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.

Joe Chvala

2023 Choreography FELLOW

Joe Chvala has created over 30 original works for the stage that have toured from New York to Paris and from Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival to Litle Falls, MN. He is the founder and artistic director of the highly acclaimed percussive dance company, Flying Foot Forum. Articles and reviews of his work have appeared in national and international magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, La Monde, the Chicago Tribune, Dance Magazine, and the Village Voice. The range of his work has been described as "somewhere between Sammy Davis, Jr. and Samuel Becket" and has
earned such accolades as "Fred Astaire on acid" and "the Agnes DeMille of the tap."

Chvala has also choreographed, directed, and/or been commissioned to create new work for a variety of venues including the Walker Art Center, The Ordway Center, the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, The Guthrie Theater, the Minnesota Opera, Arkansas Repertory Theatre, The Children’s Theatre Company (to name a few). He has received Ivey and Minnesota SAGE Awards for theater and dance, as well as numerous other awards, fellowships, and grants from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, Target, and McKnight Foundation. Chvala also choreographs and directs dance for films. His first short film, COOKAPHONY, has been chosen as an official selection at 14 film festivals, winning four awards at various festivals including Paris Short Film Festival, Sedona International Film Festival, Vasteras International Film Festival (Sweden) and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Internatonal Film Festval.

Touring Information

Rita Mustaphi

2023 Choreography FELLOW

Rita Mustaphi is a choreographer, dancer, educator and disciple of the legendary master late Pandit Birju Maharaj in the Kathak style of Indian classical dance. She is known for her innovations in Kathak dance, her multi-disciplinary productions incorporating spoken word, live and commissioned music, and the utilization of production elements. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Katha Dance Theatre. Under her vision and leadership, the company has become renowned for its dynamic productions, distinctive movement style, and technical virtuosity. Her work, intelligently crafted storytelling, is recognized as being profoundly moving and effortlessly intimate.

Ms. Mustaphi is a recipient of a Leadership award from the Council of Asian Pacific Minnesotans, a Lifetime Achievement award from the India Association of Minnesota, and an Education award from the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in the category of Excellence in Vision. Most recently, she received the 2021 “Nari Shakti Award” from the Indian Government in New Delhi, India, given for her work in the cause of women empowerment.

With a career and a commitment to Kathak dance spanning 30+ years, over 500 performances, and 50+ original choreographic works, she still revels in the process of directing bodies in space, creating movement on her own body, and exploring what “moves” an audience to become engaged emotionally, intellectually and musically. Her works have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, The McKnight Foundation, three past McKnight Choreography Fellowships (‘88, ‘92, ‘98) the Jerome Foundation, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Target Foundation, and the 3M Foundation.

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Deneane Richburg

2023 Choreography FELLOW

Deneane Richburg (Choreographer, Dancer, former Competitive Figure Skater, Founder/Artistic Director of Brownbody) grew up a competitive figure skater—in spaces where she had to check her blackness at the door, as world skating was dominated by whiteness and rooted in values that subjugated her ancestry’s truths; to quote Zora Neale Hurston, she always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” Richburg realized the need to carve out space for her ancestral history hence her decision to establish Brownbody.

Since 2013 Brownbody has honored complex narratives of U.S.-based Black communities by disrupting assumptions, and disenfranchising ideologies, around blackness. She received her MFA in dance and choreography from Temple University in 2007, an MA in Afro-American Studies from UW Madison, and a BA in English and African American Studies from Carleton College. Richburg has been choreographing work for both the stage and ice since 2007 most recently completing an evening-length work called “Tracing Sacred Steps” which brings ring shout onto the ice. Deneane was a recipient of a 2017 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

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Leslie Parker

2022 CHOREOGRAPHY FELLOW

Photo by Canaan Mattson

Leslie Parker, a St. Paul, MN Rondo native, is a dance artist with art bases in Brooklyn, NY and in Twin Cities, MN. As a dance artist/maker, improviser, performer, director, collaborator, and educator, her work is awarded by National Dance Project (2021), National Performance Network Creation Fund (2020), National Performance Network Development fund (2021), National Performance Network community engagement fund (2021), and National Performance Network Storytelling & Documentation fund (2021).

