Select Summer Faculty
Hollins 2024
Jeffery N. Bullock
Jeffery N. Bullock, professor, chair of Hollins’ dance department and director of Hollins MFA dance program, began his performing career with the North Carolina Dance Theater following graduation from the North Carolina School of the Arts. He continued his performing career with Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) Seattle, Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Sharir + Bustamante DanceWorks (Austin, TX), touring nationally and internationally. Bullock’s repertoire included soloist and principal roles in an eclectic array of works by George Balanchine, Agnes De Mille, Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Daniel Esralow, Nacho Duato, Lucinda Childs, Salvatore Aiello, Yacov Sharir, Glen Tetley, and others. He was also a featured performer in the 1986 Paramount Motion Picture The Nutcracker with PNB, and was a featured performer in the 1983 PBS Special Where Dreams Debut: The North Carolina School of the Arts. Bullock’s work At Midnight earned him a Dance Magazine’s Best Choreography Nomination at the 1996 American College Dance Festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Bullock was a faculty member at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC, for 15 years, teaching in the ADF Six Week School and Young Dancers School; and in ADF/Russia (2000), ADF/Korea (2000, 2004, 2006, and 2008) and ADF/Mongolia (2004 and 2005). In 2006, he was named director of the ADF Four Week School. Also, Bullock served as a site visit consultant for Dance Advance of the Pew Charitable Trust located in Philadelphia, PA. He earned his M.F.A. in choreography from the University of Iowa; taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Iowa, and joined the Hollins dance department in 2004; becoming chair in Fall 2009 and director of the Hollins M.F.A. in dance program in Fall 2010, where he continues to teach, serve, and lead. In 2021, Bullock was invited to join the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, NC.
Rainy Demerson
Rainy Demerson is a dance artist and scholar invested in intersectional feminism and global decolonial embodiments. In addition to extensive studies in San Francisco and New York City, she trained at L’ecole des Sables in Senegal, Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Escola de Dança da FUNCEB in Brazil, and in collaboration with The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts in Germany. She has produced concerts in New York and Senegal and her work has been presented in festivals across the United States and in South Africa. Demerson’s pedagogical praxis is informed by many years of teaching disenfranchised youth as well as formal study in the dance education M.A. at New York University. She also holds an M.F.A. in dance from Hollins and a Ph.D. in critical dance studies from University of California Riverside where she published her dissertation, Decolonial Moves: Re-Membering Black Women in South African Contemporary Dance. She taught at Lindenwood University, El Paso Community College, Crafton Hills College, Scripps College, California Polytechnic University Pomona, and California State University San Marcos before joining the University of the West Indies Cave Hill. Her work has been published in the Journal of Dance Education, Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, Critical Stages, Research in Dance and Physical Education, Performance Research, and several anthologies.
Ángel Díaz Miranda
Ángel Díaz Miranda is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Hollins. He received his doctoral degree from Emory University. In 2014, he was Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Agnes Scott College. His research focuses on contemporary Mexican and Chilean poetry and literature and their relations to violence, trauma, and memory from Modernismo to the present. Díaz Miranda has published journal articles on Mexican and Chilean poetry and fiction. He contributed the chapter “Octavio Paz and Poetic Institutions” to the Cambridge History of Mexican Poetry to be published in 2023. He is the guest editor for a special issue of Trasatlántica: Poetry and Scholarship, on Incurable (1987) by David Huerta. His book project Archives of the Wound traces the cruel modalities of psychological wounding and bodily harm in Mexican and Chilean literature and visual arts from Modernismo to the present. He has presented his work nationally and internationally. Díaz Miranda is also a poet. His books Catálogo de inconsistencias and Escala Richter are forthcoming by Editorial del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and Ediciones Acapulco, respectively. He is one of the cofounders of distropika.com, a space for Puerto Rican and Latin American poetry.
