Note: This essay was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

These are the loving reminders you will hear over and over again from Giulia Carotenuto, a Dance Movement Therapist, as she facilitates her weekly class at Gibney Dance Center. Giulia’s Saturday morning class is a new addition to Gibney’s schedule and one that is becoming a staple for professional dancers in New York City, alongside their rigorous routines of rehearsals and auditions. It offers a much-needed opportunity to reflect and, as Giulia would say, to engage with dancing as a full, creative human being.

Giulia begins each class with the same playful ritual. After taking a moment to gather the group, she kindly asks the dancers to leave the room. We all do, some with a knowing familiarity and others with a perplexed curiosity. Giulia closes the door behind us and then opens it again to invite us into the studio. This time, she encourages us to enter with intentional presence, taking in the space as if it is a friend we are meeting for the first time. As our eyes wander over unnoticed details of the floor’s texture or the pattern of natural light on the ceiling, she invites us to become aware of our bodily sense of comfort or discomfort. How do we feel in this space? Where in this studio do we experience a bodily sense of ease? Once we identify a place of ease, Giulia invites us to claim that spot as a safe space and to rest there. “You can always return to this space,” she tells us. “It is yours.”

The rest of class unfolds with dynamic explorations of the tools and techniques of Dance Movement Therapy. We engage in Bartenieff Fundamentals, Laban Movement Analysis, Authentic Movement, stream of consciousness writing, and visual art, all with the intention of uncovering the innate wisdom of our bodies. This weekly class is a cornerstone of the cultural transformation Giulia is ushering into the New York City professional dance field…the reclaiming of embodiment.

Photo by John Mosloskie

What is embodiment? Giulia defines it as the body, mind, emotion continuum and our relationship to these three realms of experience. At any given moment, we can ask ourselves, “What am I sensing (body)? What am I thinking (mind)? What am I feeling (emotions)?” If we are embodied, we experience an integration between our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations and are able to care for ourselves, safely connect with others, and make meaning of our experiences.

As dancers, we spend much of our lives refining the body as an instrument of expression. But Giulia clarifies that being in the body does not equate to being embodied. The physical, psychological, emotional, and financial stressors of professional dance training often trigger disassociation, or a detachment from the present moment and our authentic experience of it.

“If we fully listened to what we are feeling and experiencing in the moment, most of us would not be able to sustain the demands of a professional dance career.”  -Giulia Carotenuto

Giulia experienced this disassociation as a young dancer growing up in Italy. While drawn to ballet for its grace and elegance, her formative years are saturated with memories of self-criticism and daunting expectations from authority. She recalls a physical assessment, in which she and other aspiring dancers were analyzed solely on their anatomical potential, such as flexibility and external rotation of the hips. These early experiences contributed to self-objectification, a feeling that many dancers can resonate with amidst the constant pursuit of approval.

Giulia later moved to California to pursue a BFA in Dance and eventually to New York City, where she entered the professional field. The emotional challenges of auditioning and working within settings that were often harmful and sometimes bordering on abusive reinforced the detriment of her early dance training. Giulia was drawn to experimental performance work that directly engaged audiences and pushed the limits of artistic expression. She was filled by the empathy and connection that this type of work created with audience members. However, she also felt that her full humanity was not always being considered, seen, or heard by some of the demands placed on her to push herself beyond her own boundaries of safety in service of the work.

The accumulated stress of training and professional life contributed to Giulia’s decision to step away from performance and return home to Italy. During her time there, an acquaintance introduced her to the field of Dance Movement Therapy. Inspired by the possibilities of healing through dance, Giulia left home again, this time to pursue a master’s degree in Dance Movement Therapy at Codarts University in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Her years in the program were rich with opportunities for healing her own pain and learning to guide others through theirs. “Dance was originally born as a healing practice,” Giulia recognizes, and it can continue to function as one. She discovered a personal mission to help other artists reconnect with dance as an avenue for healing rather than self-abuse.

Photo by by Giulia Carotenuto in front of Codarts

The trauma incurred by the dance field is especially poignant for those who have been marginalized by Euro-centric training and aesthetics. Giulia articulates that the studio can become yet another space of non-belonging for dancers of color, disabled dancers, and larger-bodied dancers, leading to self-alienation. This rupture is particularly heartbreaking in light of the fact that most dancers first saw their practice as a relationship with pleasure and joy.

