The Symposium Programming Committee exists to advise and assist Dance/NYC in the identification and programming of sessions offered at Dance/NYC’s yearly Symposium—and, by extension, further the dance field in NYC. Membership is comprised of Dance/NYC’s established Advisory Committee, Dance/NYC Task Forces, one member of Dance/NYC’s Junior Committee, Justice, Equity & Inclusion Partners, and additional candidates they identify. Ideal members will have experience in creating, performing, and/or presenting dance in the metropolitan New York City area, share our commitment to revealing, removing, and preventing inequities in professional dance, and represent the demographic makeup of the local population.
Click committee members' names below to access their bios:
Albert Blackstone, Director, MOMEN; Faculty, Broadway Dance Center
Al Blackstone is an Emmy-winning director, choreographer, and educator. His passion for bringing people together to experience something meaningful drives him to make dances, tell stories, and encourage joyful connection. Born in New Jersey and raised in a dance studio, he has called New York City home for more than a decade. In that time he has created emotional work for the stage and screen, thrown dance parties for charity, and introduced hundreds of people to one another. He believes deeply in the power of dance, community, and kindness.
Ami Scherson, Equity in Arts Leadership Prog. Associate, Americans for the Arts; Co-Chair, D/NYC Junior Committee
Ami Scherson (she/her/hers) is an arts administrator and musician based in Queens, NY. She is fascinated by the intersections of social justice and the arts, and strongly believes in using creativity to create positive change. Ami works for Americans for the Arts as the Equity in Arts Leadership Program Associate, creating opportunities and initiatives to pursue cultural equity throughout the field. She is passionate about community development, and has pursued projects throughout urban, suburban, and rural regions of the United States. Most recently, she conducted research in Nelsonville, Ohio to understand the impact of nonprofit arts programming on rural Appalachian communities. Ami holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Ohio University. She currently serves as Co-Chair for Dance/NYC Junior Committee. She is a proud Japanese-Chilean, and Cleveland native.
Ana "Rokafella" Garcia, Managing Director, Full Circle Souljahs
Rokafella is a multi faceted Afro Latin artist who is internationally known for her Breakdance/Street Dance mastery. She co-founded NYC's only Breakdance Theater company Full Circle Souljahs with her husband street dance Pioneer and Historian BBoy Kwikstep. She is currently a Part Time professor at The New School and she offers Classic Hip hop dance classes to beginners at NJPAC in Newark and in Manhattan at Peridance Studio.
Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Senior Director of Artist Development & Curation; Editorial Director, Gibney
Eva Yaa Asantewaa works at Gibney as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation as well as Editorial Director. A veteran writer, curator and community educator, she won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. Since 1976, she has contributed dance criticism and journalism to Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, Gay City News, The Dance Enthusiast, Time Out New York, her arts blog, InfiniteBody, and other publications and podcasts. As Editorial Director of Imagining: A Gibney Journal, she publishes essays reflecting issues and perspectives of importance to the dance/performance community. Among many other program initiatives she launched at Gibney, she has created the Black Diaspora group (emerging artists) and the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Black Arts Leadership Awards. In 2016, for Danspace Project’s Lost and Found platform, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa created "the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds," an evening of group improvisation featuring 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers, a cast that won a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. In 2018, Queer|Art named one of its awards in her honor, the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists. In 2019, Yaa Asantewaa was a recipient of a BAX Arts & Artists in Progress Award. Now a member of the Bessie Awards Steering Committee, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa was born in New York of Barbadian immigrant heritage and makes her home in the East Village/Lenapehoking.
https://infinitebody.blogspot.com
Executive Director, José Limón Foundation
Juan José Escalante joined the José Limón Dance Foundation in 2013 as Development Director and came to the organization with an impressive nonprofit management background from New York City Ballet, where he worked as an associate director of finance and Miami City Ballet as the development manager and human resources director, and Ballet Florida, where he served as Executive Director from 2001 to 2004. He also led the Orlando Ballet from 2009 to 2011 as their Executive Director. Mr. Escalante holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and a Masters Degree in Global Management. He has chaired the national committee for small and medium companies for DanceUSA, and the Cultural Executive’s Committee for the Palm Beach County Cultural Council. Mr. Escalante was appointed Executive Director of the José Limón Dance Foundation on January 1st, 2014 and currently serves on the Advisory Board of Dance NYC.