Amanda DiLodovico
Amanda DiLodovico is a teacher, writer, and dancer. She is currently a lecturer in critical writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in Dance Studies and Disability Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in dance studies from Temple University in 2017. Prior to her doctoral work, she received a B.A. in dance and English literature from Marymount Manhattan College and an M.A. in performance studies from NYU. She has previously taught in the dance departments at Temple University, Marymount Manhattan College, and Swarthmore College. Her current research focuses on the labor of disabled bodies in contemporary dance practice through the lens of crip theory as a way to reflect upon and rearticulate a history of dance and Western culture invested in progress, innovation, and ability. In the classroom, she hopes to create a space for learning and creative practice that is accessible, supportive, equitable, and interdependent. In addition to teaching and writing, DiLodovico currently dances with the Philadelphia-based dance collective, BollywoodTechPhilly.
Eliot Gray Fisher
Eliot Gray Fisher is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose practice bridges overlapping layers of technology with performance. As a codirector of interdisciplinary performance group ARCOS (arcosdance.com), he creates interactive video projections, music, and text, as well as performing in transmedia productions. He has composed music and designed sound for film, theatre, and dance, for which he was awarded a commission from the Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts to collaborate with musicians in Tbilisi, Georgia. Fisher has also conducted documentary video fieldwork, recognized by an award from the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, including in Sonora and Yucatán, Mexico; Minas Gerais, Brazil; and Victoria, Australia. He has built interactive installations selected for Currents New Media Arts festival and commissioned by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology. He has also written and directed over 10 full-length theatrical productions with music at the Santa Fe Playhouse and Engine House Theater in Madrid, New Mexico. Fisher has participated in artist residencies including Ucross Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Signal Culture; designed curricula and taught on faculty at the College of Santa Fe, Santa Fe Preparatory School, and University of Texas at Austin; served as a guest artist at institutions such as University of Michigan, Colorado College, Texas State University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Texas A&M University; and published in USITT’s Theatre Design & Technology journal and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy. He has an M.F.A. in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College and is currently a doctoral student in performance as public practice at the University of Texas at Austin.
Elizabeth Poliner
Elizabeth Poliner is the author of the novel, As Close to Us as Breathing (Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown & Co.), winner of the 2017 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction, finalist for the Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award in Fiction, and an Amazon Best Book of 2016. She’s also the author of Mutual Life & Casualty, linked stories, and What You Know in Your Hands, poems. Her writing has appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, The Common, Colorado Review, and TriQuarterly, among other journals. She’s been a fellow at MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference. She recently taught in the M.F.A. and undergraduate creative writing programs at Hollins, where she was an associate professor of English and creative writing.
Orfeas Skutelis
Orfeas Skutelis is an award-winning cinematographer/producer from Novi Sad, Serbia. Skutelis graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad with a degree in cinematography and received an M.A. in media studies from The New School in New York, where he is based. Apart from documentary films, over the course of the past 20 years, he has also authored and produced TV programs, theatre performances, exhibitions, experimental and short films, and music videos. He is currently teaching at The New School in New York.
amara tabor-smith
amara tabor-smith (she/they) is a dance and performance maker, and cultural worker based in unceded Huichin Ohlone land currently known as Oakland, CA. They describe their work as Conjure Art. Her interdisciplinary site-responsive and community specific performance experiences utilize Yoruba Lukumí spiritual technologies to address issues of social and environmental justice, race, gender identity, and belonging. Their work is rooted in Black, queer, feminist principles that insist on liberation, joy, home fullness and well-being. amara has collaborated with, and performed in the works of artists such as, Ed Mock, Joanna Haigood, Anna Deveare Smith, Faustin Linyekula, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Ellen Sebastian Chang, Julie Tolentino, Adia Tamar Whitaker, and Leslie Parker. She is the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater and was the former associate artistic director and company member with Urban Bush Women. Previous grants and awards include, Creative Capital, United States Artist fellowship, Dance/USA Fellowship, Religion in the Arts Award, Rainin Fellowship for Artists, MAP Fund, and A Blade of Grass. amara received their M.F.A in Dance from Hollins University and is a teaching artist in residence at Stanford University. www.deepwatersdance.com
Joshua Tuason
Joshua Tuason is a dance artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Associate Professor at Boston Conservatory, he has also taught at Roger Williams University, Rhode Island College and workshops at Brown University and Connecticut College. He is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique and Cunningham Technique. BFA from Marymount Manhattan College. His performance career led him to be a member of the Stephen Petronio Company, Dance Hegginbotham, Martha Graham Ensemble and freelance work with artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Pam Tanowitz, Ian Spencer Bell, and the Merce Cunningham Trust.
