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Image description: The headshot of Peter Rockford Espiritu is of a mature and handsome native Hawaiian male with black hair neatly combed back. He has brown eyes, a thin black mustache and goatee under his chin. He is wearing a traditional long sleeve, button collar, black Hawaiian print shirt in a bold geometric chevron design in a golden mustard color that resembles traditional Hawaiian Tapa or bark cloth design. Mr. Espiritu is wearing ten strands of golden brown traditional Ni’ihau shell lei that surrounds his neck and rests on the middle of his chest. He has a calm and welcoming demeanor with a slight smile on his face. Photo: Chris Rohrer
ID: Laurel, a white woman with creamy skin, cropped silvery hair, and hazel eyes, looks thoughtfully to one side. Crimson lipstick punctuates a slight smile.
Choreographer, designer, and artist-engineer: Laurel is a transdisciplinary artist making work which imagines new kinds of experience, reinterprets traditional stories, and questions cultural assumptions. Her performing arts career began in music before serendipity brought her to dance, where she found a discipline combining her lifelong loves of athleticism and art. Featuring synthesistic mythology and partnering, her work includes choreography for both disabled and nondisabled artists as well as novel ways of extending and creating embodied art through technology.
Laurel began her dance career with Full Radius Dance in 2004. She is an artist and access & technology lead with Kinetic Light, the internationally acclaimed disability arts organization, co-founder and CEO of CyCore Systems, a boutique systems architecture & product design firm, and the director of Rose Tree Productions, where she choreographs transdisciplinary art and supports equity-centered arts work; her justice and community-centered work was recognized as a 2019 DFA Fellow. Laurel’s latest project, in collaboration with Sydney Skybetter, is The Choreodaemonic Platform: a multiply-manifesting choreo-computational performance which centers embodied knowings of interdependence as artists, audiences, and AI contend with human-mediated symbiotic and adversarial relationships between nature, art, and emerging technologies. This project is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation and has received a 2023 Creative Capital Award. Find her online at laurellawson.com or instagram/worldsoflaurel.
ID: A white woman with long brown hair smiles, she wears a black and white polka dot top. Photo Credit: Christopher Duggan
Mariclare Hulbert (she/her; Rochester, NY) serves as a Marketing & PR Advisor for the DFA program. She has 20+ years of experience in the arts and nonprofit fields, specializing in strategic marketing, communications, public relations, and outreach. She worked at the internationally renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for nearly 10 years, serving as Director of Marketing & Communication. As a consultant, she supports clients with an array of marketing, PR, and communications needs. Recent projects and clients include Dance/NYC, Dance/USA, the National Center for Choreography-Akron, Kinetic Light/Alice Sheppard, Bridge Live Arts, Leela Dance Collective, Visual Studies Workshop, and others. She is based in Rochester, NY, the ancestral lands of the Onondaga or Seneca people. For more information, visit mariclarehulbert.com.
ID: White female-identified middle-aged person with a wide smile and squinting eyes, wearing a yellow V-neck top, along with dangling earrings and shoulder-length medium brown and grey streaked straight hair. Blurred in the background is the back of some houses and a wooden fence. Photo: John Whiting.
Since retiring as a dancer and choreographer, Michèle Steinwald has managed performing arts projects and professional development programs for On the Boards (Seattle), New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project (Boston), DanceUSA (DC), and the Deborah Hay Dance Company (Austin). She joined the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) in October of 2006 as Assistant Curator for the Performing Arts and remained in that role until summer of 2013. She was on the boards of the National Performance Network (New Orleans) and Movement Research (NYC) from 2012-2018. She has served on panels for the NEA, MANCC, NPN, McKnight Foundation, USA Fellows, Pew Foundation, Herb Alpert Award, MAP Fund and been an artist mentor for Creative Capital's retreat and Arts Midwest's ArtsLab. She holds an MA from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University and was published in Curating Live Arts (Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford) and Shifting Cultural Power (NCCAkron Series in Dance, University of Akron Press). Committed to social justice in the arts, she has researched and facilitated original sessions at conferences and professional gatherings such as Grantmakers in the Arts (2022), Association of Performing Arts Professionals (2018 & 2019) in partnership with American Realness, Interrarium at Banff Centre (2018), National Performance Network (2017 & 2018), Arts Midwest (2011 & 2014), and DanceUSA (2012 & 2013 + 2014 host & showcase committees). Half Québécoise and half American, Steinwald is currently living in Montréal as an independent curator, community organizer, dramaturg, and occasional writer. www.44artsproductive.com
ID: Headshot of a middle-aged man with glasses, wearing a dark collared shirt and a patterned baseball cap. He has a neatly trimmed beard and a serious expression on his face. The background is plain white, keeping the focus on the man's portrait.
