Anne Harris  is an American-Australian playwright, dramaturg, videographer, performance poet and academic based in Melbourne.

Anne is also an international expert in creativity education and creative methodologies through a heuristic of creative ecologies. Harris is the series creator and editor of Creativity, Education and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan), has authored over 100 articles/book chapters and 17 books on creativity-related topics, in addition to public productions of plays, films and spoken word performances, and has won over $1.6 million in competitive research funding since 2010. Harris is currently an Associate Professor, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and RMIT Vice Chancellor’s Principal Research Fellow, and the Director of Creative Agency research lab: www.creativeresearchhub.com

Annette Markham is an ethnographer and critical pedagogy scholar, currently Professor at the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. She is founding director of The Museum of Random Memory, a series of arts-based interventions around automated memory in the digital age. Her writing can be found in a variety of books and academic journals. More information at annettemarkham.com.

Dr. M.E. Luka is Assistant Professor of Arts, Media & Culture Management and Interim Program Director, Arts Management, at the Department of Arts, Culture, Media (UTSC) at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment at the Faculty of Information. Dr. Luka is also an award-winning scholar, activist and digital media producer for arts, social enterprises, broadcasting and telecommunications, and creative management policy, planning and practice. She studies modes and meanings of creativity and innovation in the digital age, to investigate how arts, culture, media and civic sectors are networked together. Her research examines co-creative and collaborative production, distribution and dissemination in the intersecting fields of media, arts and culture.

Zach Bastick is a postdoctoral researcher in Digital Government at the European School of Political Science in France. His research is at the intersection of new media and political science. Previously, he was a researcher at the Harvard University Department of Government and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

Brook Bolander is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, at Monash University, Australia. She is a sociolinguist with major research interests in digital discourse, language and globalisation, and qualitative research Methodology.

Dina Brode-Roger is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven and UNIS. She worked in television before obtaining an MBA and working in the luxury industry. Based in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Dina is researching Identity of Place within the context of a changing climate.

Heidi A Campbell is Professor of Communication and affiliate faculty in Religious Studies at Texas A&M University. She is director of the Network for New Media, Religion & Digital Culture Studies and author of over 100 articles and books on emerging technologies, religion and digital culture.  Her work includes When Religion Meets New Media (Routledge 2010), Digital Religion (Routledge 2013) and Digital Creatives and Rethinking Religious Authority (Routledge 2020. She was named Scholar of the Year in 2017 by the Religious Communication Association and a Presidential Impact Fellow by Texas A&M University in 2018.

Rebecca Carlson is an assistant professor at Tokyo Medical and Dental University where she teaches medical anthropology, global health, Japanese society and qualitative methods. Her interest in the borders and bordering of disease and healthcare grew out of a parallel interest in the boundaries that shape the circulation of videogames and their fans. She has published most extensively on video game localization, and her work has appeared in the journals Culture, Theory and Critique, Games and Culture and Transformative Works and Cultures. Currently, she studies efforts to globalize basic science research in Japan.

Tatiana Chemi is an Associate Professor, Department of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg University, Denmark. Chair of Educational Innovation, where she works in the field of artistic learning and creative processes. Her latest work focuses on examining artistic creativity cross-culturally, arts-integrated educational designs in schools and theatre laboratory. The latter brought her to author A Theatre Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy and Creativity: Odin Teatret and Group Learning published in 2018 by Palgrave and to editing The Five Continents of Theatre, by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, published for Brill/Sense in 2019. She is Italian and has been living in Denmark since 1999.

 

Siyu Chen is an assistant professor in cultural studies at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans the fields of creative industries, youth culture, urban studies, media studies and gender studies, with a special focus on the Chinese context. Her research examines the mutually constitutive nature of social practices, modes of power, and the intersections of multiple axes of identity, including place, gender and class. She employs qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, textual analysis, content analysis and interviews, etc. Her previous studies have been published in several peer-reviewed journals, and she is the winner of the Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Best Graduate Paper on the Anthropology of East Asia 2015 and the Asian Anthropology Best Paper Award 2017.

Marianne Clark is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW, Sydney.  Her research interests encompass the intersections of physical and digital cultures and gendered dimensions of health. Drawing from poststructuralist and new materialist theoretical perspectives as well as innovative qualitative research methodologies Dr. Clark is particularly interested in the socio-cultural study of the moving body. She is the co-author of the forthcoming book Sport, Fitness and Feminist New Materialisms: A Lively Introduction (Palgrave MacMillan).   