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Kupferberg Center for the Arts
Julia Del Palacio was born and raised in Mexico City. She studied a BA in history, at the same time that she trained as a folk dancer of music from the state of Veracruz. Julia moved to New York City in 2005 to pursue a Master’s Degree and then a Doctorate in history from Columbia University. Her interest in dance and her specialization in the artistic practices, cultural policies, and musical traditions of Mexico, led her to seek work in arts administration after she graduated from Columbia in 2015. Julia now works for Kupferberg Center for the Arts (KCA) in Queens College-City University of New York, as Manager of Strategic Partnerships. She reports directly to the Executive Director and is involved in programming, fundraising, and community outreach. As part of her portfolio, Julia provides logistical and administrative support to the CUNY Dance Initiative – a residency program that offers subsidized rehearsal and performance spaces on CUNY campuses to NYC-based dance companies. Julia is also the co-founder and director of the traditional music and dance project Radio Jarocho, a collective that promotes and preserves the son jarocho tradition from Veracruz, Mexico, on the US east coast. Julia lives in Ridgewood, Queens, with her husband and baby girl.
Laurel Lawson, Choreographer, Kinetic Light; Artist-Engineer, Rose Tree Productions
Choreographer, designer, and engineer: Laurel Lawson is a transdisciplinary artist making work which questions cultural assumptions and vantages. Her performing arts career began in music before serendipity brought her to dance, where she found a discipline combining her lifelong loves of athleticism and art. Featuring synthesistic mythology and partnering, her work includes both traditional choreography and novel ways of extending and creating art through technology and design. Whether beginning in the studio or with code, her art is grounded in and enriched by liminality, the in-between, and arises from her experience as a genderqueer disabled woman and understanding of disability and access as aesthetics and creative forces. Laurel began her dance career with Full Radius Dance in 2004 and is part of the disabled artists’ collective Kinetic Light, where in addition to choreographic collaboration and performance in such award-winning works as DESCENT she contributes production design and leads technical innovation, including the Audimance project and the Access ALLways initiative. She also choregraphs, teaches, designs, and creates artistic tech implementations in her personal practice at Rose Tree Productions. Beyond the studio, Laurel is an activist and organizer and skates for the USA Women’s Sled Hockey team.
Nelida Tirado, Artistic Director & Teacher of Nelida Tirado Flamenco
Nelida Tirado hailed “magnificent and utterly compelling” (NY Times) began her formal training at Ballet Hispanico of NY. Barely out of her teens, she was invited to tour the U.S. with Jose Molina Bailes Españoles and work as a soloist in Carlota Santana’s Flamenco Vivo, soloist/ dance captain of Compañia Maria Pages and Compañia Antonio El Pipa, performing at prestigious flamenco festivals and television in Spain, France, Italy, UK, Germany and Japan. She has performed with "Noche Flamenca", in the MET's “Carmen” , World Music Institute’s “Gypsy Caravan 1”and featured flamenco star in the Broadway/touring company of "Riverdance”. Ms. Tirado was recipient of the 2007 +2010 BRIO Award for Artistic Excellence, and opened with her company Summer 2010 for Buena Vista Social Club featuring Omara Portoundo for the Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. Some highlights include HarlemStage E-Moves, “Amores Quebrados” at the Repertorio Espanol, Valerie Gladstone’s “Dance Under the Influence” 2011 & 2012 in collaboration with the Flamenco Festival USA and collaboration with jazz great Wynton Marsalis at Harvard University and the 2016 premiere of her solo show "Dime Quien Soy" in the Flamenco Festival NY. She was currently the recipient of the 2017 Rosario Dawson Muse Fellow through BAAD, featured in Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch”, 2018/2019 recipient of Gibney’s Dance in Process Residence and will be seen in the Warner Brother’s film adaption of Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In The Heights”.
Managing Director, MOVE(NYC) Foundation, Inc.