Gene Pendon is based out of Montreal, Canada and is a graduate of Concordia University’s Fine Art Bachelor’s Program in Painting & Drawing in the early 90's.
As a contemporary painter and visual arts producer, Gene has created within various spheres of mural work, street art and music marketing, graphic illustration and fine art, animation, installation, art performance, and art direction for stage spanning the last 30 years.
After the first two decades of project development and production work for U.S. and international-based street & contemporary art projects, exhibitions and street branding & music marketing campaigns during the 2000's, Gene re-establish his original interest of contributing creative projects within Montréal’s public cultural life.
Since then, Gene has been involved in personal and professional research and presentation of interdisciplinary philosophies of embodied authorship. Gene has presented research methodologies within public forums in both Canada and the U.S. including “The Tuning Fork” online live forum for the International Institute for Cultural Activism, Delhi, NY (2022), as a guest educator at Champlain College of Vermont, Montreal campus (2023-24), and as a panelist at both the Global Cultural Districts Network Annual meeting and conference in Montreal (2023), and the American Studies Association at Harvard University’s Revisiting Regions Conference (2024) in Cambridge, MA.
Image description: Holly Bass wears bright blue glasses, a dark blue leather jacket and a wide smile against a backdrop of blurred twinkle lights. Photo by Pamela Janzesian.
Holly Bass (she/her) is a multidisciplinary performance artist, educator and cultural worker. Her visual art work includes photography, installation, video and performance. A Cave Canem poetry fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies. She studied modern dance (under Viola Farber) and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning her Master’s from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As an arts journalist early in her career, she was the first to put the term “hip hop theater” into print in American Theatre magazine. She has received numerous grants from the DC Arts Commission and was a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow as well as receiving Engaging Dance Audiences grants from Dance/USA. She was awarded a 2022 MAPFund grant. She was a 2019 Red Bull Detroit artist-in-residence, a 2020-2022 Live Feed resident artist at New York Live Arts and a 2021-22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. A gifted and dedicated teaching artist, she directed a year-round creative writing and performance program for adjudicated youth in DC’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services for four years as well as facilitating workshops nationally and internationally. She is currently the national director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program which uses the arts strategically to transform schools facing severe inequities. www.hollybass.com.
Image description: A Tamil woman turning her head towards the camera. She wears her hair up in a bun and has a nose ring on her right nostril per her Tamil culture. Photo by Nathan Cornetet.
Dr. Prathiba Batley (she/her) is a three-time Indian National Champion of Bharatanatyam and a recipient of the Dance/USA fellowship funded by the Doris Duke Foundation for her work addressing social justice in and through Bharatanatyam. She strongly believes in challenging the status quo in Bharatanatyam by addressing caste/religious hegemonies while also giving more agency to women practitioners. She is the founder/chairperson of Eyakkam Dance Company. Her recent works include Dirty Secrets - a dance short film and Parai+Natyam which brings together the parai drums (of the oppressed Dalits) and Bharatanatyam (predominantly practiced by the dominant caste).
Image Description: A devilishly handsome (but modest) man wearing a blue chinoiserie tuxedo looking like he sees a bowl of noodles just out of his sightline. Photo: Eli Schmidt.
Phil Chan is a co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface and the President of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation. He is a graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School. He has held fellowships with Dance/USA, Drexel University, Jacob’s Pillow, Harvard University, the Manhattan School of Music, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, NYU, and the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris. As a writer, he is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact and Banishing Orientalism, and has served as the Executive Editor for FLATT Magazine and contributed to Dance Europe Magazine, Dance Magazine, Dance Australia, and the Huffington Post, and currently serves on the Advisory Board of Dance Magazine. He served multiple years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel and the Jadin Wong Award panel presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. He was a Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Dance at Carleton College, and was named a Next 50 Arts Leader by the Kennedy Center. His recent projects include directing “Madama Butterfly” for Boston Lyric Opera (garnering “Best of 2023” in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Broadway World), and staging a newly reimagined “La Bayadere” for Indiana University. His dances are currently in the repertory at Ballet West and Oakland Ballet, where he serves as Resident Choreographer.