Emma Cooke is a PhD Candidate (Sociology) and Research Assistant with expertise in qualitative research at the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland. Her PhD examines the experiences of children in Early Childhood Education and Care, childhood discourses, and methodologies for researching with children.

Jayson Cooper is an arts-based researcher in early childhood, land-based education, and public pedagogy. His work explores the ways places, with all their complexities, are pedagogical. His research and teaching embraces post-qualitative art-based pedagogies and methodologies that seek ways the public sphere is artful, and full of pedagogy in a hyper-complex entangled world. Decolonising agendas drive how he connects and understands places as an educator and artist. His publications explore young children’s art and aesthetics, public pedagogy, community-based learning and art education. Jayson is a lecturer in early childhood studies at Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

Mark DeGarmo is a New York City-based dancer, choreographer, writer, and researcher who earned a Ph.D. from Union Institute & University and a B.F.A. from the Juilliard School Dance Division. He has created, performed, and produced over 100 dance-theater works and led his dance company on multiple projects across 13 countries. Recipient of the Martha Hill Dance Fund’s 15th anniversary Mid-Career Award, his work has been recognized with performing arts awards and honors in choreography, education, and community development from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the U.S. Department of State, and The White House.

Las Fridas, Mark DeGarmo’s original duet inspired by Mexican painter and revolutionary Frida Kahlo, was called “Genius,” “Wonderfully in your face,” and “Frightening… in a way great art always should be,” by New York audiences in November 2019. Melanie Brown of Stagebuddy.com characterized DeGarmo, an open water distance swimmer, as “a gladiator in various arenas.”

Dani Dilkes is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto, enrolled in the Knowledge Media Design Collaborative Specialization and focusing on studying digital pedagogy, learning communities and the social nature of knowledge. She is also currently working in Curriculum and eLearning Design and Development in Medical Education University and is an advocate for student-centred learning experience design. In a past life, she was a web developer, a linguist and a language teacher. Dani is a perpetual student, a sometimes writer, and a novice photographer. She has three cats that keep her entertained and often grace her twitter feed @danielledilkes. Fortunately, she thrives on chaos, and they do not disappoint.

Zachary A. Dorsey is an Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at James Madison University. His PhD is in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the dramaturg for “Queens Who Read,” Virginia State’s first regularly scheduled Drag Storytime series at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library in Charlottesville, Virginia. His recent article describing that work can be found at https://lmda.org/review.

Melissa Dunlop is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry (CCRI – Sea Cry) at University of Edinburgh, writing Psy-Fi, a novel as thesis concerning the relationship between contemporary fiction and therapeutic practice, and a psychotherapist practising online and in Bristol, UK. Melissa facilitates regular online groups concerned with exploring relational co-presence in digital space: Touching Near for researchers, artists and writers, and Intervision for therapeutic practitioners.

Jennifer Erdely is an Associate Professor at Prairie View A&M University. As a qualitative researcher and performer, she has explored storytelling, fandom, trauma, altruism, and pilgrimage. Her most recent research utilizes performance, ethnographic, and autoethnographic inquiry to explore narratives of chronic pain, health, and empathy. 

Dawne Fahey is an interdisciplinary artist and a part-time PhD candidate at Western Sydney University, Australia. The title of her research is “Visualising Empathy: An Alchemist in the Landscape”. Dawne’s research project is practice-led.  It makes use of autoethnography and arts-based research methods to explore the intersection among cultural immersion, empathy, trauma, personal meanings and storytelling. She may be reached at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Australia.

Esther Fitzpatrick is a Senior Lecturer in The Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland. She uses various critical innovative pedagogies, including writing as a method of inquiry, in her teaching and research. She has published on issues of racial-ethnic identity in postcolonial communities, Pākehā identity, critical family history, critical autoethnography and arts-based methodologies. Her current research explores emerging identities in postcolonial societies, and ‘culturally responsive pedagogy’ in practice. Esther has published in Qualitative Inquiry, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and Art Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal. She has recently co-edited two books: Fitzpatrick, E. & Fitzpatrick, K. (Eds) (2020). Poetry, method and Education Research: Doing critical, decolonising and political inquiry. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, and Farquhar, S. & Fitzpatrick, E. (Eds) (2019). Innovations in Narrative and Metaphor: Methodologies and Practices. Singapore: Springer. ​

Lisbeth Frølunde is a white Danish-American, who is an Associate Professor in Communication at Roskilde University, Denmark. Lisbeth’s background combines visual and dialogic communication research with illustration, expressive arts therapy, and arts-based research in health. 

