Amy O’Neal, 2023-2024

Amy O'Neal is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator. A sought-after artist for over two decades, she teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for live performance, dance film, music video and virtual reality. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O'Neal co-directed locust, an experimental multidisciplinary video, music, and contemporary dance company. Inspired by hip-hop culture and experimental cinema, locust's work created social commentary with humor and heavy beats. From 2010 until now, she creates experimental dance work merging Black social dance practices from hip-hop and house culture and contemporary dance while directly addressing race, gender and the sampling nature of innovation. She premiered her first evening-length solo in 2012 where she examined her influences, questioned her relationship to Blackness as a white woman, and paid homage to her teachers and dance heroes. As a practicing guest of Black dance culture, she has participated in experimental and all-styles battles, co-organized and co-produced Seattle House Dance Project, and developed hip-hop curriculum for the University of Washington. Her passion and research meet at the intersection of the hip-hop, house and contemporary dance communities. Within this intersection she explores the complex differences, nuances and layers of hybridized movement vocabularies. City Arts Magazine wrote, "O'Neal synthesizes complex themes with a cohesive, penetrating aesthetic. Her latest work transcends disciplines and boundaries. It is a bridge between worlds, a translator for opposing points of view, a force for good."

O'Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artist Trust, and 4 Culture. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/ImpulsTanz scholar and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, where she was awarded the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. While at Cornish, she danced and toured with the Pat Graney Company from 1998 to 2001and Scott/Powell Performance from 1997-2004. . O'Neal has been an Artist in Residence at Bates Dance Festival, Headlands Center for the Arts, the US/Japan Choreographer's Exchange, and Velocity Dance Center.

Naomi Macalalad Bragin with Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra, 2023-2024

Naomi Macalalad Bragin works at intersections of movement, sound and word. As part of the artistic collaboration Little Brown Language/Umalalengua Okan, she is interested in exploring translation as a body-based medium for accessing hidden histories and activating processes of cultural syncretism and psychosomatic healing. Her practice is deeply informed by her ongoing study of rhythms and forms of African Diaspora street and club dance. 

Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra is an artist born in Caracas-Venezuela, where she began her career as a dancer combining dance and theater training. Experiences with trauma at an early age fueled in her a pressing drive toward movement. Milvia went on to devote her life to reaching liberation through art and movement. In this journey, she has become a dancer, choreographer, performer, mother and Community Organizer. MÁS (Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle) has become the platform where she continue serving as a conduit for healing and liberation. Milvia’s own experiences with the healing aspects of dance, inform the work she creates. She believe that the worst events that can happen in your life are those that allow you to grow and change.  People experience a wide range of emotions throughout their lives,  as we open our bodies to this memory, including pain, regret, passion, and joy, we begin to feel the force of life and how it can help reconcile the body with its past.  When anger meets movement in its full expression, it creates an opening.  Pain is released through the promise of power. This is the impulse that Milvia uses to create her work.

Ankita Sharma, 2023-2024

Ankita Sharma is an experimental performance artist invested in world-making where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. Their often radical, demanding creations unpack systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is grungy, confrontational, and cheeky, a dance-horror, with physicality rooted in contemporary dance-theater and South Asian and African diasporic forms. For Ankita, performance audiences are agentive, sitting with and challenging discomfort in environments where sophistication and blasphemy collide.

Ankita's work has been shown at venues across the US, including Denver Art Museum, Dixon Place, Abrons Arts Center, JACK, Ormao, The Basement, The Tank, Chelsea Factory, University Settlement, and LaGuardia Performing Arts. Currently in residence at BASE and GALLIM, they have previously received support from Performance Project, ECS, LEIMAY, Crown-Goodman, and more. They hold degrees in Dance and Anthropology and have trained under artists such as Eiko Otake, Rosy Simas, Sorah Yang, Rennie Harris, Hofesh Shetcher, and Pallavi Sriram. In their spare time, they manage several award-winning dance-theater companies, including Sleep No More.

Akoiya Harris, 2023-2024

Akoiya Harris is a movement artist based in Seattle Washington.  Her work uses a queer Black gaze to explore how art holds personal and communal histories. Akoiya's practice is rooted in finding ways oral history, archival research, and poetry can be interwoven into dance works. She has collected oral histories on  behalf of the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute, a community story training program through Wa Na Wari, and Black Collectivity. Akoiya has also participated in the Black Embodiments Studio Arts Writing Incubator.  As a choreographer, she has shown work at the Seattle Art Museum, Wa Na Wari, On The Boards, Friends of the Waterfront, Velocity Dance Center, The Moore Theater, and more. Akoiya is a founding member of Black Collectivity, a group that explores memory and culture through embodied responses. Following a matriarchal lineage of teachers, Akoiya is a dance educator working with youth at Ailey Camp and Pacific Northwest Ballet. She has also performed with Spectrum Dance Theater, Will Rawls, Zoe|Juniper, Third Rail Projects, and SoloMagic. 

