. Julia is also

Julia Rocha-Nava, 2021 Julia Rocha-Nava (they/them/ellx), who performs under the artist name Chispa, is a non-binary first-generation chicanx vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. They grew up surrounded by mountains that turn purple at sunset, in unceded Tongva territory known today as Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. They are currently based in Lenape land known as Brooklyn, NY. Through vocal loops and layers of samples, with influences ranging from electronic dance music to music traditions from across Latin America, Chispa’s experimental pop explores queer desire and liberation. linktr.ee/aka.chispa IG: @aka.chispa

Julián Mesri, 2010 Julián Mesri is a New York-based Argentinean-American writer and composer who makes multilingual plays and musicals in the US and around the world. He is a current member of the Public Theater Emerging Writers Group and received a 2020-2021 EST/Sloan Commission. Recent productions include Immersion, Gauchos Americanos, and the upcoming musical Telo. Mesri has been an Emerging Artist of Color Fellow at NYTW, a Van Lier fellow at Repertorio Español, and the recipient of an ASCAP Scholarship. His adaptation of Fuenteovejuna received the HOLA Outstanding production award. He has also translated dramatic works for the Lark US/Mexico

june yuen ting, 2021 june yuen ting dreams of another world that is already here—a world, or worlds that are so expansive, so abundant, and so immanent that the confines of colonial capitalist modernity cannot hold. june dances, organizes, agitates, and grieves. they want for all the descendants of european colonial violence a fighting chance of some good loving. juneyeunting.tumblr.com

Kamron Shahraray, 2013

Katharine Lucić (Elkington), 2009 Katharine Lucić (she/her) is a skilled marketer with passion for building inclusive products and diverse communities, championing access to education, and lifting up underserved groups. Her exceptionally executed experiences have increased lead generation by more than 100x previous performance. Her campaigns push boundaries and heighten brand reputation. LinkedIn Katharine Lucić

Katrina De Wees, 2011 Katrina De Wees is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, educator and curator specializing in contemporary art. She currently works in Museum Education at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and is the current Curatorial Fellow at Danspace Project. She graduated from Hampshire College in 2010 with a concentration on Black Performative Arts as Liberation. IG @katrina.rose.dewees

Kelindah bee Schuster, 2021 Kelindah bee Schuster (they/them) is a nonbinary educator and drag performance artist known as “Theydy Bedbug” who grew up in Singapore and Indonesia. They lead a cohort-based course at BAX called “Drag Performance: Between and Beyond Gender“, which exposes participants to the lineages of drag performance and provides a brave space to explore a full range of gender expression through performance, pantomime, lip sync, gesture, tableau, reveal, improvisation, and written reflections—taking drag beyond what we see in popular culture. Kelindah studied Drama and Gender studies at Vassar College and have been teaching, technical directing, and creating

Kelsey Pyro, 2016 Kelsey Pyro is a St. Paul and Minneapolis-grown/Brooklyn-based producer, singer/songwriter, poet, and educator. Her work often encompasses healing processes and her identity as a Black and Ojibwe Native American Woman. Kelsey has performed at venues such as The Last Of The Record Buyers at SoundSet and TEDx AIU. She has shared bills with Wale, MC Lyte, Trak Girl, and more. She received the 2018 and 2019 Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Grant for co-producing the Blue Nile Jam Session. Kelsey premiered her new work, Makadewiiyaasikwe, in June 2019 for The Shed’s Open Call artist residency. kelseypyro.com Video

Kevin Quiles Bonilla, 2021 Kevin Quiles Bonilla is an interdisciplinary artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He explores ideas around power, colonialism, and history with his identity as context. He currently lives and works between Puerto Rico and New York. IG @kevinquilesbonillakevinquilesbonilla.com

Kim Fischer, 2008 Kim is an actor based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Oakland, California, he’s been a lifelong performer, acting, dancing and drumming since before he can remember. After graduating from NYU Tisch and the Actors Theater of Louisville Apprentice program, he began pursuing a career as an actor, performing in shows in NYC and all across the country. Most recently, he has appeared off-broadway at 2nd Stage Theater, and on TV on networks such as HBO, Netflix, Apple+, NBC, CBS, USA, and MTV. IG @mrkimfischer mrkimfischer.com

Kira Neel, 2010 Kira Neel is a New York City based performer, educator, and radio journalist. She is a recipient of the EMERGENYC 2010 Fellowship for emerging performers and activists. As a trained Theater of the Oppressed facilitator, she leads workshops around the world at schools, with community organizations and for theater groups. She is fluent in Spanish and English, and speaks French.

Kiyan Williams, 2014 Kiyan Williams (they/them) is a visual artist based in New York City. Working fluidly across sculpture, performance, video, and installation, they create art works that redefine fixed notions of history and the body. They are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective identities. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at The Hirshhorn, the Hammer Museum, SculptureCenter, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Shed, and more. Williams’ work

Kiyo Gutiérrez, 2021 Kiyo Gutiérrez is a Mexican performance artist based in Guadalajara. Ecofeminist, provocative, earthy, and political, she places her body into the ruptures opened up by instability, precarity, and pollution. She also draws on other mediums such as video, dance, poetry, sculpture, and sound. Her art seeks to fulfill performance art’s potential as a tool of resistance and strives to dissolve the cultural taboos constructed under a patriarchal system, hoping to eroding preconceived notions of nature, culture, gender, identity, sexuality, and art, in order to generate and disseminate discussions on complex social realities. IG @kiyogutierrezFB @kiyo.gutierrezkiyogutierrez.com

Koby, 2011 Koby (she/they) is an artist, writer and social practice facilitator dedicated to dialogical arts practices, archiving as cultural activism, and public interventions for political engagement. She facilitates durational multi-stakeholder arts activist projects with collectives such as Montreal’s Immigrant Workers Centre, the Politics & Care project, and the Living Archives with PreOccupations. Her performance interventions have been seen in theatres, warehouses, street demos, and desert landscapes across the Americas. She currently teaches in the departments of Theatre and School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University, while Her PhD and ongoing research-creation engages migrant justice in social arts

Kristel Baldoz, 2019 Kristel Baldoz (she/her) is a Filipina-American artist from Delano, California, home to the Table Grape Strike. She was a 2019 EmergeNYC fellow at the Hemispheric Institute and artist-in-residence at Tisch/Danspace Residency and the Jonah Boaker Arts Foundation | Chez Buschwick, and a 2020 Brooklyn Art Exchange Space Grant Recipient. She was a 2022 artist-in-resident at Chautauqua Institution School of Visual Art and is currently in residence with Motive Brooklyn. As a performer, she has worked with Reggie Wilson, Wilmer Wilson IV, and Alex Da Corte. As an arts administrator, she has supported Common Field and the operation

