Yara Boustany, Andrea Shaker & Mette LouLou von Kohl

2021 SOLO Choreographers

Yara Boustany is a performer and choreographer born in Ghbeleh, Lebanon. Her interdisciplinary work searches for potential sensory stimuli that can direct humans to unexplored territories of existence, looking for enchantment and disturbance. Places like Lebanon and Beirut are included with her shows as well as Stuttgart, Ankara, Warsaw, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Chalon sur Saône, and Athens. She is also the founder and director of Amalgam Studio in Beirut, Lebanon.

Andrea Shaker grew up in a small town in Connecticut on Quiripi lands. After earning her BA from Georgetown University and MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she moved to Dakota and Anishinaabe lands. She is now a professor of art at the College of Saint Benedict & Saint John’s University. Shaker’s creative work is interdisciplinary, spanning photography, moving images, experimental film, and the written and spoken word. As an Arab American, she explores the spaces between home & homeland and migration & diaspora. Through image and word, her work addresses how these spaces, and the body’s movement within these spaces, are imagined and experienced through the physiology of intergenerational memory.

Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. She is a wanderer, performer, and cultural worker currently living on un-ceded Lenape territory, now colonized as New York City. Von Kohl is a queer femme of Lebanese/Palestinian and Danish ancestry. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco, Denmark, and England. She is fascinated by the intersection between her identities as a jumping-off point to reveal, dismantle, and rebuild realities and dreams. Grappling with her past to complicate and better understand her present. She weaves movement and words into the exploration of her embodied histories. She exists in two places at once.