The Dance/NYC 2022 Symposium takes place from Thursday, March 17 to Saturday March, 19, 2022 as a virtual event convening on Whova, an all-in-one digital conference platform. As the only multi-day gathering of its kind for the dance community in the metropolitan New York City area, the Symposium is a meeting place for the dance field to exchange ideas, expand networks, sharpen organizational practices, and deepen the inquiry around New York City’s legacy and trajectory of dance-making.
**For Registered Attendees Only**
About the 2022 Symposium:
Dance/NYC’s 2022 Symposium: Life cycles. Livelihoods. Legacies., focuses on uncovering the generational continuum of lives in dance. Sessions explore career and life navigation, underscoring dance and artistic practice as core human needs while building understanding across generations of audiences and dance workers. This multi-day event invites participants to investigate topics of mentorship, advocacy, leadership, and equity, within an ethos of community care.
As the only multi-day gathering of its kind for the dance community in the metropolitan New York City area; the Symposium is a meeting place for the dance field to exchange ideas, expand networks, sharpen organizational practices, and deepen the inquiry around New York City’s legacy and trajectory of dance-making.
Accessibility:
Captioning (open and/or closed) and ASL interpretation will be available during the event. Sessions will be primarily discussion and presentation based with sporadic use of videos and/or slides. Audiences will interact through the Whova conference platform via chat functions or via video and audio presence for select sessions held through the Zoom meeting integration with the Whova platform. Captioning (open and/or closed) and ASL interpretation will be available during the event. Speakers will visually describe themselves and slides and images will be described. Video descriptions will be provided ahead of the event via the Symposium Participation Guide.
If the chat features are not accessible to you, contact our voice-only helpline at 212-966-4452, ext. 1 during the event for technical support, to propose questions, or to comment. For more information about accessibility or if you require additional reasonable accommodation, please contact Brinda Guha via email at sympcoordinator@dance.nyc.
Guest Curators and Symposium Programming Committee:
The guest curator program works to ensure that Dance/NYC is in alignment with, and amplifies the voices of, the communities it aims to serve and is made possible through the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Symposium Programming Committee exists to advise Dance/NYC in the programming and direction of Dance/NYC’s yearly Symposium—and, by extension, further the dance field in NYC.
George Emilio Sanchez is a performance artist, writer and social justice activist. His next solo performance work is titled, "In the Court of the Conqueror", and it revolves around the 200 year-old history of Supreme Court decisions that have diminished the Tribal Sovereignty of Native Nations. The new work also interlaces autobiographical stories of being raised in an Ecuadorian immigrant household and the embedded racism towards indigenous people he was exposed to. This new performance will be the second installment of his series, Performing the Constitution. He is a Social Practice artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center and he teaches at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island.
x (they/themme) is a TRANSdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and curator. x has presented installation, painting, video, and live performance in Detroit, MI; Budapest, HU; Ithaca, NY; and NYC (including Dixon Place, Judson Church, Satellite Art Club, Honey’s Bar, and Starr Bar). They founded the artivist collective, {amdpc}, which operated from 2019-2021. With {amdpc}, x directed, choreographed, produced, and performed as a soloist in their original protest-production, The Contemplative Garden: Nature is Healing (10 Rajas, 11 Feathers, and a Dozen White Kelly’s) in October 2020 at Le Petit Versailles Garden as part of Allied Productions, Inc. 2020-2021 season. Recent notable accomplishments include: City Artist Corps grant, LiftOff Residency at New Dance Alliance, Fellowship with The Performance Project @ University Settlement, and Needing It-a queer performance residency-with Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). As a curator, x is concerned about diversity and the empowerment of artist-humans of systemically marginalized identities. x’s first publicly curated exhibition, “who is me?”, was on view at the Tompkins County Public Library in 2018, focused on the intersectionality of artists who had multiple marginalized identities; additional curatorial credits include, co-curator with Stigma Unbound for “delicate wash cycle”, the virtual festival fundraiser, “Soft Pallette”, and the January 2020 web gallery, “VIRAL: A Contagious Kiss, a Transmittable Video” presented by Visual AIDS.
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.
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 various studios.
Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Senior Director of Curation; Editorial Director, Gibney
Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she/her) is the founder of Black Curators in Dance and Performance and works at Gibney as Senior Director of 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, 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, she was a recipient of a BAX Arts & Artists in Progress Award. 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
Juan José Escalante is Executive Director of National Dance Institute. He is well known in the field of dance and the arts and has extensive experience in non-profit leadership. Mr. Escalante joins NDI from the José Limón Dance Foundation where he served as Executive Director for over eight years. Previously, he held various executive positions with well-known dance organizations, including Miami City Ballet and New York City Ballet where he worked in arts management and campaign development. Escalante holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, a Masters Degree in Global Management and has completed the Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management Program at Harvard University. 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 currently serves on the Board of Dance NYC.
Julia del Palacio, 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, Artist-Engineer, Rose Tree Productions
Choreographer, designer, and artist-engineer: Laurel is a transdisciplinary artist making work which imagines new kinds of experience, reinterprets traditional stories, and questions cultural assumptions. 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; in the creation of worlds and products experienced, installed, embodied, or virtual. 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 queer and genderqueer disabled woman and understanding of disability and access as aesthetic 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 both access and technical research and innovation, including projects such as Audimance and Access ALLways, a holistic approach to equitable accessibility in the arts informed by user experience and hospitality. Co-founder and CTO of CyCore Systems, she brings two decades of expertise in UI/X and product architecture to both technological and artistic work to create impactful experiences, and is also the founder and director of Rose Tree Productions, an Atlanta-based nonprofit.
Nelida Tirado, Artistic Director and 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”.
Niya Nicholson is a justice driven, creatively inclined nonprofit arts leader with 8 years of advancement expertise–namely, strategic fundraising and marketing coupled with business, leadership & program development. A native New Yorker raised in Harlem, Niya studied dance at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School and obtained her B.A. in 2014 from Vassar College.
Niya’s career began in 2015, supporting both nonprofits and individual artists/collectives. Prior to the public launch of MOVE|NYC| in 2015, Niya served the organization as its sole volunteer administrator and has since served as its Managing Director who is responsible for the nonprofit’s growth and thriveability, including the acquisition of its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, 11 Board of Directors, and rising from a $25K to ~$700K operating budget. Niya's prior positions include Director of Development of the José Limón Dance Foundation and previously Development Manager at Gibney, bringing 6 new high tech studios and an elevator to fruition.
Concurrently, Niya is Board Chair of MICHIYAYA Dance. Niya is also an inaugural and 5th year member of Dance/NYC’s Symposium Programming Committee and has been featured as a 2-time SMART Bar Consultant and 2018 session speaker. She was the Co-Chair for the 2017-18 Dance/NYC Junior Committee. Niya was selected as a 2018-19 Dance/USA Institute for Leadership Training mentee (9% acceptance rate) and subsequently a featured speaker at the 2019 Dance/USA Conference.
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 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.
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.
zavé martohardjono (They/Them/Theirs) is a Brooklyn-based, Canadian-born, NYC-raised, Indonesian-American multimedia artist. They use queer, de-colonial, and anti-assimilationist dance and performance practices to make work that converses and contends with the political histories our bodies carry. They are dedicated to community-driven justice and lead social justice strategy both in and outside the art world. They are a 2019 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence where they facilitate dance workshops centering resiliency and embodied freedom. zavé’s writing has been published in Imagining: A Gibney Journal and The Dancer Citizen. They are a Dance/NYC Symposium committee member.
Leadership support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Howard Gilman Foundation. The Symposium is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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