Kristen Kelso, 2020 Kristen Kelso is a performer, translator, theatre director, musician and writer from Savannah, GA based in Brooklyn. As a bilingual artist from a monolingual family, her performance work and research focus on bilingualism and code-switching while exploring the realms of familial archives, mourning and embodied, experimental translation practices. She is currently working as the Marketing and Development Director for Haus of Dust, in residency with The Loisaida Center and The Laundromat Project. She has an MA from the University of Texas at Dallas in Translation Studies and most recently, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. kristenkelso.com 

KT Pe Benito, 2019 Faustina KT Pe Benito is a nonbinary queer Filipinx, a Filipino man, and a white woman. They earned a BFA at Cooper Union (2016) and were a recipient of the Osage Nation Higher Education Scholarship. They have exhibited their work in New York City, including group exhibitions at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2019), Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY (2019), Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2018-19), Flux Factory, Queens, NY (2017), and Long Island City Arts Open, Queens, NY (2017). They have performed at Knockdown Center, Queens, NY (2019), Performance Space, New York, NY (2018), among

Kyla Searle, 2012 Kyla Searle (she/her) is an artist, producer and activist. Kyla seeks out inquiry and intersection, inspired by the creativity of the community that raised her in Berkeley and Oakland, California. Her work and practice have been developed through the Institute for Theatre in the Jazz Aesthetic, the Hemispheric EmergeNYC Program, the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She lives in New York City.

Leslie Guyton, 2008 Leslie Guytonis a dance and theater director based in Brooklyn, NY.  She’s the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of The MoveShop.  She choreographs, directs and teaches throughout the US and internationally. The MoveShop’s Racine D’or, toured the US in the fall of 2013 and was funded in part by South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.  She was a master teacher at the International Contemporary Dance Lab in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. She assistant- directed Under Construction with Anne Bogart and SITI Company in 2011 at New York Live Arts.   moveshop.org

Lilach Orenstein, 2020 Lilach Orenstein is a choreographer, performer and producer. She is an Israeli immigrant with Yemeni-Polish-Romanian roots based in New York City. Lilach earned her B.Dance from The Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, majoring in choreography, in 2017, and her M.F.A from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2019. Among her awards are The Presidential Scholarship (U.S.), Outstanding Dancer from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Excellence Award by The Jerusalem Foundation. She was recently invited to residencies in L1dancefest2019 – Budapest, EMERGENYC 2020 – NYC, The Center at West Park – NYC, IMPULSTANZ’s ATLAS program

Liliana Padilla, 2008 Liliana Padilla makes plays about sex, intersectional communities, and what it means to heal in a violent world. Their play, How to Defend Yourself won the 2019 Yale Drama Prize and is a 2018-19 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist. It was produced in the 2019 Humana Festival and will be at Victory Gardens in 2020. Liliana’s work has been developed with OSF, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Victory Gardens, INTAR, Hedgebrook, Seattle Rep, the Playwrights’ Center and San Diego REP. MFA, UC San Diego, BFA, NYU Tisch. Liliana is currently commissioned to make new plays with NNPN, Colt Coeur,

Lilian (Lily) Mengesha, 2011 Lily is a director, dramaturg and assistant professor of race and performance in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her research focuses on contemporary indigenous performance art of North and Central America, particularly on art that address legacies of violence against women. In her performance work, she aims to make legible temporal scales of memory as measured through social and ecological difference, as in “manifestroom” (2014), “an emotion is a sign that something has shifted” (2016) and her current devised work that focuses on the history of the ocean. lilymengesha.com

Linus Ignatius, 2017 Linus Ignatius is a queer Armenian-American filmmaker and a proud third culture kid. Born to journalist parents, Linus grew up in various countries and inhabited the role of the outsider, constantly learning new languages and social structures. After film school in the Czech Republic, Linus directed large scale immersive events in Berlin before getting sober and committing to filmmaking. Now, Linus tells stories about rebels, making work with strong LGBTQ+ leanings and addressing the ongoing HIV epidemic. Linus’ most recent project, an indie web series called “Marque and Hector Turn Trash into Treasure”, is their first foray

Lio Mehiel, 2016 Lio Mehiel (they/them) is a Puerto Rican and Greek non-binary, trans masculine writer, actor, and artist. They are currently based between Los Angeles and New York. They attended Northwestern University and are a co-founder of Voyeur Productions with creative partners Russell Kahn (Scrap Paper Pictures, Amazon) and Dulcinee DeGuere. Lio’s work spans film, multimedia installation, and theater. They employ techniques of surrealist cinema and movement-based performance to explore the inherent contradiction of the trans experience – equally rooted in socialized flesh and transcendent in its imaginative embodiment. Lio began their career as a child actor on Broadway

Liz Andrews, 2011 Liz Andrews is an artist, curator, and scholar based in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a BA from Wesleyan University, MA from Tisch School of Arts, NYU, and Ph.D from George Mason University. Her dissertation, Envisioning President Barack Obama, focused on the role of visual images in the 2008 election. She currently works in the Director’s Office at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her curatorial projects at LACMA include The Obama Portraits Tour; A New Dawn, A New Day, A New Life: Black American Portraits; and LACMA x Snap: Monumental Perspectives augmented reality monuments in

Lolo Haha, 2014 Lolo Haha (he/him) is an organizational consultant, conflict mediator, and communication skills trainer based in Portland, Oregon. He works with companies, nonprofits, and community groups to develop creative, collaborative, conflict-positive cultures within their teams. His unique combination of skills in Liberating Structures and Process Work center fun and lightness in the context of teamwork and emphasize the potential for transformation and generative organizational change through times of conflict. In his creative work, Lolo explores the means of deep personal and social transformation through community ritual performance. lolohaha.us

Luisina Quarleri, 2009 Luisina is an actress, singer and dancer originally from Argentina. She’s performed internationally; notable credits include: Carmen (directed by Franco Zeffirelli) at L’Arena di Verona, Italy; Shrek The Musical (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Midsummer Night’s Dream (Madrid, Spain); Limitless (with Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro); Coyote Lake (with Oscar nominee Adriana Barraza and Riverdale’s Camila Mendes); VH1 Save the Music with Tony Bennett; Edha on Netflix. She studied theater at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and The William Esper Studio. She speaks English, Spanish, and Italian fluently and currently lives in Los Angeles. IG @luisinaquar