Lisbeth aspires to develop arts-based research methodologies, especially in regards to aesthetics, co-creative storytelling and audience engagement in research communication through making graphic novels (graphic medicine). Her current research is part of the collaborative project Dancing with Parkinson’s, funded by the Velux Foundation (2019-21).

Dr. Jonathon Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney and a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Online News and Media Pluralism. His research explores Public Service Media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media, automated media, and algorithms in media. He is the Editor in Chief of the Policy & Internet journal, the Treasurer for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), and the Secretary for the International Association of Public Media Research (iaPMR). Hutchinson is an award-winning author and his latest book is Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation and Media Organisations (2017), published through Palgrave Macmillan.

Kel Hughes Jones worked in K-12 education as a library media specialist and ESL/Science teacher for eleven years.  She earned an Ed.D. in metropolitan education from the University of Michigan — Dearborn in 2019. While there, she was a Center for the Education of Women Margaret Dow Towsley Scholar, a King-Chavez-Parks Future Faculty Fellow, and an Honors Scholar for the College of Education, Health & Human Services. Her research interests include care ethics, othermothering, teacher recruitment and retention, and Black feminism/womanism in education.  She recently contributed a chapter to Black Girl Civics: Expanding and Navigating the Boundaries of Civic Engagement.  Kel is currently a reference and instruction librarian at Waukesha County Technical College in Pewaukee, Wisconsin.

Georgia Rose Murray’s paintings depict her fascination with the sublime effects of light and darkness on the natural landscape. Her holistic processes are guided by conscious and subconscious observations and by a visceral awareness of the mystical; the works explore our human existence on Earth in connection with the spirit world.

Writing and drawing throughout day and night, Murray constantly records significant conscious and subconscious observations, reflecting on all of her experiences with coloured pens in sketchbooks. The results of the holistic process amalgamate to form narratives which lead to the creation of paintings. Paintings are made on paper, un-stretched canvas or primed board with water and oil based paints including gloss, vivid powdered pigments and a range of additional mediums.

Peta Murray is a writer-performer best known for her plays, Wallflowering and Salt.  Recent works for performance include Missa Pro Venerabilibus: A Mass for The Ageing, Things That Fall Over: an anti-musical of a novel inside a reading of a play, with footnotes, and oratorio as coda and vigil/wake.

Corinna Peterken is an Assistant Professor in Teacher Education at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA. She is a white British/Australian working in the USA since 2016 and has worked in education, the arts and with young children over her whole career supporting learning in relation with materials, places, and bodies. Her interests include arts based research from postmodern, feminist, and critical perspectives, advocating for anti-bias curriculum, and using the arts to support engaged learning for all students. Her art practice uses emergent processes, photography and collage, textiles/fiber including quilting, embroidery and applique as featured in Peterken, C. (2019). Crafting living inquiry with a quilt of children’s images. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 4(1), pp. 240-255. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/ari/index.php/ari/issue/view/1943.

Louise Phillips is a white Australian, who is presently located as an Associate Professor in Education at James Cook University, Singapore. Louise’s career spans theatre in education, early childhood education, storytelling, environmental education, children’s rights and citizenship research, and arts-based research methodologies. She is particularly interested in story as theory and method illustrated through co-authoring the Routledge book Research Through, With and As Storying with Tracey Bunda. See http://louptales.education

Riccardo Pronzato is currently a Doctoral Researcher (PhD) in Communication, markets and society at the IULM University (Milan, Italy). 🌍 I’m interested in digital sociology, online media platforms, critical algorithm studies, online political communication, as well as cognitive and socio-narrative approaches. 📱 I’m also a summa cum laude graduated in Sociology and Social Research (MSc) at the University of Trento with an interdisciplinary thesis in cognitive sociology regarding online adv targeting children. 📘

