Alhassane "Sana" Bangoura

2024 DANCER FELLOW

Photo by Canaan Mattson

Alhassane "Sana" Bangoura comes from a family of traditional drummers and dancers
from Guinea, West Africa. As current and former members of the world-renowned Les
Ballets Africains and Ballet Merveilles, the Bangoura brothers' talents have brought
them all over the world and led them to make their homes in Italy, France, the US and
Iceland. Inspired by his brothers, Sana began his drum and dance training in 1999 as a
member of the company Wassasso, based in the capital city Conakry. In this company,
under the direction of Ballet Africains dancer, Sorel Conte, Sana rose to the position of
Principal Dancer, and in 2001 became Assistant Director.

During his sixteen years with Wasasso, Sana's duties were manifold. He managed
rehearsals for longtime company members as well as for youth who aspired to join the
group. He provided lessons for students from a myriad of countries to include Chile,
Argentina, France, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal. He performed in the
national competition Stars Vacance when the company took 1st place. Sana also
choreographed Wassasso performances that appeared on Guinea National Television
and won his group a 3rd place finish in the nation in 2012.

After moving to Minnesota in 2015, Sana performs with his brother, master
drummer Fode Seydou Bangoura, in their group Duniya Drum and Dance, and teaches
community classes for adults. Performance highlights include Duniya’s many Fakoly
shows and appearances at The Cowles Center, The Cedar Cultural Center and
Orchestra Hall.

duniyadrumanddance.org

Kealoha Ferreira

2024 DANCER FELLOW

Photo By Canaan Mattson

Kealoha Ferreira is a Kanaka Maoli, Filipino, Chinese dance artist from Nuʻuanu, Oʻahu, now residing in Mni Sóta Makoce on the unceded lands of the Dakhóta Oyáte. She is the Artistic Associate of Ananya Dance Theatre and a Co-leader of the company's Saint Paul space, the Shawngrām Institute for Performance & Social Justice. A practitioner of Yorchhā and an emerging student of Oli and Hula, Kealoha's artistry activates at the intersection of these transnational feminist and aloha ʻāina embodied practices.

As a leader, teacher, performer, and maker her work investigates the tensile and expansive nature of relationality while remaining rooted in cultural and kinesthetic rigor . She is a recent participant of Red Eye Theater’s Works in Progress cohort (2020), Hālau ʻŌhiʻa- a land and water stewardship program (2021), BIPOC Leadership Circle (2022), and Chawrchā NextGen ChoreoLab (2023). Kealoha teaches Yoga at the University of Minnesota as an associate faculty member in the Theater Arts and Dance Department.

Tumelo Khupe

2024 DANCER FELLOW             

Photo by Canaan Mattson

Tumelo Khupe (alias Melo) is a performing artist, krumper, and emerging choreographer
based in the Twin Cities and from Botswana. Her artistry investigates and explores how the
body manifests lived experiences through movement. Krump is foundational in her work as it offers endless possibilities for storytelling through its technique and language. She makes use of some elements of theater to reveal these moments through freestyle or improvisation. The four pillars of her artistry are rawness, discovery, individuality, and spirituality.

She graduated with a BA in Music Theater with a minor in Dance. Some awards received are the David Wick Leadership Award, the David Wick Best Choreography Award, and The Mabel Meta Frey Outstanding Theater Artist Award. She is a Naked Stages Fellow, Generating Room Fellow, Next Step Fund grantee, and most recently, a Chawrchā, a next-generation choreographic lab Fellow and has performed with Emmy award-winning company, Hip Hop Nutcracker.

Vie Boheme

2024 Choreography FELLOW

Photo by: Canaan Mattson

Vie Boheme is a Motown native, blossomed creatively in Pittsburgh and refined in Minneapolis. She’s a multimodal artist; a choreographer, a dancer, actress, and poet. Her work brings athletic agility to her vocal performance by singing and dancing in unison, eliminating the boundary between the visual and audio experience. She designs theatrical dance experiences that weave sentiment and storytelling through poetry and monologues
using dance as the site of embodiment for the story being told. As a choreographer, her
work's intentionality produces a pathway and an environment for viewers to connect to
their own visceral human experience.