Magnus Elias Rosengarten, 2014 Magnus (he/him) is particularly interested in the relationship between moving image, sound and live performance. He loves visual storytelling. His work is deeply inspired and motivated by People of Color critique, Black Feminist thought and theories working within the larger Global African Diaspora. Currently, his focus lies on questions around Black fatherhood and its particular stigma within discourses of family structures in the West. He is also interested in identity questions of the mixed-race subject and what a certain proximity to whiteness does and not does. Where does theory begin and end, and how has Blackness

Manuel Molina Martagón, 2014 Manuel Molina Martagón is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video and social engaged projects. Molina Martagón holds a MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and a MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. His work has been exhibited in Mexico, United States, Spain, China and Cuba. His videos have been featured in festivals like Proyector Madrid, Region 0 The Latino VideoArt Festival, YANS & RETO, and Festival de Video Arte de Camaguey, and institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in

Marc Dewitt, 2014

Marcelitte Failla, 2012 Marcelitte Failla is a Black and biracial educator, researcher, and scholar of African heritage religions in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. Through a Black feminist lens, her work explores how religions such as Yoruba Ifá, Haitian Vodou, and Hoodoo of the American South are used for collective healing and social justice. Marcelitte is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University whose dissertation investigates Black witchcraft and how practitioners employ its spiritual technology for manifestation, healing, and protection from anti-Blackness. As a practitioner of both Ifá and Hoodoo and a self-identified Black witch, Marcelitte often holds

Mare Berger, 2015 Mare has been playing the piano for 34 years and writing music for a loooong time too. Mare believes in the importance of creative collaboration and community to help stop fascism and oppression and facilitates workshops called: Collective Songwriting for Collective Liberation. For many years they curated The Moon Show which featured underrepresented artists, and helped start The Moon Choir, a monthly song-share for queer and trans folk. Mare has played at the Jazz Standard, The Bitter End, and in the pit for the Broadway musical Evita. marielberger.comSoundcloud @mariel-berger-1  

Maria Schirmer, 2011 Maria Schirmer is a theater artist, writer and arts educator. She has received a Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellowship with the Jana Sanskriti Center for Theatre of the Oppressed in Kolkata, India and was an artist in residence at the Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Currently she is a member of the movement installation ON DISPLAY with Heidi Latsky Dance, which has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum, and the United Nations. IG @mariaschirmer

Mariam Bazeed, 2017 An Egyptian immigrant living in Brooklyn, Mariam Bazeed is a performance artist and alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and personal essays. They have an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College; have been awarded fellowships from the Center for Fiction, Asian American Writers Workshop, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, and Lambda Literary; and residencies from Hedgebrook, Marble House Project, the Millay Colony, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. IG @bazeedmemariambazeed.com

Mariana Paz Bugallo, 2019    

Mariano Ruiz, 2021 Mariano Ruiz is a trans nonbinary cabaret artivist from Mexico City. They use humor, pop culture, and satire to talk about Othered bodies and their experiences, creating projects that question the social segregation created by the rejection of identities or sexualities that are outside the “norm.” A graduate from CUT-UNAM, Mariano is the co-founder of Parafernalia Teatro and the recipient of a full scholarship to study at the Midsummer in Oxford program by BADA, Yale, and UCLA. Mariano was awarded the 2021 Scenic Creators Scholarship and the Take a Breath residency at The Action Lab in Ossining,

Marta Jovanović, 2013 Marta Jovanović (b. 1978, Belgrade, Serbia) constructs scenarios in which she interrogates politics, identity, beauty, and sexuality. Jovanović received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Tulane University in 2001 after attending Scuola Lorenzo de Medici, in Florence. Her works have been presented in institutions such as Museo Pietro Canonica and Museo della Civiltà Romana, both in Rome; G12HUB, Belgrade; Studio Marina Abramovic at Location One, New York; and Centre Culturel de Serbie, Paris, among many others. m-art-a.net

Mauricio “Cio” Alexander, 2019 Mauricio Alexander is a first-generation bilingual artist of Latin American and East European roots. A graduate of Oberlin College and the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, he has performed at the US Social Forum, Kennedy Center, D.C. Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Symphony Space, and Public Theater. A SAG-AFTRA member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, his original work has appeared at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival, on television, and in new media. Mauricio is an Actors’ Equity 2018 recipient of the Actors’ Fund Push Grant and teaching

Maxine Montilus, 2014 Maxine Montilus is a native of Brooklyn, New York and a first-generation Haitian-American. Maxine has a B.F.A. in Modern Dance Performance from The University of the Arts, an M.A. in Arts Management from City University London, and an M.A. in Dance Education from Hunter College via the Lincoln Center Scholars program. She has also had the opportunity to study Cuban folkloric dance, music and culture through the annual “Dog Aguas” program founded by Danys “La Mora” Perez from 2010-2012, which took her to Havana, Matanzas and Santiago de Cuba; and has studied Haitian folkloric dance with various

Megan Paradis Hanley, 2009 Megan Paradis Hanley has worked in theater in New York and internationally for the past ten years. She is Co-Artistic Director of The Syndicate, an ensemble theater company that produces new plays by women, queer, and trans artists. As an international network, The Syndicate seeks to expand professional opportunities in the field for both company members and fellow artists. The company’s work advocates for diversity, both in how we tell stories and whose stories we tell. With Man Meat Collective, she was an invited artist in the 2014 and 2015 editions of Squirts: New Voices in

Melanie Greene, 2014 Melanie Greene is a dance artist, writer, and podcast host. She is no stranger to swirling on the edge of impossible, swimming in the sea of the minority. She has received generous artistic support from MANCC, Marble House Project, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, New York Live Arts, Gibney Dance, Actors Fund, BAX, Dancing While Black, Bogliasco Fellowship, and Brooklyn Arts Council. Greene is a contributing writer for Dance Magazine, co-host of the Dance Union Podcast, and Movement Research Artist in Residence. Research question during EMERGENYC: How does my artistic practice live in conversation with my activism and

Mercy Viola Carpenter, 2018 Mercy Viola is a Black and Native nonbinary femme raised in Brooklyn, New York. They are passionate about land sovereignty, reclaiming ritual and healing intergenerational trauma. Mercy incorporates these values as a Visual Artist, Performance Artist, Reiki practitioner and Educator. They create art with the intention of elevating indigenous wisdom that supports TGNC, black and native peoples. Their intention is for their artwork to reflect the historical resistance blueprints. They create vibrant multimedia science fiction, bridging vision to lived practice. Creating art that allows understanding of concepts that could otherwise lose their meaning gathering dust in

Mette Loulou von Kohl, 2013 Mette Loulou was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. She is a performer and a wanderer. Currently living on the unceded land of the Lenape people, now colonized as New York City, Mette Loulou is a queer femme, of Lebanese/Palestinian and Danish ancestry. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco and Denmark. Mette Loulou is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. She uses performance as her first step to understanding and surviving generational

Michael Zalta, 2020 Michael is a queer Syrian-American Jewish, writer, researcher and playwright interested in the intersections between Media Studies, Arab Cultural Studies, Black Studies, and Human Rights Practice. He is particularly interested in examining the ways in which theories of blackness and indigeneity circulate across various marginalized communities around the globe in order to foster or disallow forms of anti-racist coalition and intercommunal solidarity. 