She is an Outstanding Performance Bessie Award recipient and an inaugural Jerome Hill Foundation Artist Fellow. Growing up in the Rondo community rooted her in socially engaged art and led her to hold a BFA in Choreography and Modern dance technique from Esther Boyer College of Music & Dance (Temple University) and an MFA in dance from Hollins University in partnership with the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and The Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany.

Parker’s original works have been presented by New York Live Arts, HarlemStages EMoves13, Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center, Tribeca Performing Art Center, University of Minnesota Dance Program, Southern Theater, Pillsbury House Theatre, Pangea World Theater, Walker Art Center, and Painted Bride Arts Center. Parker co-directed the annual 44th (IHOB Puppet Theatre) MayDay Tree of Life Ceremony 2018. She was choreographer for Jimmy & Lorraine: A Musing by Talvin Wilkes and Collidescope 4.0 adventures in Pre and Post Racial America by Ping Chong and Talvin Wilkes; Penumbra Theatre’s 45th production of Black Nativity; and Parks, a portrait of a young artist.

For more information, go to: www.leslieparkerdance.com

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Pedra Pepa

2022 CHOREOGRAPHY FELLOW

Photo by Canaan Mattson

Pedra Pepa is a Venezuelan-raised, Minneapolis-based queer dancer / performance maker. Founder/director of Viva la Pepa, their works are fueled by the overlapping values of Latinx and Queer cultures: melodrama, passion, decadence, and sensuality. An inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Pedra continues a transnational collaboration with Argentinian choreographer Celia Argüello, spending time in natural landscapes researching the nature of the encounter. Pedra developed their recent work Contained, Alive as a U of MN Cowles visiting artist, in the Berkshires (MA), with Red Eye Theater, and through Candybox festival. Their previous work, Holy Doña, re-imagines the crucifixion as a queer performance ritual; they performed a preliminary iteration of this work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Pedra continues research weaving latinx immigrant identities, queer (gender/sexuality/activism) histories across the Americas: across time/colonizations, and nature; manifesting materially in their most recent 331 residency at Rosy Simas Danse space and continues in Guna Yala, May 2022. Pedra co-directs a children and family theater program Drag Story Hour, and entertains the adults at night as their draglesque persona Doña Pepa. Pedra is currently a teaching artist with Upstream Arts and with the Pillsbury House Theatre.

www.vivalapepa.org

Touring Information

Rosy Simas

2022 CHOREOGRAPHY FELLOW

Photo by Tim Rummelhoff

Rosy Simas is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation. She is a transdisciplinary and dance artist who creates work for stage and installation.

Simas’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. She creates dance work with a team of Native and BIQTPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening.

Simas’ dance works include Weave, Skin(s) and We Wait In The Darkness, which have toured throughout Turtle Island. Her installations have been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, All My Relations Arts, SOO Visual Art Center, and the Weisman Art Museum.

Simas is a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow, 2015 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow, 2016 McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow, 2019 Dance/USA Fellow, 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellow, 2017 Joyce Award recipient from The Joyce Foundation, 2021 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award recipient, and has received multiple awards from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and National Performance Network.

Simas’ yödoishëndahgwa'geh (a place to rest)  a micro-short film, performance, and installation, has been shared with audiences in New York City, Minneapolis, Colorado Springs, Miami, Niagara Falls, and Buffalo.

Simas’ upcoming work, she who lives on the road to war, will premiere in September 2022 at All My Relations Arts and the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration in the Weisman Art Museum, both in Minneapolis, and will tour Turtle Island in 2023–2024. 

Simas is the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and three thirty one space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis, MN.

www.rosysimas.com

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Ananya Chatterjea

2021 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW

photo by Canaan Mattson

Ananya Chatterjea/ অনন্যা চট্টোপাধ্যায় ‘s work as choreographer, dancer, and thinker brings together Contemporary Dance, social justice choreography, and a commitment to healing justice. She is the creator of Ananya Dance Theatre’s signature movement vocabulary, Yorchhā, and is the primary architect of the company’s justice- and community-oriented choreographic methodology, Shawngrām. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, a 2012 and 2021 McKnight Choreography Fellow, a 2016 Joyce Award recipient, a 2018 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, and recipient of the 2021 A. P. Andersen Award.