Drama Tops, 2023-2024

Drama Tops is co-topped by Elby Brosch, a transman, and Shane Donohue, a fairly cisman. As self-professed "Seattle's hottest postmodern, nightlife performance duo.", we are committed to creating queer performance that brings campy postmodernism to the clubs and queer nightlife to concert stages. Essentially, we are sassy li'l shits with an appetite for esoteric modern dance and pop music. Our signature sense of irony parodies macho archetypes by using our overwhelmingly masculine bodies to create work that illiciates cheering, crying, and throwing money. 

In the past, you may have seen Drama Tops in the first of their self produced full-length shows, Boys! Boys! Boys!,Drama Tops, this is for you, at Washington Hall as well as in the international tour of The Jinkx + Dela Holiday Show. Their work has also been presented at On the Boards in Northwest New Works and at Velocity in Fall Kick Off. In the gay bars of Seattle you might have seen them in a drag show at Kremwerk's Family Meal, Sissy Butch, or Catharsis; at Cha Cha in Heels!; at the Unicorn in High F@ggotry; at Clock Out Lounge in Tush!; and more.

The Seattle Project with choreographer Amanda Morgan, 2022-2023

Amanda Morgan (she/her) is from Tacoma, Washington. She studied at Dance Theatre Northwest and Pacific Northwest Ballet School, and she attended summer courses at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Boston Ballet School, and the School of American Ballet. Amanda joined Pacific Northwest Ballet as an apprentice in 2016 and was promoted to corps de ballet in 2017. 

In addition to her dance career, Amanda is a newly established choreographer. She has choreographed for Pacific Northwest Ballet's Next Step Program, premiering her works "Pages" (2018) and "The Argument" (2019) at McCaw Hall. She also was selected to be a choreographer in the Seattle International Dance Festival in 2019. In 2019, Amanda won a residency at Northwest Film Forum and Velocity Dance Center, giving her the opportunity to create her own show at Northwest Film Forum. Later in 2019, she launched her project titled "The Seattle Project" which is a group of collaborative artists, led by Amanda, that creates new work and dance that breaks down accessibility barriers in the community. In February of 2020, she had her first show "The How of It Sped" premiere at Northwest Film Forum, and in July of 2020 she created and premiered her piece "Musings" for Seattle Dance Collective's Continuum Program. In October of 2020, Morgan made her first piece for Pacific Northwest Ballet's Digital Season.  Ms. Morgan was named "25 to Watch" in Dance Magazine for the 2020 year. She also has been featured on the National Endowment for the Arts podcast in February of 2021.

Annabel Turrado, 2022-2023

(b. 1982, Glendale, CA) Annabel Turrado (she, her, ella) is a Los Angeles based performance installation artist. In 2018 she took on a solo 24-hour performance piece in Boulder, CO. In 2020 she was selected to be a part of Yellow Fish's Durational Performance Art Festival residency, with a culminating 12-hour performance in NY in 2021. Her most recent video work was on exhibit at The Front in San Ysidro, CA. At present, she is a participating artist in the 2022-2023 MexiCali Biennial. Annabel's work is time based and has a foundation in contemplative and meditative practice with an emphasis on imagery and symbolism.

Moonyeka, 2022-2023

Moonyeka (they/them) is  a nonbinary Ilocano-Filipinx  shapeshifter who takes form as a performing artist, teaching artist, writer, choreographer, curator, scholar, brujx and interdisciplinary artist. With a specialty in offering sensually sacred dance and movement-based storytelling experiences, Moonyeka's performance, community organizing and divination work centers kapwa and kilig as a compass to imagine worlds where their communities can thrive. Their dance and movement foundations lineages found root in the Street Styles Communities of South King County and Seattle where they engaged in cypher practices + freestyle forms such as Popping, Tutting, Animation. In conjunction, modern dance, improvisational methods, and sensual movement practices across contemporary dance spaces, diasporic upbringing, QTBIPOC show girl magic, and nightlife worlds also inform their practice.

NEVE and Rana San, 2022-2023

NEVE (they/(s)he) is a multigender, multiracial, multiple-Disabled, multidimensional, multidisciplinary terpsichorean artist of the stage, street, field, stream, and screen. They are an indigenous African living in Duwamish and Coast Salish lands and traveling wherever they have access and an invitation. (S)He is a 2020 Pina Bausch Fellow and a 2022 Arc Artist Fellow.