Mieke D, 2009 Mieke is a queer mixed race femme of Asian and European descent, who seeks to investigate how a diversity of styles can or cannot co-exist in a performative space, hunting for cohesive narratives and aesthetic harmony while traveling through a vast terrain of fragmentation. Mieke studied at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU. She has performed with La Pocha Nostra, the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, Target Margin Theater Company, and Taylor Mac, among others, and she has worked on numerous community-based theater projects with Cornerstone Theater Company and The Foundry Theatre Company.

Mijori Goodwin, 2021 Mijori is a multidisciplinary creative focused on healing through sight & sound. As a singer-songwriter, musician, MC, spoken word artist, graphic designer & illustrator, every extension of herself creates spaces for those who have not yet been given the chance to feel. She aims to be a bringer of connection & understanding on her journey. IG @iammijori

Mon Iker, 2013 Mon Iker is an interdisciplinary artist devoted to elevating feminist, social, and environmental justice issues. Their work spans a variety of media, including street art, photography, performance, animation, film, and traditional herbalism. They combine experience in visual media making with knowledge of strategy, operations, and arts administration with and within social and environmental justice nonprofit community-based organizations, museums, and movements. Their artistic endeavors have shown internationally, been featured in the New York Times, and their arts administration work ranges from facilitating the growth of the world’s only queer museum to managing mural programs for detained young people

Monica Furman, 2018 Monica Furman is a multi-hyphenate artist and conflict mediator. She was raised in Brooklyn by her Jew-ish Russian-speaking family from Ukraine, so she’s working out her dual-identity crisis by being an artist instead of a doctor like her babushka wanted. Monica’s most recent work includes The Waiting Room for the ASHTAR Theatre Festival in the West Bank and TBD: The Live Devising Project at FringeNYC. Her bilingual TV pilot, First Jen, was recently the winner for Pickford West’s Pitch Fest and a finalist for the Orchard Project’s inaugural TV Episodic Lab. At Emerge, she investigated the intersection

Monica Torres, 2020 Being an eco-feminist artist of Caribbean descent, Torres has been theorizing on the idea of jungle mangroves, coastal archways, and ancient cenotes. She expresses them through the symbolism of her everyday environments, meshing the two together in new and compelling ways. In her work she explores tropes of migration, diaspora, and identity. She is forming a vigorous body of work, as she has replicated over a dozen sites by hand as 3-inch sculptural models, from the magical Na Pali coast, to the sacred Cenotes of Mexico, to the mysterious Cave of Wonders of The Dominican Republic that

Natacha Voliakovsky, 2019 Natacha Voliakovsky (Buenos Aires, 1988) is a political performance artist, feminist, and activist who has been performing around the world for the last 10 years. Her work revolves around the concept of culture as a humanizing system and the deconstruction of the social body, and raises awareness on issues regarding gender identity, body sovereignty, and women’s rights. She has taken part in the Venice International Performance Art Week workshop, Ûberbau Haus residency (Brazil), and Sur Polar residency (Antarctica). She is Director of Argentina Performance Art, the first research platform on performance art in Argentina. FB @natacha.voliakovskyIG @natachavoliakovskynatachavoliakovsky.ru

Natalie Cook, 2018 Natalie Cook is a filmmaker, poet, and theater-maker. Natalie’s poetry film, “Backwards God,” received the Best Social Justice Film Award at the New York International Film Awards and was the Grand Prize Winner of the AT&T Film Awards. She is the founder of Atlanta Word Works, as well as an alumna of the First Wave Hip Hop Theatre Ensemble, the BARS Workshop at The Public Theater, and the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program. She received a Bachelor in Arts in English with an Emphasis in Creative Writing and Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Master

Nefertiti Asanti, 2015 Nefertiti Asanti (they/she) is a poet from the Bronx and a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Watering Hole, Queer Cultural Center, Lambda Literary, Anaphora Arts, Winter Tangerine, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Nefertiti’s work can be found at AfroPunk, Foglifter, Santa Clara Review, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. During Nefertiti’s time at EMERGE, Nefertiti’s research asked: What can intergenerational experiences of Black menstrual pain tell us about healing ourselves? IG @electricfl0wernefertitiasanti.com

Nessa Norich, 2020 Nessa Norich (she/they) is a writer, director, producer, creative coach and performer who creates works of comedy and social critique for film and theater. For the past five years, she has dedicated herself to independent filmmaking, building on fifteen years of theatrical production. Nessa is a recipient of the 2022 NYC Women’s Fund for Media for her latest project, Jelly Bean, which has so far screened at seven film festivals including NewFest 2022, and Rhode Island International Film Festival, where Nessa was recognized with the award for Best Actress. Nessa is an alum of Jacques Lecoq, Barnard

NIC Kay, 2009 NIC Kay is from the Bronx, NY. They make performances and organize performative spaces with an un disciplined approach. Their approaches to space and objects are led by choreographic motivations and they engage with the body with a sculptural eye. NIC is concerned with the process of moving, the change of place, the production of space, and the potential as well as the meaning of shifting perspectives. They published their first book, Cotton Dreams, with Candor Arts in February 2020. Their last live performance was of their work pushit [an exercise in getting well soon] at Pomona

Nína Hjálmarsdóttir, 2020 Nína Hjálmarsdóttir (she/they) is a performance artist, writer & producer. Her art collective, Sálufélagar, has produced four performances for the stage. She makes and writes about performances of image and identity, often focusing on the Nordic image and Nordic whiteness. She holds an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch. Her most recent performance staged the Icelandic image and how one is excluded from that image. She has produced for different festivals and groups, facilitated workshops on national identity, created a personal podcast for the National Radio on love and relationships, and worked as a performance art

Noelle Ghoussaini, 2011 Noelle Ghoussaini creates expansive and genre-defying theatrical experience exploring the politics and spirit of liberation. She brings to light to the divine feminine and the resilient spirit of womxn living under patriarchal norms. She tells nuanced stories about the unexposed beauty and complexity of spiritual and social landscapes in the Middle East. She creates theatre and ritual experiences in public space, as a way to examine and reimagine our society within political, cultural and mystical contexts. Her work is grounded, yet offers visions of the surreal, sacred and abstract. She recently created “shapelight” – a organization dedicated