Devina Sarwatay is Senior Research Fellow (UGC-NET) and PhD Student in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, India. She researches young people and social media, under the guidance of Prof. Usha Raman. Recently, she joined the Media Education Lab, Harrington School of Communication and Media, The University of Rhode Island, USA as a Graduate Student member. Formerly an Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator (Communication) at a business school in Ahmedabad, she completed her M.Phil. in Mass Communication and Journalism and Masters in Development Communication (Gold Medal) at Gujarat University. Her research has examined media literacy, communication for development, and interpersonal communication, and has been presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), International Communication Association (ICA), Université Catholique de Louvain, University of Hyderabad, Indian Institute of Management-Indore, and published in The Handbook of Media Education Research (Wiley-Blackwell), Asia Pacific Media Educator (SAGE Journals), Indore Management Journal, among others. You can reach her at devina.sarwatay@gmail.com.

Gilda Seddighi is a Senior Researcher in Technology and Society at the Western Norway Research Institute. She has a doctoral degree (2017) in Gender and Media Studies, with the dissertation “Grievable lives in the Iranian Facebook pages” from the University of Bergen. Her research interests are in representations of gender, and constructions of identity and opinion in digital media and in processes of digitalization.

Stephanie Anne Shelton is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research in the College of Education at The University of Alabama, and affiliate faculty member in the Department of Gender and Race Studies.  Research interests include examining intersectional LGBTQ+ identities in educational contexts, and the ethical and pedagogical implications of interview transcription. Publications have appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, and Qualitative Research Journal.

Alison Shields is an Assistant Professor in Art Education at the University of Victoria. She received a PhD in Art Education from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the University of Waterloo. Her art practice and research focus on painting as inquiry, studio practices and artist residencies.

Philippa Smith is an Associate Professor in English and New Media in the School of Language and Culture at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Philippa’s research interests focus on critical discourse studies, identity, prejudice and discrimination, particularly in online contexts.

Dr. Kim Snepvangers (SFHEA) is an Associate Professor and Director: Professional Experience & Engagement Projects at UNSW Sydney, Faculty of Art & Design. Kim is an award-winning educator, InSEA World Councillor and has published extensively on creative ecologies at scale. Kim has a concurrent research interest in arts-based encounters, desert ecologies, Indigenous perspectives and participatory economies, especially relationships necessary to sustain creative professional partnerships in translational educative spaces.

Annabelle Sreberny is Emeritus Professor, Centre for Global Media and Communication, SOAS University of London, where she helped establish the school’s focus on global communication and where she was the first director of its Centre for Iranian Studies. She was President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) from 2008-2012. Much of her research has been in the broad field of international communication and globalization with strong foci on international news, diasporas, and feminism. Her book on the 1979 Iranian revolution (Small Media, Big Revolution) has a strong auto-ethnographic component. Her recent autobiographical photographic project can be found at https://www.myrevolutionaryyear.com/

Fiona J. Stirling is a counselling lecturer with the Division of Health Sciences at Abertay University, Dundee. Her research interests include self-harm, media and mental health, and narrative therapy. 

Dr. Lisette E. Torres-Gerald is a trained scientist and disabled scholar-activist who currently runs a writing center and coordinates two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants (Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Program and S-STEM Program) at Nebraska Wesleyan University. She has a doctorate with a Certificate in Social Justice from the School of Education at Iowa State University and a M.S. in Zoology with a Certificate in Ecology from Miami University. Her academic research focuses on addressing racialized gender justice and disability in science and higher education. Lisette is an active member of Science for the People, serving as a Lead Editor and Accessibility Editor for Science for the People Magazine. She is also a co-founder and executive board member of the National Coalition for Latinxs with Disabilities (CNLD) as well as an advisory board member of Science Friday’s Breakthrough Dialogues Program and the Invisible Disability Project (IDP). Lastly, Lisette has been identified as an AERA/Spencer Foundation Early-Career Scholar and a Kavli Foundation Sponsored Network Leader for Inclusive Science Communication.

Dr. Abby Waysdorf is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, where she is part of the European History Reloaded – Curation and Appropriation of European Audiovisual Heritage (CADEAH) project, researching how individuals and groups appropriate and recirculate audiovisual heritage material. She holds a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam and has published in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Popular Communication, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Participation. Her research interests include fan cultures, place, and the interaction between audiences and the media industry.