Niya Nicholson, a Harlem, NY native, is dedicated to intersectional racial and social justice work within the arts field and beyond. As a budding arts leader and creative entrepreneur, her work centers equitable long-range strategic planning and arts advocacy as it pertains to underserved cultural communities and non-profit sustainability. Her fervor for the arts is informed by former dance education and training at LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts and her B.A. from Vassar College with concentrations in Psychology, Africana Studies, and Educational Studies, coupled with educational, legal, and performance research in Chicago, Cuba, and South Africa. Niya serves Gibney Dance – Development Manager, MOVE(NYC) – Chief of Staff, and the 2017-18 Dance/NYC Junior Committee – Co-Chair. Additionally, she supports individual artists and emerging companies with development and programming services. While in the gestational phase of developing transcontinental arts and education centers, Niya looks forward to continued arts advocacy, communal building, and connections to ancestry and space.
https://www.movenyc.nyc/niya-nicholson
Parijat Desai, Artistic Director, Parijata Dance Company
India-born, U.S.-raised choreographer/dancer Parijat Desai creates hybrids of contemporary, Indian classical and folk dance, theater, and other movement forms, and traverses boundaries between dance, theater, and music performance. She uplifts the notion of hybrid dancemaking as a way of expressing her South Asian American immigrant experience, but also to challenge ideas of cultural purity and fear that underlie nationalism and xenophobia in the United States and India. Parijat also facilitates Dance In The Round, sharing circle dances from Gujarat, India, as a vehicle for community well-being, engagement, and advocacy.
Parijat is currently an artist-in-residence with Center for Performance Research (2020) and BRICLab (2020–21). Her work has been presented around the U.S., India, and Canada including at La MaMa, Danspace Project, and CUNY Dance Initiative; Skirball Cultural Center and California Plaza (LA); Asian Art Museum (San Francisco); The Dance Centre (Vancouver); and National Centre for the Performing Arts (Mumbai).
Parijat acknowledges that she lives and works on land stolen from the Lenape people, now known as Manhattan. She also acknowledges the caste privilege she was born with—even as she has lived as a Brown immigrant woman in the U.S. She strives through her engagement in social justice movements and sharing of participatory dance, to work in solidarity toward our collective well-being.
Remi Harris, Programs Manager, Center for Performance Research
Remi Harris is a Barbados born and Brooklyn bred artist exploring the intersectionality between dance, new media and black female representation through movement improvisation, choreography, site specific work, movement for video, and curation. Recent work explores creating liberated and inclusive dance spaces under the performance/party project “Yes Yes Yes” with Mark Schmidt and virtual reality as another extension of performance.
Artistic Director, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances
Sydnie L. Mosley is an artist-activist and educator who produces experiential dance works with her all-women company SLMDances. Through her choreographic work, the company works in communities to organize for gender and racial justice. Her evening-length dances The Window Sex Project and BodyBusiness address sexual harassment in public spaces and the economics of NYC dance, respectively. In February 2017, Sydnie was recognized by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray for using her talents in dance to fuel social change. Other recognitions include: LMCC Creative Engagement Grant, The Field Leadership Fund, CUNY Dance Initiative, Dancing While Black Artist Fellowship, and The Performance Project @ University Settlement, Create Change Fellowship with The Laundromat Project, the Gibney Dance Institute for Community Action Training, and the inaugural Barnard Center for Research on Women Alumnae Fellow. She earned her MFA in Dance Choreography from the University of Iowa and earned her BA in Dance and Africana Studies from Barnard College at Columbia University. Sydnie is a part of the 2017 Bessie Award-winning cast of the skeleton architecture, the future of our worlds, curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. Sydnie danced with Christal Brown's INSPIRIT (2010-2013) and continues to appear as a guest artist for Brooklyn Ballet. An advocate for the field, Sydnie sits on the Advisory Committee to Dance/NYC.
https://www.sydnielmosley.com/
Artist
Zavé Martohardjono is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Montréal, Canada. An interdisciplinary artist and performer, Martohardjono is interested in geopolitics, social justice, queer glam, and embodied healing. Their group exhibitions include Perfect Union, Asian Arts Initiative, PA (2017); Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time, EFA Project Space, NY (2017); State of Emergency, Winslow Garage, LA (2015); MANIFEST!, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal, Canada (2014); and Me Love You Longtime, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, NJ (2012). Martohardjono has held residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017), Gibney Dance (2017), Shandaken: Storm King (2016), La MaMa (2016), and Chez Bushwick (2015). They hold a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from the City College of New York.
https://zavemartohardjono.com/