Oceana James, 2019 Oceana James (she/her) is a St. Croix-born interdisciplinary artist. Her work is an examination/a re-telling/ a re-imagining of her Caribbean indigeneity. It is a commentary on the socio-political, cultural, and economic realities of peoples of African descent. In her work James deconstructs the idea of language as one’s sole means of communication and experiments with the use of time, space, non-linear form and movement to do this. Additionally, she uses her Caribbean “Nation Language” to further explore the mythologies and stories that she grew up hearing. Right now, her research is centered on epigenetics, trees, (the biology

olaiya olayemi, 2021 olaiya olayemi is a blk/trans/femme/womxxxn/anti-disciplinary artist/educator/and organizer who centers womxxxn of the african diaspora in her performative/literary/ cinematic/ and sonic works of art that explore love/sex/relationships/family/history/ memory and radical joy/pleasure. IG @capricorn1089

Ọmọlará McCallister, 2015 Ọmọlará Williams McCallister (pronouns: o, love, beloved) is a dynamic creator who shows up in many forms. O’s work is a call and response blend of sculpture, performance, installation, ritual, space holding, community building, surface design, adornment, word, sound, song, movement, moving images and photography. The roles that Ọmọlará steps into include: artist, educator, organizer, cultural strategist, conjurer. In all forms O’s work is immersive and interactive, it is co-authored by the people who inspire and encounter it. Ọmọlará is from Atlanta, Ga. O’s artistic journey began in church at 7 years old as a classically trained

Oraison Larmon, 2010 Oraison H. Larmon (they/them) is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Larmon’s research centers around bodies, records and archives with specific focus on 20th century performance art in the Americas. Their dissertation “Trans Figural Records: Trans Bodies Across, Through and Beyond Archives” introduces a new archival concept that re-configures how records come to represent trans bodies. Employing an innovative methodological approach, Larmon examines trans and travesti artists who create performances that counter the historical erasure of gender variant bodies in archives. This research breaks new ground by

Patrícia Faolli, 2011 The Brazilian artist Patrícia Faolli (she/her) received a Bachelor’s Degree in Performance Art from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil in 2009. Always exploring the interdisciplinary aspect of her artistic work, she started her career in theater but later focused on performance and dance using her body as the primary medium. In 2007 she developed her first performance, “Artérias” (Arteries), which started as video art and developed into an installation. It is still in constant transformation to this day. In 2008, she joined the performance group “Ajuntamento MeninasJoão de Performance”, creating collaboratively several performances and urban

Paul Bedard, 2016 Paul Bedard is a Brooklyn-based theater director. He is an artistic director of Theater in Asylum. His work has appeared at the Hangar, Cherry Lane, IRT, and Dixon Place Theatres, as well as the Prague, Chicago, and Rochester Fringe Festivals. He has collaborated with Bread and Puppet Theater and The Democratic Socialists of America. Paul is a Drama League Directing Fellow and graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. FB @paul.h.bedardIG @paulhbedardTwitter @paulhbedardpaulhbedard.com

Pêdra Costa, 2021 Pêdra Costa (they/she) is a ground breaking, formative Brazilian, Visual & Urban Anthropologist, Performer and Tarot Reader based in Berlin that utilizes intimacy to connect with collectivity. They work with their body to create fragmented epistemologies of queer communities within ongoing colonial legacies. Their work aims to decode violence and transform failure whilst tapping into the powers of resilient knowledge from a plethora of subversive ancestralities and spiritualities that have been integral anti-colonial and necropolitical survival. IG @pedraxcostaTwitter @pdracosta1cargocollective.com/pedra

Polina Porras Sibolovoba, 2012 Polina Porras Sivolobova is a Russian-Mexican multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work includes visual arts and performance. She explores narrative using ritual, iconography, technology and nature. She has performed at the Venice Biennale and has been supported by the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, El Museo del Barrio, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Queens Council on the Arts. FB @Polina.P.SivolobovaIG @polinapsivolobovaTwitter @Polina_Porraspolinaporras.com

Rachel Messer, 2014

Rad Pereira, 2018 Rad  is a two-spirit Afro-Indigenous, Jewish, Brazilian (im)migrant artist currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Their practices range from renegade participatory ritual facilitation, to popular theatrical and TV/film performance, to community based educational artmaking and healing centering an Afro-futurist longing for transformative justice and queer reindigenization of culture. The​ir work has been supported by over ​50​​ cultural institutions​ on Turtle Island/ Abya Yala. 2017 NYC Public AiR. Research question: Who gets to live off of making Art under the NYC capitalist cultural model AND how can we decolonize performance through models of participatory storytelling? IG @______rad___RadPlanet.org

Rae De Vine, 2019 Rae (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker who engages with the arts primarily as a vehicle for healing and building community. Queer, Black, and Indigenous with Gullah and Caribbean roots, while in EMERGE her research question explored the intersection and convergence of these identities, all through a transracial adoptee lens. As a Poet, Vocalist, and Theatre Artist, they have participated in workshops and readings at Cave Canem and The Leslie Lohman Museum, have appeared Off-Broadway, and as a featured vocalist in iconic venues including The Apollo, Carnegie Hall, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music),

Rania Manganaro, 2016 RANIA SALEM MANGANARO is a New York City based actor, artist, activist, and proud member of Actors Equity. Rania is known for originating the role of Peg in Ike Holter’s Hit the Wall, Off-Broadway at Barrow Street Theatre and in Chicago at The Steppenwolf Garage (produced by The Inconvenience). Last year Rania played the role of Zarina in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who & The What (Directed by Eric Rosen) at Kansas City Repertory and most recently she guest-starred in NBC’s new criminal drama, BLINDSPOT.  In New York City Rania has also worked with Barrow Street Theatre, Paradise Factory, and Calliope Theatre Company. In Chicago, she

Racquel Mavecq, 2011 Raquel Mavecq graduated in Comunicação e Artes do Corpo at PUC-SP. Through dance, performance art, video, installation and sound, her work understands the body as a catalyst for the micro and macro politics of human relationships. IG @raquelmavecq

ray ferreira 2015 ray ferreira w h e n a m i a performer of sorts aka multidisciplinary artist aka polymath. She stays playin : the dance between materiality<->language through her body w h e n a m i where histories are made and remade. She plays with iridescence, text, rhythms (aka systems), to cruise a quantum poetics. Englishes, Spanishes, and other body languages spiral, dance, and twirl to create a banj criticality: that turnup w/the grls; that swerve past white cishet patriarchy. wh e n ami IG @xxrayferreiraxx rayferreira.net