Ananya Dance Theatre is a company of BIPOC cultural activists and women and femme dance artists who believe in the transformative power of dance. In dancing stories where their lives and dreams occupy the center, they shift the landscape of mainstream culture, build understanding about arts and social justice, and empower artistic voices.

www.ananyadancetheatre.org

Touring Information

Alanna Morris

2021 Choreographer FELLOW

photo by Canaan Mattson

Alanna Morris (formerly Morris-Van Tassel) is a Brooklyn-born Dancer-Choreographer, Educator, Artist Organizer, and Curator, who danced with TU Dance (St Paul, Minnesota) under artistic directors Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands from 2007-2017. She was featured in works by Kyle Abraham, Gioconda Barbuto, Camille A. Brown, Ronald K. Brown, Greggory Dolbashian, Katrin Hall, Francesca Harper, Dwight Rhoden, and Uri Sands. In 2020 they served as the company's Artistic Associate and is a founding Teaching Artist at The School at TU Dance Center.

Alanna is the Artistic Director of I A.M. Arts (formerly Alanna Morris-Van Tassel Productions), founded in 2017 as a fiscally-sponsored project of Springboard for the Arts to sustainably provide opportunities for the development and presentation of new dance works, international collaborations, educational and community-development initiatives. For more on community development programs go here.

In January 2023, Morris premieres Invisible Cities, a collaborative reimagining of Italo Calvino’s metaphysical novel, interweaving cultural perspectives with a dynamic group of dance artists—Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy (Bharatanatyam), Berit Ahlgren (Gaga), Alanna Morris (Modern), Joseph Tran (Breaking)—and visual artist, Kevork Mourad, who creates Invisible Cities’ interactive, immersive projections in real time. For in-person and livestream tickets go here.

Alanna is a proud graduate of The Juilliard School with academic honors and of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (NY). She is an Artistic Advisor to Springboard Danse Montréal and was recently co-curator of the Walker Art Center’s 50th Anniversary of Choreographer’s Evening alongside Judith Howard in November 2022.

iamartss.com

Touring information

Darrius Strong

2021 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW

photo by Canaan Mattson

Darrius Strong is a Twin Cities-based choreographer, instructor, and dancer. As the founder and Artistic Director of STRONGmovement, he uses the universal language of dance while blending styles such as Hip hop, Ballet, Modern, and West African to tell stories related to society and humanity. His passion for the youth has led him to the position of hip hop director at Eleve Performing Arts Center where he focuses on teaching young dancers how to connect their identity to movement.

Strong’s creative work is supported by the Walker Art Center’s Choreographers Evening, Rhythmically Speaking, and The New Griots Festival. He was also featured on an American Standard Billboard advertisement in NYC Time Square in 2016. Strong has created works for Threads Dance Project, Flying Foot Forum, Alternative Motion Projects, TU Dance, and James Sewell Ballet.

Strong is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a 2021 McKnight Choreographer Fellow, and a recipient of the 2017 Momentum New Works Award.

www.strong-movement.com

Touring Information

HIJACK (Arwen Wilder and Kristin Van Loon)

2020 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOWS

photo by Jaime Carrera

HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. HIJACK is the confluence and clash of two independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses. Their dances embrace juxtaposition. Their dances house unlikely intimates and question “who is the enemy?

Over the last 26 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, 9 Herkimer), Japan, Russia, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation.

HIJACK has enjoyed long relationships with Bryant Lake Bowl Theater (where their 1996 Take Me To Cuba was the theater’s first ever dance concert), Zenon Dance School (where they have taught every Wednesday morning for 19 years), and Walker Art Center (which commissioned redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK). In 2014, Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”, edited and instigated by Lisa Nelson. Jealousy (HIJACK’s 2019 installation/performance collaboration with Ryan Fontaine and Heidi Eckwall) was selected as one of the “Best of 2019” shows by the Star Tribune.

Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy

2020 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOWS

photo by Ed Bock

Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy are Artistic Directors of Ragamala Dance Company, founded by Ranee in 1992. Through their work, they explore the dynamic tension between the ancestral and the contemporary, highlighting the fluidity between the secular and the spiritual, the human and the natural. Their training in the South Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam under legendary dancer/choreographer Alarmél Valli, known as one of India’s greatest living masters, is the bedrock of their creative aesthetic.

Ranee and Aparna are recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships, Research Fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy) and Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), and Doris Duke Artist Fellowships, among others.

The New York Times writes “Ragamala shows how Indian forms can be some of the most transcendent experiences that dance has to offer.” Ranee and Aparna’s work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, American Dance Festival, the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Walker Art Center, among others; and has been presented widely, highlighted by the Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Cal Performances, and National Centre for Performing Arts (Mumbai, India).

Ranee serves on the National Council on the Arts, appointed by President Barack Obama. Among her awards are a 2012 United States Artists Fellowship, and a 2011 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. Aparna is a recipient of a 2016 Joyce Award, and a Bush Fellowship for Choreography, among others, and was selected one of Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch for 2010.

For more information

Karen Sherman

2020 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW

photo by Aaron Rosenblum

Karen Sherman’s work incorporates her background in dance, writing, theater, music, and the manual trades. Hands-on in all aspects of her work, she choreographs and performs, builds sets and props, designs sound, and writes text. Her explorations in craft and visual art, including glassblowing, woodworking, and sculpture, illuminate how the body extends to and through other materials, culminating in an interdependent world where objects elucidate bodies, choreography is language, and words become tools. She has been a freelance stage technician, technical director, and production manager for 25 years, which allows her to instinctively strategize the technical execution of her work as she creates it, and signals a lifelong commitment to helping other artists realize their work.

Her projects have been presented nationally by Walker Art Center, P.S. 122, Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, PICA/TBA Festival, Fusebox Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, American Realness, The Southern Theater, Diverseworks, Movement Research, Highways, ODC, and many others. Honors include a 2007 Bessie Award for her performance in Morgan Thorson's Faker, multiple McKnight Fellowships, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Performance Lab, ADI/Lumberyard, Movement Research, and the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy. She was a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellow in The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and is an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-in- Residence in its dance program. Her writing has been featured in such forums as e-flux journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Criticism Exchange, and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by the Work of Nicole Eisenman.

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Paula Mann

2019 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW

Photo by V. Paul Virtucio

Paula Mann’s work has been presented by performance venues both in New York at New York Live Arts, P.S 122, Danspace, and in the Twin Cities, by the Southern Theater, the O’Shaughnessy Dance Series, The Walker Art Center, and solo work presented throughout the U.S, Canada and Italy.

Mann has received several awards from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Meet the Composer, the MN State Arts Board, St. Paul Cultural Star, MRAC Arts Activities (2015, 2016) and Community Arts, the Sage Cowles Chair at the U of M, a Bush Artist Fellowship, an American Composers Forum Music for Dance grant, a 2017 Artist Initiative Grant from the MN State Arts Board and a 2016-17 commission for new work from GT Artistry. In 2003, 2005 and 2007 her company, Time Track Productions, completed a trilogy of evening-length work that explored the effect of media on humanity through live performance. In July 2009 the company presented the evening length “I Love Tomorrow” at New York Live Arts.

Newer works include “Here & After” (2012), ‘The One And The Many” (2014) and “Rules Of The Crowd” (2015) for the Weitz Center for Creativity at Carlton College. From 1993-2013 Mann was full-time faculty at the U of M and was a 2015-16 visiting professor of dance at the U of W, Eau Claire. She is a graduate of New York University.

www.timetrackdance.org

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Ashwini Ramaswamy

2019 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW

As an independent choreographer, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s work references ancient myths and ritualistic practices, global literature and poetry, and the mixed media contemporary culture she has absorbed for 35 years, drawing from myriad influences to express a personal identity with collective resonance. Celebrated for her ability to “[weave] together, both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine” (New York Times), Ashwini studies Bharatanatyam from the legendary dancer/choreographer Smt. Alarmel Valli of Chennai, India, and Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, Artistic Directors of Ragamala Dance Company.