 

Elizabeth Whitney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech, Communication, and Theatre Arts at Borough of Manhattan Community College, in the City University of New York. She teaches intercultural communication and gender studies. During the 2015-2016 she was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Turku, Finland, researching arts funding and freedom of expression. She has returned to Finland multiple times via CUNY grant funding and was most recently a Scholar in Residence at Aalto University. She is interested in creative research methods including auto/ethnography and digital storytelling.

Lynnette Widder (M.Arch, Columbia University, 1990; Sc.D., ETHZ, 2016) is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Masters of Sustainability Management Masters Program at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. She is principle investigator on a two-year project funded by the UN Development Programme in Guinea and the Earth Institute to support community-based environmental impact assessment from bauxite mining. Her other research projects include urban resource flows; community resilience; and architecture, construction and urbanism in post-war Germany and the US. She is a 2021 fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination at Reid Hall in Paris. 

Prior to joining the Earth Institute, she was Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design; she has taught at the ETH Zurich, Cornell University, City College of New York and Cranbrook Academy. She is co-author of three books: From Year Zero to Economic Miracle – West German Architecture 1949-63 (gta Verlag, 2021); Live Projects: Pedagogy into Practice (Taylor and Francis, 2014); and Ira Rakatansky: As Modern as Tomorrow (William Stout, 2010); and curator of several exhibitions on architecture and urbanism. She has written widely on architectural history and sustainable building in journals including Daidalos, Bauwelt, architecture, Manifest, Kritische Berichte, Journal of Industrial Ecology and The Social Science Journal. Her professional work with architecture has been published in the US, Europe, China and Australia.

Lea Wolf is a PhD student In Social Welfare at The CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Her research interest is in the seam between human and machine in equations of care. 

Estella Wong. Theatre director, actress and applied theatre advocate. Currently working in the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, School of Drama as Associate Dean and Head of Applied Theatre. She has authored Applying Theatre, Chinese translated Dramawise  (Haseman & O’Toole), Gavin Bolton: Essential Writings (Davis), and edited Risks and Opportunities: the Tension in Hong Kong Drama Education Development. Recent works include the online theatre See You Zoom (April-May 2020) premiere & re-run and See you Zoom Again (Sept-Oct 2020).

Shiyu Zheng is a Ph.D. researcher on Media and Communication in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK. She is also an academic tutor at Warwick. Her research areas focus on qualitative research, (auto)ethnography, (transcultural) fandom studies, digital media and cultural policy studies.

(Show Order)

Section 1:

Run Bunny Run: A collective art piece on COVID-19 lockdowns and digital technology (Zach Bastick, Lynette Widder, Heidi Campbell, Elizabeth Whitney)(00:51) France, USA

Braiding Dislocated Lives (Lisbeth Frølunde, Corinna Peterken, Louise Gwenneth Phillips, Tatiana Chemi) (2:25) Denmark, Singapore, Denmark, USA

The threshold of sound (Rebecca Carlson, Annette Markham, Fiona Stirling, Sharon (Shiyu) Zheng) (1:50) USA, Australia, Scotland, Uk (England)

Section 2:

Marsh_Wings_Faded (Melissa Dunlop, Lea Wolf, Jonathan Hutchinson, Mark DeGarmo) (01:07) Scotland, USA, Australia

Out, Empty, Away (Gilda Seddighi, Peta Murray, Zachary Dorsey, & Devina Sarwatay) (03:29) Norway, USA, India, Australia

Ice melting on artwork (Jayson Cooper) (00:23) Australia

Section 3:

 The Warrior (team 8) (Lisette Torres, Corinna Peterken, Kel Jones, Siyu Chen) (00:51) USA, China

Paces (Stephanie Anne Shelton, Emma Cooke, Estella Wong) (2:28) USA, Australia, Hong Kong

Exquisite corpse (Stephanie Anne Shelton, Alison Shields, Emma Cooke, Estella Wong) (1:26) USA, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada

Section 4:

Homesteading Across Time (Brook Bolander, Philippa Smith and Fiona Stirling) (2:08) Australia, New Zealand, Scotland

Braided work visual art. (Dina Brode-Roger, Jennifer Erdely and Peta Murray) 2:00  Belgium, USA, Australia