Rebecca Fitton, 2019 Rebecca Fitton (she/they) is from many places. She cultivates community through movement, food, and conversation. Her work in the dance field as an artist-scholar, administrator, and advocate centers arts and culture policy, Asian American communities, and disability justice. Her practice takes shape in studios, classrooms, basements, warehouses, bars, grocery stores, rooftops, gardens, sidewalks, and streets. IG @_rebecca.fittonrebeccafittonprojects.com

Rebecca Nagle, 2012 Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning advocate, writer, and citizen of Cherokee Nation. As the host of the chart-topping podcast “This Land”, Nagle told the story of one Supreme Court case about tribal land in Oklahoma, the small-town murder that started it, and the surprising connection to her own family history. Nagle has been covering the Murphy case since May of 2018. Her writing about Native representation and tribal sovereignty has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, Teen Vogue, The Huffington Post, and more. In addition to being an outspoken advocate for advancing Native

Régine Romain, 2018 Régine Romain is a Haitian-American artist, educator, visual anthropologist and race equity coach living in Brooklyn, NY.  As a storyteller and cultural producer, she uses photographs/film/performance as mixed-media educational tools to promote love, understanding and respect by addressing issues of representation and equity through participatory and reflective learning practices. Régine is founder/director of the Urban PhotoPoets Project, Brooklyn Photo Salon and the WaWaWa Diaspora Centre. She is the director/producer of the award winning short film and podcast “Brooklyn to Benin: A Vodou Pilgrimage” and “Vodou Roots: A Love Story Musical.” Régine received her BS in International Studies from Bowie State University and MA  in

Renee Floresca, 2014 Originally from Hercules– East Bay Area, Renee is a Filipina actor, educator & writer based in Brooklyn. Creator of original theater works Sidewalk Sisters; Nanay, Tatay, Anak; and Undressing the Fragments, Renee uses theater, hip hop, story telling, poetry & improv to transform personal narratives into theater pieces not yet highlighted in society. IG @reneefromthebay_reneerises

rexylafemme (rex renée leonowicz), 2017 rexylafemme (rex renée leonowicz) is a visual + performing artist, writer, and healer born and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. As a working class trans femme, rex’s work is grounded in a politics of radical resistance, healing, and witness. s/he blends genders and genres, using drag/burlesque, comedy, visual art, and voice, to critically respond to the relationships people “on the margins” have with our surroundings and each other. rex’s book of poems and illustrations, when there is no one and there is everyone is available from Magic Helicopter Press. IG @rexylafemmerexylafemme.com

Rina Espiritu, 2018 A local of Queens Village, NY with a US greencard and Pilipino passport. This multidisciplinary artist has organized various things but not limited to: public discourse with artists/curator, a physical theater with clickbaity title, solo movement improvisations, solo exhibition of gestural paintings, durational performance in a pond, sculpture with trash and notes, Instagram memes, solo and collective performance art projects, and anonymous dissents. Oftentimes, she daydreams about a borderless and debtless world of a collectively thriving society free from cycle of bad parenting, home and food insecurity, and of historical amnesia/erasure/distortions.

Rodrigo Arenas-Carter, 2021 Rodrigo Arenas-Carter is an arts worker, researcher, migrant, and pansexual. His performance artworks have been exhibited through the Americas, receiving grants and awards, and he is the author of academic essays on performance art. He holds an M.A. in Literature, and is a member of RACA (Red de Arte de Centroamérica) and Cuirpoétikas (LGBT Central American collective). arenascarter.weebly.com

Rory Golden, 2013 Rory Golden creates multi-layered figurative work that deals in a clever and sometimes startling way with social issues like racial bigotry, sexuality, love and hate-based violence. A native of Miami Valley, Ohio, Golden holds an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama. He has exhibited his work widely in both solo and group shows at venues such as Spruill Gallery and Eyedrum, both in Atlanta, GA; the Denver International Airport, and the San Francisco and New York Public Libraries. Upcoming exhibits include a group show this coming fall on torture awareness at the John Jay

Rosary Solimanto, 2017 Activist artist Rosary Solimanto, explores oppression and societal stigmas living with multiple sclerosis evolving into her international artistic career. She approaches disABILITY identity, biology, healthcare and medicine from a humanitarian perspective. Solimanto graduated with her MFA from SUNY New Paltz in 2015 and since exhibited and performed across the US, Toronto, London, Greece, China and Spain, and featured in twelve international museums. Awards include Unlimit Fellowship from Art OMI; Kulakoff Award at SUNY Albany; and the Sojourner Truth Fellowship at SUNY New Paltz. She was a selected for the activist program, Emerge NYC. rosarysolimanto.com

Sabina Ibarrola, 2013 Sabina is a Brooklyn-based performance artist, activist, and troublemaker: a dancer and bruja on the path towards becoming a writer and healer, too. Sabina apprenticed with herbalist Robin Rose Bennett of Wisewoman Healing Ways. A graduate of Hunter College and the New York School of Burlesque, she collaborates with the Boston-based Femme Show and Brooklyn’s Heels on Wheels Glitter Roadshow. As a mixed-race Latina femmedyke, her work coalesces around conscious, performative femininity and camp as strategies for resisting racist heteropatriarchy. sabinaibarrola.com

Sacred Walker, 2012 Sacred Walker is a master facilitator and the CEO and Lead Holistic Trainer of Kuumba Health LLC. Sacred’s creative writing and dance performances include gracing the stage of Alvin Ailey World Dance Festival, WOW Cafe, Second Stage Theater, Malonga Dance School, Union Theological Seminary, LGBT Community Center, etc. Her creative passion is the cross-section between the ways dancing and co-creating artistically with the divine in the hardest of times, bridging ancestral and modern wisdom, helps build resilience and has brought out the best in those she is blessed to support and serve year after year. IG @asksacredFB

Sahar Sajadieh, 2011 Sahar Sajadieh is a digital performance/media artivist (artist+activist) and scholar, interaction designer, and computer scientist, born and raised in Iran. Sahar’s research and practice lie at the intersection of computational performance, media arts, interrogative design, performance/media theory, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. She is interested in the application of digitally-mediated interactivity, extended reality, machine learning, and virtual & robotic embodiments in live performances and public spheres as means of storytelling, poetic expression, and socio-political intervention. For Sahar, digital media practice is a form of activism, a way to challenge the public’s comfort zone and provoke dialogues about

Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai, 2019 Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai is an Iranian American video and performance artist. Healing and language are the axes of her practice. She is interested in the metaphorical flux of translation that speaks to diasporic displacement when considering the decolonization of time and space. She is a world-builder and engages her audience in self-reflexive and affective moments of recognition and play. She has performed at The New Museum, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, and Performa ‘15 NYC. She also curates a show called Digital Diaspora for digital artists in the Islamic Diaspora centering Black Muslim Artists. saharspace.com

Salome Egas, 2018 Salome is proudly Ecuadorian, an interdisciplinary artist, educator and bilingual children’s book author who is permanently questioning her identity through multiple mediums: dance, theater, film and textile arts. She’s a Brooklyn Arts Council grantee, an American Immigrant Council Fellow, and a For the Artist! resident artist at MOtiVE Brooklyn for 2022. She founded By Salo Books and her first bilingual book highlighting self-love in mixed-race characters launched in April of 2022. salomeegas.com IG: @salomeegas

Samantha Galarza, 2012 Samantha Galarza (she/her/ella) is a queer, Puerto Rican, SAG-AFTRA actress, writer, performance artist, educator, podcaster, and director. Ultimately a storyteller, her dream is to bridge the gap between mainstream media and progressive “de-colonial” art. Her work interweaves personal narratives of queer identity, internalized and systemic anti-black racism, generational trauma, migration, and gender-based violence with policies that disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities. She’s been published in award-winning anthologies and has performed internationally. Sam is co-foundeder/co-host of the bilingual queer femme Latina/e/x centered podcast Latinas en Queerantine and co-founder of the queer performance-art collective A Beautiful Desperation. She’s a

Santiago Venegas Duque, 2013 Santiago Venegas Duque is a Colombian fashion designer and performance artist, currently working at Brooks Brothers as a knitwear designer. He ultimately wants everyone to be happy including the animals and environment. IG @sanvene

Sara Kostic, 2018 Sara Kostic (born in 1990 in Belgrade), received an M.A. in Architecture Design from Belgrade University. She attended EmergeNYC program, at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU. She polished her practices by working with artists such as VestandPage, Marlin Arsem, Franko B. In her work, she incorporates her fields of interest referring to the physical and social context that the role of the psychological and physical body takes. sarakostic.com IG: @arbor_sara

Sara Lyons, 2012 Sara Lyons is a director who seeks to explode form/politic in new, critically embodied theatre and performance works. Working frequently in adaptation, social practice, and new media, their work has been presented by Los Angeles Performance Practice, The Wattis Institute, OUTsider, SFX Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE, LaMaMa, Edinburgh Fringe, and more. MFA-Directing, Carnegie Mellon. sara-lyons.com

Shelah Marie, 2011 With her authentic, rebellious and playful personality and her @curvycurlyconscious movement, Shelah Marie engages an online community of over a quarter million people. Her mission is to create a movement of total self love and liberation for women of color. She’s the creator of the Curvy, Curly, Conscious movement, where “self help” meets “real talk” and has been featured in NBC, Fox5, Luxe Radar, Black Girl In Om, and Live Civil by Karen Civil among others. Prior to Curvy, Curly, Conscious, Shelah led her signature workshop named The Sustainable Theater Workshop to entities such as The United

Shenny de Los Angeles, 2019 Shenny de Los Angeles is a Dominican-American performance artist. Her work focuses on healing generational trauma, inviting every hurt to free itself into joy. During her time at Emerge, Shenny was researching the Afro Latinx experience in America and Domincan American’s relationship to DR, exploring rituals of beauty passed from generation to generation. Shenny centralizes Black Caribbean femmes in her work; affirming the beauty in being alive. “when you in pain just focus on somebody else’s business,” is her first piece to be published by The Caribbean Writers. This past fall, she was commissioned by

Sita Frederick, 2013 Sita Frederick is a choreographer, performer, arts administrator and teacher based in New York City. After graduating from Swarthmore College, Frederick performed with Bessie-winning choreographers Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women and Merian Soto, co-founder of Pepatian. In 2003, Frederick and visual artist José Miguel Ortiz co-founded Areytos Performance Works, a multi-disciplinary performance company that presents innovative contemporary dance-theatre rooted in Caribbean traditions and the principles of social justice. From 2007-2010 Frederick produced a body of work reinterpreting Afro-Cuban, Salsa and modern in “Maletumba II,” “What Do You Dance On?”, “Sirenas” and “Bembé, Salon, y

Sol Cabrini de la Ciudad, 2017 Sol Cabrini de la Ciudad is a Chicago trans creator based in NYC. Sol has created and collaborated in numerous seasons of shows at Free Street Theatre. From audio engineering to performative efforts she has made mediums concerning the abstraction of how sounds are produced and operating sonically within and without the hands of the State. She is also a member of the radically politicized theatrical group Young Fugitives. A portion of her work can be viewed under the name Sol Patches and 1/2 of collaborative group solYchaski. Listen on Spotify Twitter @solciudadsolpatches.bandcamp.com

Sophia Mak, 2016 Sophia Mak is a Brooklyn based, multi-disciplinary artist and educator. They have had the pleasure of working with young artists across New York City’s five boroughs. Sophia is currently in collaboration with Bex Kwan (EMERGE’16) creating performances which unearth secret histories of foreignness, family mythologies, and kinship in East Asian communities in the United States. IG @so_mak | @soandbex sophiamak.comsoandbex.com

Sriya Sarkar, 2015 Sriya Sarkar is a digital media producer, comedian, and filmmaker working at the intersection of digital media, comedy, and activism. She has worked with artist Maya Lin for the What Is Missing? Foundation as well as the feminist sleeper cell of riotously funny reproductive rights advocates at Lady Parts Justice. She is the producer of Speakout Laughout, a comedic storytelling show about abortion, as well as lolvote, a comedy variety show and accompanying Twitterbot encouraging youth voter turnout. Currently, she’s the Digital Content Producer for Priorities USA. sriyasarkar.com

stefa marin alarcon, 2019 stefa marin alarcon is a vocalist, composer and multi-media performance artist born and raised in Queens, NY. Using an amalgamation of punk, experimental pop and classical minimalism with queer ethereal aesthetix and video collages, stefa builds worlds that offer a somatic decolonial respite for the misfits & displaced who are yearning for a sense of home. They studied euro-centric classical music for 20 years (Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts ‘07, CSSD ‘10), were an Artist-in-Residence at TrueQué Residencia Artística, Slippage Residency at Duke University, a Hemispheric Institute of Performance

Stephano Espinoza, 2015 Stephano is an artist and educator from Guayaquil, Ecuador. He is the co-founder and director of TrueQué Residencia Artistica, an annual artist residency in the coast of Ecuador. He holds a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis with concentrations in Latinx and Metropolitan Studies from New York University. He was part of the NYFA’s Immigrant Artists Program and the Center for Artistic Activism’s 2016 Art Action Academy. Espinoza has worked at the Queens Museum as a Public Programs and Community Engagement Fellow, as an educator at the Museum of the Moving Image and a teaching artist at