Image description: A Chinese American woman smiles at the camera. She has straight black hair and glasses. The background behind her is a blue sky and the green tops of trees. Photo by C.S.
Delphine Lai (she/her) is a writer, arts advocate, and arts administrator with over twenty-five years of nonprofit experience. In 2009, she founded Del Arts Consulting to make the arts more accessible to all, to support the creation of new work, and to further art as a means for social change. Clients have included Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Bay Area Mind and Music Society, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association, ODC, and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. Delphine is also the organizational dramaturg for the National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron), and she is a contributor for the forthcoming book "Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography" that will be published by University of Akron Press as the second title in the NCCAkron Series in Dance.
Throughout her career, Delphine has experimented across mediums, studying the creative process as a dancer, designer, engineer, visual artist, and writer. At Stanford University, she discovered partner dancing (western social dance forms and contact improv) and earned a B.S. in Product Design Engineering and a B.A. in English with a poetry writing emphasis. She worked as a graphic designer and user interface designer. However, her path shifted to the nonprofit world with positions at George Coates Performance Works, Dance Through Time, Performing Arts Workshop, and Bay Area Youth Fund for Education. She also became an Associate Director of Individual Giving at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, overseeing the SFMOMA Director’s Circle and Artist’s Circle giving programs. Her volunteer work has included helping local PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) develop equity statements, creating art with patients through Art for Recovery at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, and teaching art to children through DrawBridge at Hamilton Family Center, an emergency overnight shelter for families.
A sepia tone headshot of Yvonne Montoya, a smiling Latina woman with dark sparkling eyes and long wavy hair. Photo by Dominic AZ Bonuccelli.
YVONNE MONTOYA is a mother, choreographer, bi-national artist, and founding director of Safos Dance Theatre. Based in Tucson, AZ and originally from Albuquerque, NM, her work is grounded in and inspired by the landscapes, languages, cultures, and aesthetics of the U.S. Southwest. From 2017-2018 Montoya was a Post-Graduate Fellow in Dance at Arizona State University, where she founded and organized the inaugural Dance in the Desert: A Gathering of Latinx Dancemakers. From 2019-2020, Montoya was a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and a member of Round One Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists program In 2020, Montoya was the first Arizona-based artist to receive the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Project Production Grant. In 2022, her company Safos Dance Theatre received the National Performance Network Creation Fund Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Project Grant for her piece Stories from Home. Stories from Home premiered at GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C. in October 2023. Montoya was recently featured in KQED’s If Cities Could Dance and KNME’s ¡COLORES! www.yvonnemontoya.co.
ImagJames shown here is a dark skinned Black man wearing glasses and a black mock turtleneck short sleeved shirt, he is obviously a man of a certain age
James Scruggs is a writer, performer and producer creating topical, interactive, theatrical work usually about race, racism and inequity. He was just recently been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. In March of 2024, work in progress excerpts of his interactive The American Truth and Reconciliation Commission play was commissioned and web streamed live by HERE Arts Center, NYC. It was commissioned by The Perelman Arts Center. He was awarded an NPN Creation Fund Grant for OFF THE RECORD: Acts of Restorative Justice (2022) to be performed in NYC, Boston and Tampa in 2025. In addition to the theatrical component, ANOTHER aspect of this work will be the production of criminal record sealing clinics in the above cities. His 3/Fifths SupremacyLand (2017) was a fully functional, interactive Ethno-Theme-Park exploring racism. “Immersive theater routinely makes audience members uncomfortable, but Mr. Scruggs is on a level all his own with 3/Fifths SupremacyLand… Visually and conceptually, 3/Fifths SupremacyLand is extraordinary”…says The NY Times May 2017. It was awarded a 2015 MAP Grant and a 2016 Creative Capital Grant. His Trapped in a Traveling Minstrel Show (2017) was an authentic deconstructed blackface minstrel show performed in Boston. The Bay State Banner said “Writer James Scruggs wrenches the audience out of their comfort zone and into the hilarious, haunting and tragic center of the lives of two black men, framed through a minstrel show. Right from the start the show shocks.” It received an Elliot Norton Award. He has a BFA in film from School of Visual Arts. www.jamesscruggs.com.