Birdsong (Kim Snepvangers, Georgia Rose Murray, Riccardo Pronzato, Abby Waysdorf)  (02:30)  Australia, Scotland, Italy, The Netherlands

Section 5:

Feeling Our Way, (Dawne Fahey, Melissa Dunlop, Elizabeth Whitney) (2:21) Australia, Scotland, USA

A Moment (Esther Fitzpatrick, Annabelle Sreberny, Marianne Clark, Dilkes) (2:58) New Zealand, UK (England), Australia, Canada

Mark DeGarmo, PhD, is Founder, Executive & Artistic Director of Mark DeGarmo Dance, New York City; Dance Director of Crossing Bridges International Artist Residency, Michoacan, Mexico; and an Artist-Scholar with Creative Agency, Australia.

His transcultural transdisciplinary commitment includes writing “Activating Embodied Imagination During COVID-19: A Performative Reflexive Autoethnography” for a special edition of “Qualitative Inquiry” journal (in press, 2020); “Road Kill, American Style: An Embodied Imagination, Photography, and Poetry Autoethnography” chapter for a Springer series book (in press, 2020); and “Transdisciplinary Performative Improvisation” for the University of Colima, Mexico’s innovative textbook Teaching Choreographic Composition from a Transdisciplinary Focus (in press, 2020).

Jan Hanvik is currently Co-Founder and Principal of Crossing Bridges LLC and Development Officer of Mark DeGarmo Dance.

 From 2008 – 2016 Jan was Executive Director of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center in Manhattan, an intentionally multi-cultural artist residency program with 43 visual art studios, 11 not-for-profit performing arts organizations, 4 theaters, and 3 galleries.  From 2002 – 2008 he was Executive Director of the Columbia County Council on the Arts, an upstate New York service organization organizing year-round arts education and public art events, among other activities.  From 1986 – 2001 he was Executive Director of PAMAR, organizing performing arts exchanges among the countries and cultures of the Americas.  He has twice been an awardee of Fulbright Senior Scholar Awards, in El Salvador 1990-91, and in Uruguay and Argentina 1999, 2001.  He holds an M.A. from New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and a B.F.A. from the Dance Program of the City College of the City University of New York.  He has been a site visitor and panelist for New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, NYSCA Regional Economic Development Council, Transcultural Exchange, and the Chicago Cultural Center, among other entities.  

Prof. José Alberto Velázquez Campoverde was born in the town of Nuevo Parangaricutiro, Michoacán (San Juan Nuevo) on April 8, 1979. He graduated from the Instituto Superior de Educación Artística CALMECAC in the city of Jerez de García Salinas Zacatecas, where he finished his degree in Mexican folk dance. 

Promoter and cultural promoter inside and outside the Mexican territory, promoting with great passion to children and young people the love to preserve and spread the customs, festivals and traditions, which is part of their cultural identity, through the dance interpretation of the dances that are representing the different states of their country. “Mexico”. Founder and director of the folkloric group P’urhépecha and of the dance of the Kúrpites of the group Raíces de mi Pueblo, with whom he has had the opportunity to visit a great part of the Mexican Republic, as well as some important cities of the United States of America. 

He also designs and manufactures typical clothing from the state of Michoacán.

The Grupo Folklorico P’urhépecha has a children’s group and a youth group. They welcome all children, youth and adults who are interested in learning traditional dances and Mexican folklore.

Visit the Facebook Page

Mark DeGarmo is a New York City-based dancer, choreographer, writer, and researcher who earned a Ph.D. from Union Institute & University and a B.F.A. from the Juilliard School Dance Division. He has created, performed, and produced over 100 dance-theater works and led his dance company on multiple projects across 13 countries. Recipient of the Martha Hill Dance Fund’s 15th anniversary Mid-Career Award, his work has been recognized with performing arts awards and honors in choreography, education, and community development from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the U.S. Department of State, and The White House. His transcultural transdisciplinary commitment includes writing “Activating Embodied Imagination During COVID-19: A Performative Reflexive Autoethnography” for a special edition of “Qualitative Inquiry” journal (in press, 2020); “Road Kill, American Style: An Embodied Imagination, Photography, and Poetry Autoethnography” chapter for a Springer series book (in press, 2020); and “Transdisciplinary Performative Improvisation” for the University of Colima, Mexico’s innovative textbook Teaching Choreographic Composition from a Transdisciplinary Focus (in press, 2020).  Dr. DeGarmo is Founder, Executive & Artistic Director of Mark DeGarmo Dance, New York City; Dance Director of Crossing Bridges International Artist Residency, Michoacan, Mexico; and an Artist-Scholar with Creative Agency, Australia. Las Fridas, Mark DeGarmo’s original duet inspired by Mexican painter and revolutionary Frida Kahlo, was called “Genius,” “Wonderfully in your face,” and “Frightening… in a way great art always should be,” by New York audiences in November 2019. Melanie Brown of Stagebuddy.com characterized DeGarmo, an open water distance swimmer, as “a gladiator in various arenas.”