Stephen Graf, 2011 After many years in the NYC theatre scene, Stephen began pursuing doctoral studies in 2017 at the New School for Social Research, with a major concentration in comparative politics and a minor in global politics. His research interests include the structure of political institutions, inclusiveness in public service delivery, state-society relations, and social movements in India. He has worked in the Permanent Observer Office for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) to the United Nations for over five years. IG @grafstephen

Stevie Walker-Webb, 2014 Stevie Walker-Webb is an Obie award winning Director, Playwright, and Cultural Worker who believes in the transformational power of art. As a survivor of poverty and the associative violence that comes with growing up black and poor in America, he’s knows how liberating and necessary it is to create. He is a 2050 Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop and recipient of the Princess Grace Award for Theatre. The Lily Award in honor of Lorraine Hansberry awarded by the Dramatists Guild of America. He’s served as the Founding Artistic Director of the Jubilee Theatre and has created

Susana Plotts-Pineda, 2020 Susana Plotts-Pineda (she/her) is an artist, writer, and translator. Her work touches on cultural identity, revolution, and post-historical debris, by delving into archives and speculative landscapes. She has been published in Kitchen Magazine, Global Performance Studies, Waif Magazine and The Drunken Canal. Her performances and film have shown at Performance Studies International’s 2019 Conference, Beam Center’s The Lighthouse on Governors Island, and the Orange County Film Fiesta. She has worked at The Kitchen, Mapa Teatro, and Noche Flamenca. Currently she is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Brooklyn College and a resident artist at CoLAB Arts.

Taja Lindley, 2014 Taja Lindley (she/her) is a spirit-led interdisciplinary generative artist creating dynamic and iterative works designed to transform audiences and to shift narratives, culture and consciousness. She is inspired by the healing arts and metaphysical sciences which support her healing journey and inform the rituals of conceiving, developing and presenting her artwork. She is most known for her performances, installations, and podcasting addressing state sanctioned violence, reproductive freedom, economic sovereignty, bodily autonomy and our relationship with the past. Her work is often immersive, participatory, socially engaged, political and autobiographical. Her mediums (to date) include film, memory, sound, dance/movement,

Timothy Du White, 2016 Timothy DuWhite (he/they) is a Black/queer poet, actor, and activist based out of Brooklyn, NY. His essays and poetry can be found in The Rumpus, The Root, Afropunk, Black Youth Project, The Grio, and elsewhere. In the summer of 2018, DuWhite debuted his one-man show NEPTUNE as the headliner for Dixon Place’s annual “Hot Festival.” Following rave reviews and sold-out performances, NEPTUNE was then restaged as the 2019 kick-off event for Brooklyn Museum’s acclaimed “1st Saturday” series. DuWhite was named a “Black LGBTQ+ playwright you need to know” by Time Out NY. He is an alumnus

Troizel Carr, 2017 An artist, advocate, and academic, Troizel Carr is black + alive and that means more than these words can say. They are pursuing their PhD at New York University in Performance Studies, where they also earned their MA. Currently, their research wants to consider figurations of black children in post-emancipation aesthetics and the capacities of those figurations to articulate the possibility of black freedom. They also hold a Teaching Fellowship at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, where they lead weekly New Perspective tours. Troizel enjoys facilitation and curriculum development and created a

Valentina De Roca Fuerte, 2020 Valentina De Roca Fuerte is a sensitive poet, awakening visual artist, workshop facilitator, and creative wellness educator. Born in Bogotá Colombia, raised in the DMV & Washington state, to now living in Harlem; she carries all these places with her. Her words are motivated by the urgency to write through brown immigrant women’s pain & power. Her written work can be found printed in Undertone Magazine’s On Body collection as well digitally in Spanglish Voces ‘Desahogo Al 2020’ Series.  She also recently graduated with a Masters in Art Politics from NYU Tisch & is now

Vanessa Cuervo, 2016 Born in Bogotá Colombia, Vanessa is a dancer, curator & cultural producer exploring the connections between identity, collective memory building and rituals of resilience in (but not limited to) Latin America. Working with dance, theatre and film organizations in Toronto, Buenos Aires, New York & Bogotá she has collected a multiplicity of stories. She currently works with film teams strategizing on how to use their documentaries as tools for social change, and connecting them to changemakers and partners that can fuel their impact campaigns.

Vaseah Dupree, 2014 Vaseah Dupree is a spoken word artist and creative writer who grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn during the height of the drug wars and the AIDS/HIV epidemic. She is a survivor of Urban America, sexual, physical, verbal and domestic abuse. While struggling to cope with the affects of the environment in which she grew up, Vaseah received her Associates Degree from BMCC.

Verónica Peña, 2021 Verónica Peña is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator from Spain based in the United States. Her work explores the themes of absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. Peña is interested in migration policies, cross-cultural dialogue, and women’s empowerment. Recent works include participatory performances that create shared moments amongst strangers. Peña has performed in various countries around Europe, Asia, and America. In the United States, her work was featured at Times Square, Armory Show, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, Queens Museum, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Grace Exhibition Space, Triskelion Arts, Defibrillator Performance Art

Wazina Zondon, 2020 Centering her own identities as both an obstacle and a breakthrough, Wazina generates from the in-between space of insider-outsider. Her process is a hybrid of disciplines to recollect memory and nostalgia through written word, personalized soundscape and the rehearsal of cultural choreographies. As a visual thinker and processor, the re-creation of stories and rituals serves as both the site of performance and offers viewers to distill their imprints for new understanding. wazina.com IG: @wazina

Yael Miriam, 2008 ya_yams

Zachary Wager Scholl, 2013 Zachary Wager Scholl is an educator, artist and cultural worker. He’s a member of The Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee, a multi-disciplinary arts collective making queer, intergenerational, diasporic radical purimshpiln; a member of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice; an educator at Kolot Chayeinu Synagogue. Recent projects include researching Jewish women partisan fighters from the Nazi Holocaust; food ethnography; and learning songs and singing in Yiddish, Ladino and Appalachian traditions. IG @zacharyisafox

Zavé Martohardjono, 2011 Zavé Martohardjono is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist born in Montréal, Canada. Their artistic practice explores geopolitics, social justice, queer glam, embodied healing, and modes of decolonization. Martohardjono studied political economy at Brown University, filmmaking at CUNY City College, and entered dance and performance art in 2009. IG @zavozavitoTwitter @zavozavitozavemartohardjono.com