(In alphabetical order:)

AIMEE MEREDITH COX is a cultural anthropologist and movement artist who teaches at Fordham University. She is the author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015) and the forthcoming edited volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan). Aimee toured widely with Ailey II/The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble and is the founder of BlackLight, a young women of color-led activist art initiative that has produced community-based projects in Detroit, Newark, and New York City.

 

 

 

ALICE SHEPPARD took her first dance class in order to make good on a dare; she loved moving so much that she resigned her academic professorship in order to begin a career in dance.  She studied ballet and modern with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater.  After an apprenticeship, Alice joined AXIS Dance Company where she toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew in the United Kingdom.  In the United States, she has worked with Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton.  As a guest artist, she has danced with AXIS Dance Company, Full Radius Dance Company, and MOMENTA Dance Company.  Alice has also performed as a solo artist and academic speaker throughout the United States. As an emerging choreographer, Alice creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies.  Engaging with disability arts, culture and history, Alice attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race by exploring the societal and cultural significance of difference. Her work has been commissioned by CRIPSiE, Full Radius Dance Company, and MOMENTA Dance Company.  “Descent from Beauty," Alice’s most recent project, is a collaboration with dancer Laurel Lawson, lighting and video artist Michael Maag, and professors Sara Hendren, Yevgeniya Zastavker, and students of Olin College. Alice’s online home is alicesheppard.com

(Photo credit: Benjy Been)

 

CARRIE SANDAHL, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago. She directs Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports the development of disability art. Her research and creative activity focus on disability, race, and gender identity in live performance and film. She is a collaborator on a documentary, Code of the Freaks, a critique of Hollywood’s disability representations

 

 

 

 

DIANNE MCINTYRE, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist, choreographs in the fields of concert dance, theatre, and film. From 1972 to 1988 McIntyre with Sounds in Motion, her company of dancers and musicians, and toured internationally. McIntyre’s work has been seen with Sounds in Motion and her subsequent ensembles in European concert halls and major U. S. dance venues including the Joyce Theater, Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Arts Center, Wexner Center, Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, New York Live Arts.  Commissions include Jacobs Pillow, American Dance Festival, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Dancing Wheels, GroundWorks Dance Theater, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Def Dance Jam Workshop, Roxane D’Orleans Juste for the Limon Dance Company and recent colleges – Sarah Lawrence College and The Ohio State University,  Her collaborations have been with artistic icons like Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, Max Roach, Regina Taylor, Lester Bowie, Olu Dara and Ntozake Shange. For film and television she choreographed Beloved; Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper; for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf and Miss Evers’ Boys for which she received an Emmy nomination. In theatre choreography: four Broadway shows, 30 New York and regional theatres. As well, McIntyre has conceived and directed her own dance-driven dramas I Could Stop on a Dime and Get Ten Cents Change and Open the Door, Virginia! that have been produced in regional theatres. Time Out New York calls McIntyre “one of modern dance’s reigning divas.” McIntyre’s many other awards, include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Workforce (Ohio), three Bessies (NY Dance and Performance Award), ADF Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching, Helen Hayes Award (DC theatre), Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from SUNY Purchase and Cleveland State University, two AUDELCO awards, plus numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and other foundation and corporate funders.
Recent projects: Spelman College 2015-16 Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Dance St. Louis Ensemble, workshops of Ntozake Shange’s new choreopoem lost in language and sound, performing with Music at New York Live Arts, and premiere of a new ballet Change for Dance Theatre of Harlem. McIntyre’s mentors include Gus Solomons Jr; dance faculty of The Ohio State University; Louise Roberts of New York’s Clark Center; and theatre producer Dr. Richard Davis. www.diannemcintyre.com

(Photo: Larry Coleman)

 

DAVID DORFMAN has been the ARTISTIC DIRECTOR of David Dorfman Dance since 1987and has been Professor of Dance and now Chair at Connecticut College since 2004. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2005 to continue his research and choreography in the topics of power and powerlessness, including activism, dissidence, and underground movements, culminating in DDD’s, underground, which toured for four years engaging community dance casts in each venue. DD has also been honored with four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, an American Choreographer's Award, the first Paul Taylor Fellowship from The Yard, and a New York Dance & Performance Award ("Bessie") for DDD's community-based project Familiar Movements (The Family Project).

 

JUDITH SMITH has earned an international reputation in the field of physically integrated dance. She has performed, taught and lectured nationally. Judith initiated the first ever National Convening on Physically Integrated Dance in 2016. She was honored with an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Sustained Achievement and as one of Theatre Bay Area’s 40 people that have changed the face of Bay Area theatre. Key words: Physically Integrated Dance, Inclusion, Equity for People with Disabilities

(Photo: Andrea Basile)

 

 

MARC BREW is an award wining Australian performer, director and choreographer. Now based in Glasgow, Marc’s work has been toured to critical acclaim across the world, his outdoor work (i)land was commissioned for the Glasgow 2014 Cultural programme and Without Walls. Brew’s Unlimited Commission Fusional Fragments was part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and a collaboration with world-renowned percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. His new work For Now I am… had its World Premiere at the inaugural Dance International Glasgow Festival 2015 and performed at Edinburgh Fringe Festival before embarking on a UK and International tour. Marc has also produced work for a number of high profile companies such as Scottish Ballet, Indepen-dance 4, Ballet Cymru, AXIS Dance Company (USA), Candoco Dance Company, Scottish Dance Theatre, Touch Compass (NZ), Amy Seiwert’s Imagery (USA), The London Contemporary Dance School, YDance, National Theatre Scotland and Dundee Rep Theatre. Marc has been presented with a Centenary Medal for Outstanding Contribution as a dancer and choreographer and in 2014 Marc was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Performance (Individual) at the prestigious Isadora Duncan Awards for his solo piece Remember When. Marc is Guest Artistic Director at AXIS Dance Company and Associate Artistic Director at Ballet Cymru in Wales.

(Photo: Andy Ross)

 

SIMI LINTON is an author, filmmaker, and arts consultant. Her writings include Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, My Body Politic, and the essay “Cultural Territories of Disability” in Disability. Dance. Artistry., published by Dance/NYC. She is the subject of the documentary film Invitation to Dance, which she and Christian von Tippelskirch directed and produced. Linton’s consultancy practice, Disability/Arts, works to shape the presentation of disability in the arts. Projects include events at the Public Theater, Writers’ Guild of America, HBO headquarters, the Smithsonian, Margaret Mead Film Festival, as well as ongoing advisor to Inclusion in the Arts (2006-present), and DanceNYC [2015-present]. Linton holds an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from New York University. She was a Mary E. Switzer Distinguished Fellow, US Department of Education (1995-1996), Co-Director of the University Seminar in Disability Studies at Columbia University (2003-2007), and Presidential Visiting Scholar at Hofstra University (2006). Linton was on faculty at CUNY from 1985-1998. She received the2015 Barnard College Medal of Distinction, an honorary Doctor of Arts from Middlebury College (2016) and was recently appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to New York City’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission.

(Photo: Ben Wolf)

 

VICTORIA MARKS, an Alpert Award winner, Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, and Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellow, has been practicing knowing and unknowing, making dances for stage and film, for 37 years. VM’s work migrates between “choreo-portraits” and “action conversations” for individuals who don’t identify as dancers, and dances for dancers that fuel her inquiries into movement. The project of rendering those who are invisible, visible, through live performance and film is a constant.

(Photo: Dan Froot)