Giulia speculates that the seeds of healing might be found in remembering these origin stories of dance, which are often coated in joy and connection. There is then a need for examining the beliefs and educational experiences that tainted these early motivations. Giulia cultivates an environment within her classes that offers validation for personal choice-making, provides freedom for risk-taking, and affirms the inherent value of each mover. She asks dancers to return to one essential question: “How does this feel?” rather than “How does it look?” Giulia hopes to see Dance Movement Therapy integrated into the curricula of college programs and exhorts choreographers to honor the boundaries of their performers when stepping into the territory of emotional risk-taking.

The need for healing in the dance field has been exacerbated by the impact of the past two years on physical, emotional, and psychological health. When I asked Giulia to speak to the bodily effects of the pandemic, she opted for a physical gesture instead, caving her shoulders in towards her chest and covering her face with her hands. “For the past two years, we have lived with a chronic sense of danger and fear,” she explains. When our bodies are faced with a threat such as COVID-19, they respond accordingly through adaptive reactions which become stuck in our physicality as maladaptive responses. As we begin to process the trauma of this pandemic, Giulia invites us into the practice of softening.

Dancers have experienced this softening on a visceral level in Giulia’s classes. One attendee is an international student who recently moved to the states to study dance. In an early class, Giulia invited the dancers to begin in a fetal position with hands clenched and arms crossed over the chest. The student shared that this position evoked a feeling of fear and inability to engage beyond herself. After months of attending Dance Movement Therapy classes, she explains, “Now, I feel safety and comfort in that position, as well as an ability to reach beyond myself and engage with the world.” By exploring her personal sense of embodiment, she has untangled her anxieties and feels more confident in her own presence.

Through the practice of embodiment, dancers can create from a place of joy and access a space within themselves that feels inherently worthy and untainted by the perceptions of others. As Giulia says at the beginning of class, “You can always return to this space. It is yours.”

Photo by John Mosloskie

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To learn more about Giulia Carotenuto and her Dance Movement Therapy practice, please visit www.giuliacarotenuto.com and www.healingdanceandmovement.com. You can register for her drop-in class at Gibney Dance Center at https://gibneydance.org/class-schedule/.

Sophia Diehl lives in New York City and enjoys a career as a dance artist through performance, choreography, and education. After graduating from St. Olaf College with a BA in Dance and Religion, she began working with Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater, a company with a focus on arts in health. She has enjoyed working with community populations, from cancer survivors to veterans, as they give creative expression to their stories. Her choreographic work combines personal narrative with somatic research to produce soulful explorations of human experience. 

This essay was first printed in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The post “Focus on pleasure. Freedom. You have permission. No Expectations.” appeared first on Stance on Dance.

This year marks Stance on Dance’s 10th birthday. In honor of the occasion (and a bit of a coincidence as well), I am pleased to announce that Stance on Dance has become a nonprofit and received 501c3 status. Stance on Dance’s nonprofit mission is to educate the dance community and wider audiences about dance from the perspective of underrepresented voices and access points. One way my board and I are fulfilling our mission is by launching a twice-yearly print publication that features and supports more dance writers and thus shares more perspectives. We will also distribute copies to dance educational institutions and to our donors who make this possible.

Allow me to wax philosophic about how Stance on Dance got to this point. I started Stance on Dance as a blog in 2012. As a freelance dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, I felt frustrated with the ways dance was written about. It was often written about by people without a deep knowledge of the artform, it was often review and preview oriented (and the show is but the tip of the iceberg), and it tended to follow the money and cover major ballet and modern companies while overlooking the varied world of freelance artists who pour their energy (and often their earnings) into making their art exist.

My idea was simple enough: I would publish interviews with fellow dance artists in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as solicit and edit content from colleagues. The blog often had a tone of being “on the ground,” as opposed to the more formal reviews and previews I contributed to various publications around San Francisco. I took pride in it being by and for dance artists. I published content once to twice a week, and it generally consisted of interviews conducted by me, essays by various colleagues, cartoons drawn by my roommate Maggie Stack satirizing the dance world, and music recommendations by my friend Jake Padilla. As time went on, my friend Ryan Kelley wrote drink recommendations to pair with various shows, a calendar listing with a twist.