Râna San is an artist and arts administrator who, prior to stepping into her role as Artistic Director, served as the Community Programmer at NWFF, co-creating programming driven by and for the community. Râna co-directs the annual Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, the only video poetry festival in the PNW. Drawing on her background in performing arts and cultural management, she has curated and produced cultural festivals, museum programs, and intimate creative salons in Seattle, Istanbul, and Barcelona. Her creative practice melds dreamwork, written word, body in motion, video poetry, and analog photography. She's interested in the ways we relate to ourselves, each other, our surroundings, the unknown, and the new meanings that are made in spaces where artistic mediums meet.

Saira Barbaric, 2022-2023

Saira Barbaric (they/ he/ she/ ze) is a multidisciplinary, gender-blending hedonist creature in a thicc Black disabled human suit. His work exists in mediums and venues considered both high and low art with the aim of weakening the barrier between the two. Across discipline, Saira explores mythologies, sex, Afro Psychedelic dreams, ritual objects and glitch aesthetics as digital expressionism. The way to arch his back and bounce that fat was never shown to him. He twerked with enthusiasm before he ever saw Big Freedia and felt so validated when he did.

Hexe Fey, 2022-2023

Hexe Fey (he/they) is an interdisciplinary mover, art worker, and community harm reductionist. Hexe is the creator of the video game, "Cursed Task,” about the struggle of writing artist bios.

Degenerate Art Ensemble, 2021-2022

Degenerate Art Ensemble (Haruko Crow Nishimura and Joshua Kohl) Degenerate Art Ensemble has shown their work throughout the US and Europe known for their large scale dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation. Recent highlights of the group's work include a major exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in 2011, was commissioned by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach in 2012 and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet in 2013. Also in 2012 Degenerate Art Ensemble was commissioned by the city of Seattle to create a massive site specific work Underbelly in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair. The group’s 2015 work Predator Songstress premiered at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in 2015. In of 2016 DAE teamed up with Czech rock legends Uz Jsme Doma for an epic orchestral work inspired by the group's music at the Archa Theatre in Prague with the South Bohemian Philharmonic Orchestra. DAE’s newest work Skeleton Flower was first seen as a work in progress at the Spotlight USA Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, had its world premiere in Seattle in 2019, was performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City in August of 2021 and will have its New York premiere in the Spring of 2022. The group is currently in preparation for the premiere of their collaboration with sculptor Senga Nengudi and musician Eddy Kwon; Boy mother / faceless bloom at Colorado College and at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center.

Same As Sister, 2021-2022

Same As Sister (S.A.S.) is an experimental performance collective founded in 2013 by Canadian-American choreographers Briana Brown-Tipley + Hilary Brown-Istrefi, to challenge, deconstruct, and reimagine representations of identity towards understanding. S.A.S.’s interdisciplinary commissions have been presented at venues in the US, Canada, France, Greece, and Italy including Danspace Project; BRIC Arts | Media House; New York Live Arts; Dancemakers Centre for Creation; Centre d'Art Marnay Art Centre; Kinitiras; Libreria d’Arte Contemporanea; MOMus - State Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Archaeological Museum of Messenia. They are the recipients of a Queens Council on the Arts’ 2020 Queens Arts Fund New Work Grant (Multi-Discipline); New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (Choreography); Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ 2017 Emergency Grant (Dance); and were an Alternate and Finalist for the Jerome Foundation’s 2021-22 and 2019-20 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (Dance).

Jenna Eady, 2019-2020

Working in collaboration, Jenna and Hanna Eady use text, movement and sound design to create environments for experiential story telling. As Palestinian artists they focus their content on personal experience while uplifting the voices of their community. In their newest project FLOOD, they draw the parallels between modern day refugees and biblical stories.

Coley Mixan, 2019-2020

Coley Mixan is a musician, public library activist, performance artist, radio DJ, and pastry/prairie enthusiast. They currently work in Seattle, thrusting through a multiverse of clues, hunches, and downright queer shenanigans. You can discover more on their website and Instagram: @astro.ooze

Jade Solomon Curtis, 2018

Born in Texas, Jade Solomon Curtis is a choreographer, dance artist and Founder/Executive Artistic Director of Solo Magic, a non-profit arts initiative that collaborates with innovative artists to create socially relevant multi-disciplinary performances highlighting dance. For Solo Magic, “Activism is the Muse.”

A celebrated dancer of Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater for four seasons, Curtis is also the subject of an Emmy Award-winning short film, "Jade Solomon Curtis", directed by Ralph Bevins of the Seattle Channel. Curtis received her BFA in Dance Performance from Southern Methodist University and is the recipient of fellowships, residencies, and grants from the University of South Carolina, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Velocity Dance Center, Artist Trust and 4Culture. Curtis is currently the Director of the Arts Program for the Pan African Center for Empowerment (P.A.C.E).

