Collaborators
Sholeh Asgary
Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist and educator whose immersive works, performances, and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary has exhibited and performed at such institutions as ARoS Kunstmuseum, Sotheby's Institute of Art, and Minnesota Street Project, and has received support through numerous residencies and awards, some of which include The Foundation for Contemporary Art (2021), UCLA Art Sci (2021), MASS MoCA (2021), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2022), and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is currently a Lecturer at the University of California Berkeley and CCA and resides in Oakland, CA.
Rachel Austin
Rachel Austin (she/they) is a queer white performer, singer, and electronic composer. A deconstructionist, Austin's recent works have focused on disassembling whiteness and blurring the lines of majority culture experiences through songwriting, performance art, and prose. Playfulness-as-liberation is at the centre of her practice. She/they taught voice and performance at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast whilst touring as a songwriter and working in a homeless hostel in Northern Ireland. She/they has performed across Europe and the US and received an MFA in Performance+Performance Studies from Pratt Institute. Austin splits her/their time between the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia and Brooklyn, NY.
Hannah Meleokaiao Ayasse
Hannah Meleoakaiao Ayasse (she/they) is born and based in Huichin, Ohlone Land also called Oakland, CA. She is a white, Native Hawaiian, and Chinese dance artist, administrator, curator, and educator whose work explores deep listening and improvisational practice within interpersonal and environmental relationships. She tends to her evolving creative practice, co-curates the Performance Primers, and teaches Creative Movement to young children. Hannah holds a BA in Dance and Psychology from The George Washington University and has presented her work at Joe Goode Annex, San Francisco Center for the Book, SAFEhouse Arts, and various DIY spaces throughout the Bay Area.
Tessa Nebrida
Tessa Nebrida (she/they) is a Filipina improvisational dance artist and bodywork + energy healing practitioner rooted in community healing practices. Her work is heart centered, regenerative, and invites a grounded inquiry into the body as both a landing place and bridge for interconnection, expression, and deeper experiencing of source and mystery. Her inquiries live within the integrative space of consciousness and form, the unseen and seen, the local and non-local dance that makes up our rich human experience. She holds a BFA in Dance and Composition from California Institute of the Arts and 20 years of training and exploration in the field of healing arts therapies.
Emma Tome
Emma Tome has practiced martial arts since childhood, and began learning modern dance technique in 2019. They write about this experience in "dancing close to home", published in the Spring 2022 issue of Dancer's Group In Dance.
Elizabeth Sugawara
Elizabeth Sugawara (she/they) is a dance artist and movement maker, currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at The Ohio State University. She is a multi-layered, ever curious artist who enjoys the feeling of making, the attentive focus, and awareness that goes into creating a world. She dances to honor her ancestors, actively listen to surrounding ecosystems, and to allow the ripples of internal sensations to seep to the external. She understands movement practice as a multisensory, multitasking activity and is interested in researching the constant patterns and movement transitions in her kinesthetic, improvisational process. Elizabeth questions through movement and storytelling: What does generous intentional adapting and active listening look like within improvisation as a performer?
Iris Yirei Hu
IRIS YIREI HU (b. 1991, Los Angeles) paints, weaves, dyes, tells stories, and composts her lived reality into installations, public artworks, and intercultural, generational, and geographical collaborations, often working in community with artists, scientists, historians, keepers of traditions, and organizers. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013 and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2017, and her work has been exhibited extensively. Hu has completed public art commissions for California State University, Dominguez Hills; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA-LA) and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND); LA County Department of Mental Health; and she is working on on a multi-year, large-scale public art project for the future UCLA/Westwood Purple Line LA Metro Station slated to open in 2027. Iris was recently selected for the internationally recognized artist-in-residence program at Headlands Center for the Arts. She has been supported by the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2022), California Arts Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship (2021), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2020, 2018), and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans (2016).