As Choreographic Associate/featured performer with Ragamala, she has toured extensively, performing throughout the U.S. and in Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, the U.K, and India. Ashwini’s choreography was among the “Best of the Year” in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Big Dance Town, and Minn Post, and has been presented by the Joyce Theater (NYC), Triskelion Arts (NYC), Cowles Center (Minneapolis), The Yard (Martha’s Vineyard, MA), and Just Festival (Edinburgh, U.K.), among others.

Ashwini is a recipient of grants from the McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and Jerome Foundation, including a recent inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Ashwini’s work is supported by USArtists International, National Endowment for the Arts, and New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project. A recent piece was commissioned by The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series, and her work has been developed in residence at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) the Baryshnikov Arts Center (New York, NY) and the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron, OH.

http://www.ashwini-ramaswamy.com

Touring Information

Jinza Thayer

2019 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW

After spending the first six years in Japan and Southeast Asia, Jinza Thayer grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received an MFA in Dance at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Now based in Minneapolis, she has created over 60 original works and presents her work as Movement Architecture – a blend of dance and theater in structured environments.

Some of the awards include being a two-time semi-finalist for France’s Rencontres choregraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (Bagnolet) in 1999 and 2001, and receiving a 2010 SAGE Award for Choreographic Concept and Design. Fellowships include a 2004 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Choreographers, 2006 Associate Artist Residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a 2010 Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Fellowship. She has received additional support from the Minnesota State Arts Board (1999, 2002, 2009, 2014, 2018), Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (2017), American Composers Forum (2006, 2011, 2014), and Jerome Foundation (2006).

Thayer has taught somatics, modern technique and composition at Zenon Dance Company and School in Minneapolis for twenty years.

https://www.movementarchitecture.com

DejaJoelle

2018 Choreographer Fellow

Photo by Tim Rummelhoff

DejaJoelle is a Black artist who uses dance, poetry and theater to explore the many bridges to and from Black America and Africa. She has studied dance at Howard University and with master dancers from Senegal and Guinea. She is also a graduate of Penumbra Theatre’s Summer institute program where she has honed the skill of art for social change. She continuously explores body image, language, culture, and modes of oppression. She believes her art is something not to be performed but witnessed and has replaced the word “performance” with “observance” mainly to keep the artist’s raw emotions intact. The art is not gifted for the observers, but in fact a ‘rites of passage' for the artist. Her most recent work includes Taneber/BLAQ Wall Street with her dance company BLAQ. BLAQ thrives off four main pillars: Dance, Writing, Discussion, and ASL (American Sign Language). BLAQ’s mission is to strive for freedom and aspire to embody the true reflections of themselves and their vast communities. 

Laurie Van Wieren

2018 Choreographer Fellow

Photo by Tim Rummelhoff

Laurie Van Wieren has been a creative force in the Twin Cities for 30+ years. Her choreography has been shown in the Twin Cities, nationally, and in Europe. 9x22 Dance/Lab, her monthly showcase, is the pre-eminent performance platform for local and visiting choreographers. She’s developed work for the Walker Art Center’s Open Field performance, which highlighted 100 local choreographers.

Van Wieren has curated performance for the Southern, Ritz, Bryant Lake Bowl Theaters and Soo Visual Art Center. She is a recipient of fellowships/grants from McKnight, Jerome, Bush, NEA, Rockefeller Foundations and Mn State Arts Board. She has received a Special Citation SAGE Award and a SAGE Award for Outstanding Performance. Van Wieren received a City Pages Artists of the Year in 2016 for her solo dance Temporary Action Theory and her ongoing curation. She is currently making site-specific ensemble dance performances for parks and large spaces and a series of solo works for small spaces. 

Laurie Van Wieren touring information