While at Spectrum, Curtis toured throughout the U.S and in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Since beginning her solo career in 2015, her solo performances have been commissioned by Seattle Art Museum, Central District Forum for Art & Ideas and Grammy Award-winning jazz composer John Clayton (NYC). Her work has been presented by the Seattle International Dance Festival, Velocity Dance Center and Spectrum Dance Theater. In 2016, Curtis was selected to tour Cuba as part of Common Ground Music Project; her solo, “Emancipation,” was produced as part of the landmark exhibition, “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic.” Her solo work has also been commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum and the Northwest African American Museum as a part of “Complex Exchange: Jacob Lawrence's Great Migration.”

Babette Pendleton, 2018

Babette DeLafayette creates activated environments through her multidisciplinary work as an artist, curator, and creative entrepreneur.  Babette utilizes her background as a choreographer and performance artist to build immersive body-sculpture, video, and multimedia based installations and performances. She began her early training at Baltimore School for the Arts, Nutmeg Conservatory, Alonzo King Lines Ballet and received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.  In 2013 she founded The Pendleton House, a creative entity that is a conduit for artistic and entrepreneurial collaborations to emerge, allowing for the integration of art, business, research, and communion. In 2015 she ran a multipurpose art and photography studio called New Tomorrow. She is currently the artistic/executive director of the Seattle based Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival. She has been presented at Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards, LoveCityLove, Glass Box Gallery, Chapel Performance Space, LxWxH Gallery, The Steel Gallery at Gage, 12th Avenue Arts Center, Cornish College of the Arts, and Hedreen Gallery. Her work has been showcased in Velocity Made in Seattle, Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe) , Yellow Fish Durational Performance Festival, Northwest New Works Festival, Next Fest Northwest, Next Dance Cinema, 12 Minutes Max, Trigger. New Dance Happenings, Akimbo Site–Specific Festival (Baltimore), High Zero Music Festival (Baltimore), and Decibel Music Festival.

Petra Zanki, 2018

Petra Zanki is a Seattle-based choreographer and theatre maker originally from Croatia. She pursued her theatre studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, and was awarded two-year choreographic scholarship from Croatian HIPP-TSP, and ICK-Amsterdam/Emio Greco. Her insightful take on the international arts curation system, The Curators’ Piece, has been performed all over the world to critical and audience acclaim. In Seattle, she has mounted works at On the Boards and at Velocity Dance Center. Growing up in Croatia during the war, Petra’s main artistic interest remains the transformation of pain into landscapes of beauty for the benefit of humanity. Her recurrent themes are life and passage of time.

Keyes Wiley, 2017

Keyes Wiley is a dance maker, performer and instructor across a range of movement styles. Originally from California, Wiley holds a BFA in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts and has performed with Keith Hennessey, Kitten n' Lou, The Dance Cartel, Lingo and more. Their movement vocabulary spans a lifetime of influences, from breakdancing and hip-hop to contemporary and theatre dance. Wiley was featured on the 2014 City Arts Future List; they’ve danced at venues all over Seattle, including Spectrum, Velocity and On the Boards, and choreographed for theatre groups WET and the Satori Group. Wiley spent their two-week, November 2017 residency working with collaborator Laura Aschoff on a new project, "Being All Feeling or 6 to 8 white women," under the name Sylvia_Cilvia.

Jessica Jobaris, 2016

Jessica Jobaris, a Seattle based choreographer and instructor, has been exploring movement and awareness for 20+ years. As a performer, she has had the honor of dancing for notable choreographers Mark Haim, KT Niehoff, Maureen Whiting and Scott/Powell Performance, Salt Horse, and Carr Mixed Media in NYC. In Berlin she worked for Jess Curtis/Maria Scaroni, Felix Ruckert, and Kirsten Burger for German MTV. A graduate of Cornish College of the Arts, and a graduate of Anna Halprin's Tamalpa Institute, Jessica continues to study in the U.S. with Miguel Gutierrez, Anna Halprin and Tere O'Connor. In Berlin, she studied with Martin Spangberg, Robert Steijn, Felix Ruckert, and Rosalind Crisp. Her four-week residency in September, 2016 was spent working with her collective, General Magic, on A Great Hunger, which premiered at On the Boards in the 2016-17 season.

Dylan Ward, 2016

Dylan Ward is a dance/theater/filmmaker operating under the project name Sleep Nod.  He has produced original performance work, interventions and film for over a decade in Denver and Seattle. He spent his four-week residency in August, 2016 working on a range of projects that culminated in a two-night run of "The Lesser Evils," a mixed evening of new work in dance by Ward, Kim Lusk and Laura Aschoff.