From the get go, I loved producing content about dance and organizing an editorial calendar. And while the bawdy cartoons and drink recommendations were fun, it was the interviews with various dance artists that gained the most traction. I had an affinity for writing, but I was by no means a trained journalist. I was a dancer. As a result of Stance on Dance’s growth during that first year, I started to look into graduate programs in arts journalism. Around the same time, the cost of living in San Francisco started to skyrocket due to the tech bubble, and I felt trapped as a dancer barely making ends meet. I decided my time in San Francisco had come to a close.

In 2013, I entered a master’s program in Arts Journalism at the University of Southern California on scholarship and, through moving to Los Angeles, Stance on Dance began to cover artists beyond the Bay Area. As I developed a more journalistic tone, the blog became more professional in its coverage, transforming from a site that was mostly circulated amongst colleagues, to an online publication that was beginning to command a serious readership. My master’s thesis was a redevelopment of Stance on Dance with a sleek redesign, a more engaged social media presence, and employment of metrics to track and understand readership.

In 2013, I also began working on what would become the book Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, where I interviewed more than 50 dance artists over the age of 50 up and down the West Coast. I worked with Portland based photographer Gregory Bartning, who beautifully captured each interviewee. Our goal was to showcase the beauty and form in a dancer of any age, as well as to demonstrate how artistry enrichens with time. The compilation was published as a hardcover book in 2017.

After graduate school, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to South Africa to cover the National Arts Festival for Cue Newspaper, a printed daily arts newspaper that existed for the duration of the festival. Aside from the experience being a cultural whirlwind, I also began to appreciate for the first time how different print is from online content. Instead of an endless vertical scroll, themes could be developed across articles with the aid of good design. The reader’s attention is also different, with more sustained focus, as opposed to distraction after receiving notifications on a device. One day during my time in South Africa, I outlined a plan for a print version of Stance on Dance. Of course, I had graduate school debt, no job, and I didn’t even know where I would live next, but the seed was planted.

Upon returning to the states, I moved to Santa Fe, NM, and took a job as the editor of Fine Lifestyles Santa Fe, a glossy magazine that covered restaurants and shops in town. I didn’t care much for the content, but I relished the experience of working closely with a team of writers, photographers, sales reps, and designers to produce a print magazine. I took careful notes on the process, always having in the back of my mind that one day I might apply these skills to a print version of Stance on Dance.

Throughout grad school, my time in South Africa, and my time in Santa Fe working for the magazine, I continued to produce weekly (and often bi-weekly) content for Stance on Dance. As a result of working on the dancing over 50 book project as well as through my various experiences post graduate school, Stance on Dance increasingly became devoted to elevating the voices of those who are often marginalized in the dance world. These include older dancers, dancers of color, dancers who identify as LGBTQ, dancers who have a disability, fat dancers, dancers who live outside major metropolitan areas, women in leadership positions, dancers working outside well-funded institutions, and dancers who practice forms outside the Western canon. Through focusing on perspectives that have traditionally been marginalized in dance journalism, Stance on Dance found its footing as a journal where ideas and ways of working that challenge the status quo are covered and celebrated.

In 2017, I embarked on a second book project, this time in collaboration with Austin/Finland based dance educator Silva Laukkanen, interviewing professional dancers with disabilities. Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance came out this spring 2022 and features 35 professional dancers with disabilities in 15 countries. Through our interviews, Silva and I deepened our knowledge of problematic stereotypes, barriers to education, access issues, and terminology preferences. These interviews are accompanied with whimsical illustrations by San Francisco based artist Liz Brent-Maldonado.

That brings us to the present. After years of publishing weekly online content covering dance artists from many practices and places, Stance on Dance is excited to announce the launch of a twice-a-year print publication that will further promote dance and the many perspectives of its practitioners. This first issue features an interview by Sophia Diehl with dance movement therapist Giulia Carotenuto, an essay by Katie Flashner on relocating her life and dance practice from southern California to Maine, an essay by Cherie Hill on advocating for equity in dance spaces, an essay by Bhumi Patel on decolonizing praxis, three original dance inspired illustrations by Camille Taft, and an interview by Nikhita Winkler with French dance artist Illan Riviere. I also have contributed an interview with Miami-based choreographer Pioneer Winter on his intergenerational and physically integrated dance company, and an interview (translated and facilitated by Lorie House) with Colombian butoh artist Brenda Polo and her collaborators who are studying the effects of butoh on the brain. We will eventually publish all this content on stanceondance.com, but I believe the design and opportunity for more sustained reading brings the content to life in a different, hopefully more enjoyable, way.