Chitra Vairavan

2024 Choreography FELLOW

Photo by Canaan Mattson

Chitra Vairavan is a contemporary Indian dancer, choreographer and educator of South
Indian-American descent, with roots in Kandanur and Rayavaram. Vairavan is immersed in both Thamizh/Tamil culture and progressive brown politics in the U.S. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, spatial observation, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory.

She chooses to gesture towards and embody within the practice of liberation
and decolonization in creative and collaborative choices. The aesthetic of her movement is through
both yoga and contemporary Indian dance forms – mainly a mixture of training in Bharatanatyam,
Odissi and Yorchha™. For more please visit: www.chitravairavan.com or https://linktr.ee/vair0002.
Vairavan has been a proud part of the Mni Sota Makoce dance community for 20 years. Her dance work has been featured transnationally as a founding member and company dancer with Ananya Dance Theatre for 14 seasons, and her choreographic works have been featured in spaces such as The Cowles Center, the Walker Art Center, The Southern Theater, Intermedia Arts, Red Eye Theater, Pillsbury House Theatre and Patrick's Cabaret over the years. Vairavan has been the recipient of the 2016 McKnight Dancer Fellowship, 2018 Naked Stages Fellowship with Pillsbury House Theatre, and the 2020-2021 Springboard for the Artsʼ 20/20 Fellowship among other honors.

Pramila Vasudevan

2024 Choreography FELLOW

Photo by Canaan Mattson

Pramila Vasudevan is a movement-centered artist, cultural worker, and maker of
community-rooted/routed transdisciplinary work. Vasudevan is the founder and artistic
director of Aniccha Arts (est. 2004), an arts collaborative producing site-specific
performances that examine agency, voice, and group dynamics within community
histories, institutions, and systems. She is an artist associate of Pillsbury House Theatre.
She has been honored with a Joyce Award (2022), and also United States Artists (2022),
Guggenheim (2017) and McKnight Choreography Fellowship (2016). Vasudevan has been
invested in cultivating art spaces and artist growth as the director of Naked Stages
(2016–21), a fellowship program for early-career performance artists at Pillsbury House
Theatre, and as a teaching artist with Upstream Arts (2015–19), which activates and
amplifies the voice and choice of individuals with disabilities at every stage of life.

Her current practice involves gardening, hosting conversations and community
gatherings, and developing improvisational movement sessions inspired by growing
practices in gardens and greenhouses and by plant cycles in the urban park systems.
Her work engages with physical sites, ranging from human-constructed locations (like a
suburban parking ramp) to natural environments (such as along the Mississippi River).
In this process, she learns about the site’s history and current uses, the people that
have come and gone, the embedded politics, and the materials that physically make it
what it is. In responding artistically, Vasudevan orients from the body while layering in
other media (sound, drawings, sculptural elements, and so on) that illuminate a
multiplicity of perspectives.

Meryl Zaytoun Murman

2024 McKnight International Choreographer

 Photo credit: Hanna Hrabarsk

Meryl Zaytoun Murman is a Lebanese American choreographer and filmmaker and a permanent resident of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her art juxtaposes choreographic, cinematic and live art practices to create movement pieces that emphasize interactivity and intimacy and have been presented in Mexico, Turkey and throughout Europe. Her queer films and choreographies derived from experiments at the intersection of cinema and dance disrupt popular notions of spectacle, the body, virtuosity and gender, and her film le Pain was an official selection at international festivals receiving the Audience Choice award at East End Film Festival in London.

Murman has guest taught at ImpulsTanz International Dance Festival in Vienna, Companhia Instavel in Porto, Zelyonka International Dance Festival in Kyiv, and at Tulane University, CalState Long Beach University, and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Thematically, her work is engaged with moving bodies, particularly between borders and across binaries, and human rights in transitional spaces. She has twice received international fellowships through the US Embassy to implement multi-faceted projects with female and LGBTQ+ refugee populations in Ukraine and Northern Greece exploring sexuality, gender, and the effects of assimilation and migration on the body. These projects integrate trauma informed pedagogy, a kinesthetic approach to media, ritual and public performance intervention. Her work has been supported by the National Performance Network, the Arab American Museum, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. She is currently in development on her first feature film, ways of forgetting.

For more info, visit: merylmurman.me