photo © Julie Chetaille

Rachel Cohen studied choreography with Claire Mallardi at Harvard University, and in New York studied dance with Mary Anthony, Bertram Ross, and Carolyn Lord, and mask and clown with Rafael Bianciotto and Mario Gonzales. She is a certified teacher of Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater improvisation. She has performed with Nadine Sures, Sarah Bild and Susanna Hood, Theodora Skipitares, Christopher Caines, Julie Atlas Muz, Ariane Anthony, Le Min Tam, Shua Group, Mary Anthony, Rika Burnham, and Fiona Templeton, and choreographed for Olek, Chelsea Knight, Christine Jowers/Moving Arts Projects, and Peculiar Works. In 2003 Rachel founded movement-theater company Racoco, which fuses raw materials, absurdist visuals, quixotic choreography, improvisation, and original music, and its burlesque offshoot Racoco + the It Girls.

photo © Alexander Engelman

Sofia Engelman and Em Papineau are dance artists who live and work primarily on Nipmuck and Pocumtuc land in the town known as Northampton, Massachusetts. Their first collaborative work, Where the air is light and clear, was presented at the National College Dance Festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Since then, they have held choreographic residencies at The Living Room, Ponderosa (Germany), the Dance Complex, and School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. In addition to presenting their work at these spaces, the pair have performed at festivals including FRESH Festival, EstroGenius Festival, AS220’s Providence Movement Festival, and Dancing Queerly Boston; music/DIY venues such as 10 Forward and Flywheel; and other venues they love dearly such as Judson Church, Green Street Studios, and Smith College. Their work has been supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Northampton Arts Council and they are both on staff at Contact Quarterly. Sofia and Em are co-founders of freeskewl, an experimental, donation-based platform for online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teresa Fellion founded BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance in late 2011, after working as an independent choreographer since 2004. Fellion’s work has been positively reviewed by The New York Times, NPR, The Huffington Post, The Scotsman, Oberon’s Grove, NYTheatre.com, The Skinny Magazine, World Dance Reviews, Edinburgh Festivals Magazine, Edinburgh Spotlight, Southampton Press, Stage Buddy, East Hampton Press, The Sun Journal, Broadway Baby, and Earth Press, among others. She has received the Choreographic Fellowship from SummerStages Dance Festival and ICA Boston and the American Dance Guild Fellowship for Jacob’s Pillow’s Choreographers’ Lab. Teresa has received grants for her work from The National Endowment for the Arts Window Award, O’Donnell Green Foundation for Music and Dance, New York Community Trust, and space grants from ITE-Inception to Exhibition, MANA Arts/Armitage Gone! Dance, Mount Tremper Arts, Field FAR Space, and at Triskelion Arts and Mark Morris Dance Center through the Mellon Foundation.

Teresa will be performing with Serena Chang, Kate Bishop, Xenia Mansour, and Nicole Kadar.

 

Dawn States started dancing at age five and immediately loved ballet. At age eighteen, Dawn experienced two severe spinal surgeries; a year later they fractured their right hip in a car accident. Medical professionals advised against dancing. Through the tutelage of Axis Dance, Dawn reconnected to their passion of dance. In 2018, Dawn also completed a residency with Full Radius Dance. Dawn is now invested in finding ways to make dance more accessible to other people with physical disabilities. Dawn has earned their MFA in dance from Temple University and received the Rose Vernick Artistic Transformation Award for their thesis work Incurvation. Their most recent work, Healing Connections: 2020 was featured in FringeArts Festival. In addition to Dawn, two other dancers with disabilities were in the work as well as a musician with a disability. The work is available with audio description for free viewing on Vimeo.