Where will you read your copy of Stance on Dance? And will you share it with your friends?

I hope you will consider supporting Stance on Dance in this exciting new format by helping spread the word or becoming a donor/subscriber. Many thanks to those of you who have supported and followed Stance on Dance in its many iterations over the past decade!

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To donate to support dance journlism and recieve two issues of Stance on Dance in print a year, visit stanceondance.com/support.

To learn more about the Spring/Summer 2022 issue or to order a single copy, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The post Stance on Dance’s Journey to Print appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Many professional dancers spend a typical Sunday morning in the studio, taking an open class, or rehearsing for an upcoming show. On occasion, these same dancers might find themselves sitting in a sanctuary. While stained glass windows seem a world apart from studio walls, for New York City-based dancers Joy Havens and Nehemoyia Young, both of these places can constitute sacred space. These two artists work at the intersection of dance, spirituality, and healing. When asked to define “spirituality,” they point to that which inspires a sense of beauty, or the sacred. Joy references Irish poet John O’Donohue’s definition of beauty as, “That in the presence of which one feels most alive.” Whether it’s the synagogue, the stage, or the ground beneath a favorite tree, many of us have a set-apart space where we feel most whole and alive.

For some, this spiritual aliveness starkly contrasts the religious background of their childhoods. Joy and Nehemoyia have turned their artistic focus to the largely underserved demographic of people who have experienced religious trauma, which refers to the emotional damage of indoctrination caused by an authoritarian and dogmatic approach to religion. As Pastor Michael Walrond of Harlem explains, “Some churches weaponize scripture and religion to do very deep damage on the psyche.”^[1] This damage often manifests in harsh restrictions placed on the body, prescribing what one can wear and how one can express gender identity and sexuality. As Nehemoyia describes, “Within Eurocentric Western religion, if you’re not a male, if you’re not white, if you’re not an able-bodied person, then a lot of what’s sacred is taken away from you. It’s very hard to see the self as sacred, which means that it’s also very hard to see one’s own emotions, ideas, or questions as sacred.” Since the body often resides at the center of religious trauma, it also needs to be centered in healing. This is where Joy and Nehemoyia come in.

Nehemoyia Young (L) and Joy Havens (R)

The two first met and began having conversations about their religious upbringings while working with Renegade Performance Group in Brooklyn. Joy was raised in a Pentecostal community. While her family did a lot of “church hopping,” visiting Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Black Southern Baptist churches, a lot of the messaging she received at home was tied to the religious right. As Joy explains, “In high school, I made friends with people who I was told were going to lead me into sin. I had a real conflict and dance became a safe way for me to try to deal with that cognitive dissonance.”

Nehemoyia is familiar with this cognitive dissonance. She was born into the African Methodist Episcopal Church and later transitioned into COGIC (Church of God in Christ), a community with a more fundamentalist Christian expression. In her late teen years, she broke away from the COGIC community, realizing that it no longer served her. Years later, as a dance-artist in Brooklyn, she found herself engaged in identity politics, investigating cultural narratives around Black, queer, and womanist identities. She explains, “I began doing work that questioned some of the religious and spiritual norms that we might be coming from.”

Joy and Nehemoyia describe the independence of stepping away from institutional religion as a common stage in the journey of healing religious trauma. Joy articulates, “For a lot of people recovering from adverse religious experiences, there is a period of years when they just need to have a clean slate. And then they make individual choices about how to bring spirituality back into their lives.”

As members of Gibney’s Moving Toward Justice cohort, Joy and Nehemoyia facilitate a community-based project that focuses on the power of communal dance and music to build friendships and support personal and collective healing for former fundamentalists and ex-evangelicals. The inspiration for this project, entitled In Liberated Company, emerged from extensive conversations with the ex-evangelical community. Blake Chastain, a Chicago-based writer and podcaster, explains, “The term, ‘ex-evangelical’ nods to our heritage and how it has shaped us, but does not make any assumptions about what we individually or collectively believe now.”^[2] Joy and Nehemoyia support individuals from a wide range of adverse religious experiences. Some may choose to reconstruct a belief system, while others gravitate toward atheism or an entirely different spiritual practice. This project addresses the specific needs of those who seek community as they deconstruct beliefs and recover from religious wounding.

One of the primary needs among this demographic is a renewed sense of community. Separation from one’s religious background often ruptures connection with family and friends, and integrating into secular society can prove isolating. Ex-fundamentalists might feel misunderstood by both their new and old social circles. Joy poses the central question, “How do we create a space that is safe for people to be together with others who understand their challenges and get them in connection with their bodies, so they can trust themselves as they explore the world?” Joy and Nehemoyia will offer communal dance, music, and storytelling practices to facilitate this supportive community. While many religious traditions incorporate dance and music, others reject these embodied practices. The artists are sensitive to the myriad of memories, both positive and traumatic, that participants might bring to the table surrounding dance.

Joy Havens

In addition to building community, Joy and Nehemoyia seek to foster a sense of personal autonomy in participants. Fundamentalist cultures often strip away personal agency in favor of external authority and hierarchy. Nehemoyia shares, “Dance has given me the ability to listen to the signals that come up in my body and to know that they’re valid. That idea of the ‘flesh’ as dirty or sinful can be so far-reaching and impactful. To return to the body as a space of connection can be extremely healing.” Joy and Nehemoyia explain how something as simple as taking a deep breath can awaken a sense of beauty within one’s own physicality. In Nehemoyia’s words, “The constructive part of reimagining what spirituality is for you means that you have to put yourself at the center. As we begin to reimagine how we want to be in connection to spirituality or to religion (if that is something you choose to go back to), it’s important to ask ‘Who am I in relation to the things that I believe?’” Through this body-based introspection, In Liberated Company addresses the emotional numbness that often accompanies adverse religious experiences.

Nehemoyia and Joy envision this self-reflection emerging into a creative community of artists who actively engage with questions of spiritual identity. In the future, they would love to offer their program in colleges, engaging young adults who might encounter a shift in religious identity for the first time. They also see potential for how these conversations can reshape our academic and professional dance culture at large. Nehemoyia points to the separation of spirit and body that often dominates the Euro-centric dance field. In contrast, many cultures center dance in spirituality and rituals of healing. “The spaces where artists are investigating ideas critically are often the spaces where there is little room for folk dance, liturgical dance, African dance or Haitian dance,” she says. “These artists are not given the opportunity to investigate something that is from a different paradigm.”

This disconnect challenges the dance field to offer more space to Indigenous artists and artists of color. Nehemoyia believes that engaging with the many ways that bodies move in space has potential to offer us “information about ourselves as divine beings.” This critical engagement with religion also prompts us to consider the ways in which white christianity has contributed to racism and the erasure of other cultures and languages. Deconstructing the religious influences on one’s political and cultural assumptions is another part of the healing process.

Since this collaboration developed from a place of storytelling between the two artists, it seems fitting that we concluded our conversation with a story. When asked about her definition of spirituality, Nehemoyia pointed to the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. In the story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (a seagull) makes a name for himself as a skilled flyer. As other seagulls attempt to learn his gift of flight, they become overly preoccupied with the theory and mechanics, which inhibits their own ability to soar. Nehemoyia says, “In a lot of ways, religion is like the theory of how Johnathan learned to fly, and spirituality is getting up there and flying. Your spirituality is everything that you experience as you attempt to reach some version of your highest self.”

This metaphor sometimes parallels the journey of becoming a dance artist. While years of training hone skills and mechanics, many dancers originally enter the field because they experience freedom, joy, and aliveness while dancing. We seek a healthy community and connection with ourselves and the larger environment. By critically engaging with our histories and training, we can continue to return to that sense of connection.

Whether you find yourself in the studio, the sanctuary, or a space of your own making, Joy and Nehemoyia offer us the tools to look deeper, engage in these conversations about spirituality, and find the space of beauty that resides within us.

Nehemoyia Young

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To learn more about Joy Havens and Nehemoyia Young and their work with Gibney’s Moving Toward Justice Cohort, visit gibneydance.org/2020/04/27/meet-the-moving-toward-justice-2-0-cohort or follow their progress on Instagram @inliberatedcompany.

All photos provided courtesy the artists.

^[1] Richard Schiffman, “When Religion Leads to Trauma,” The New York Times, February 5, 2019

^[2] Blake Chastain, “Exvangelical – A Working Definition,” #Exvangelical, March 2, 2019

The post At The Intersection of Dance, Spirituality, and Healing appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Meet our director and editor:

Emmaly Wiederholt is a dance artist and arts journalist based in Albuquerque, NM. She founded Stance on Dance in 2012. Emmaly earned her MA in Arts Journalism from the University of Southern California and her BFA in Ballet and BS in Political Science from the University of Utah. She further trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and performed extensively around the Bay Area. Her first book, Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, was published in 2017, and her second book, Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance, was published in 2022. Emmaly is also a master DanceAbility instructor and facilitates movement groups at the UNM Hospital adult psychiatric ward, as well as is a founding member of the dance advocacy nonprofit ABQ Dance Connect. She continues to perform throughout the Southwest.

Photo by Allen Winston

Our contributors have included:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert, a performance artist and organizer in the Bay Area.

Gregory Bartning, a photographer in Portland, OR.

Liz Duran Boubion, the director of the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers in the Bay Area.

Liz Brent-Maldonado, an artist, writer, educator, and producer in San Francisco, CA.

Michelle Chaviano, a ballet dancer with Ballet North Texas.

Bradford Chin, a disabled dance artist and accessibility consultant in Chicago, IL, and San Francisco, CA.

Shebana Coelho, a writer and performer currently studying flamenco in Spain.

breana connor, an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator + healer in Albuquerque, NM.

Lauren Coons, an interdisciplinary artist, performer, healer and educator in Albuquerque, NM.

Julia Cost, a painter, textile designer, sewist, and dancer in Maui, HI.

Sophia Diehl, a dancer in New York City.

Bonnie Eissner, a writer in New York City.

Katie Flashner, a.k.a. The Girl with the Tree Tattoo, a World Champion ballroom dancer and author in ME.

Micaela Gardner, a dancer and choreographer in Baja, Mexico.

Sarah Groth, an interdisciplinary artist from Albuquerque, NM.

Cherie Hill, a dance educator and choreographer based in the Bay Area.

Lorie House, a dancer, choreographer, and lawyer in NM.

Silva Laukkanen, a dance educator and disability advocate in Austin, TX.

Mary Elizabeth Lenahan, the director of Dance Express in Fort Collins, CO.

Shannon Leypoldt, a dance artist, teacher, and sports massage therapist in Berlin.

Erin Malley, a dance artist and tango teacher based in West Michigan.

Julianna Massa, a dance artist in Albuquerque, NM.

Aiano Nakagawa, a dance artist, educator, facilitator, writer, and event producer in the Bay Area.

Jessie Nowak, a dance artist and filmmaker in Portland, OR.

Kevin O’Connor, a multidisciplinary artist in London, Ontario, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bhumi B Patel, an artist/activist based in the Bay Area.

Stephanie Potreck, a sports nutritionist and health advocate who currently resides in Germany.

Jill Randall, artistic director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA.

Kathryn Roszak, a choreographer, filmmaker, educator, and activist in the Bay Area.

Donna Schoenherr, director of Ballet4Life and Move into Wellbeing in London, UK.

Maggie Stack, a dancer and teacher in Reno, NV.

Camille Taft, a CO front range-based mover and visual artist.

Mary Trunk, a filmmaker, choreographer, and multimedia artist in Altadena, CA.

Diana Turner-Forte, a teaching artist, healing arts coach, and writer in NC.

Ana Vrbaski, a body music practitioner in Serbia.

Nikhita Winkler, a dancer, choreographer, and teacher from Namibia who currently resides in Spain.

Erica Pisarchuk Wilson, a dance artist, visual artist and poet in Albuquerque, NM.

Rebecca Zeh, an interdisciplinary artist in Sarasota Springs, NY.

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Our board:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert

Cathy Intemann

Alana Isiguen

Courtney King

Malinda LaVelle

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