Plovdiv, Bulgaria 2024
Thomas Greil
Thomas Greil is a certified practitioner and teacher of the Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) and a therapist of the Jeremy Krauss Approach (JKA), an approach to work with children with disabilities based on the Feldenkrais method. For 20 years Thomas has been teaching in accredited BMC® programs worldwide, as well as in many different contexts. Drawing on research in neuroscience, consciousness, and infant movement development, he has developed his personal approach to somatic re-education for people of all ages, from infants to adults, with all abilities, including different approaches to work with trauma. Together with Carla Bottiglieri they found minima somatica, centro di studi e pratiche del gesto, center for the study of gestures and somatic practices (www.minimasomatica.org). Besides traveling for work, they live and practice in Faenza, Italy.
Adrian Heathfield
Adrian Heathfield writes on, curates and creates performance. He is the author of Out of Now, a monograph on the artist Tehching Hsieh, editor of Ally and Live: Art and Performance and co-editor of Perform, Repeat, Record. His numerous essays have been translated into ten languages. He conducted the three-year European Union funded creative research project Curating the Ephemeral (2014-2016) on immaterial art and museal practices. He was co-director of Performance Matters, a four-year AHRC funded research project on the cultural value of performance (2009-2013).He co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern, London (2003) and a number of other performance and durational events in European cities over the last eighteen years. He was curator of Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), a curatorial adviser and attaché for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016) and an artistic director with the collective freethought of the 2016 Bergen Assembly, Norway. Heathfield has worked with m a n artists and thinkers on critical and creative collaborations including film dialogues, performance-lectures, dramaturgy, writing and workshop projects. He was President of Performance Studies international (2004-2007) and is Emeritus Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London.
Boyan Manchev
Boyan Manchev is a philosopher and professor at the New Bulgarian University (Sofia) and at the HZT – UdK (Berlin). He is also former director of program and vice president of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. His actual research, which proposes the perspective of a radical materialism, is focused on the fields of ontology, philosophy of art, and political philosophy. Manchev has lectured widely at European, North-American, and Japanese universities and cultural institutions. He has organized and/or collaborated on a number of projects, congresses, and public forums dealing with philosophy, art, and politics at the CIPh (Paris), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Tanzquartier (Vienna), Apexart (New York), CND (Paris), BAK (Utrecht), UTCP (Tokyo), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), among others. He curated the exhibition Out of Time at the Sofia City Art Gallery (March – April 2011). He has participated as theorist, dramaturge, or performer in theatre and contemporary dance projects, including Tim Etchells and Adrian Heathfield’s The Frequently Asked, Boris Charmatz’s expo zero and Poster session “Mouvement” for the Festival d’Avignon, and Ani Vaseva’s Frankenstein, A Dying Play. Manchev is the author of seven books and more than 100 book chapters, catalogues, and other publications in various languages. In the last years he has appeared in Logic of the Political (Sofia: Critique&Humanism, 2012); Miracolo (Milano: Lanfranchi, 2011); L’altération du monde: Pour une esthétique radicale (Paris: Lignes, 2009); La Métamorphose et l’Instant – Désorganisation de la vie (Paris: La Phocide, 2009); Rue Descartes 64: La métamorphose, ed. by B. Manchev (Paris: PUF, 2009); Rue Descartes 67: Quel sujet du politique?, ed. by G. Basterra, R. Ivekovic, and B. Manchev (Paris: PUF, 2010). His book The Body–Metamorphosis (Sofia: Altera, 2007) deals extensively with contemporary art, performance, and dance.
Ani Vaseva
Ani Vaseva was born in 1982 in Sofia. She graduated in theatre studies and theatre directing at NATFA, Sofia. She is a theatre director, the author of theatre plays of critical and theoretical texts on dance and theatre, and holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Among her visual projects are Still Here. On The Meteor Arhcipelago (together with Georgi Sharov, Museums Night, Plovdiv, 2015), Gorgons In The Depot, or Apocalypse Now (exhibition curated together with Monika Vakarelova and Boriana Rossa, part of The Other Eye project of Maria Vassileva at the Sofia Municipal Gallery, 2013), In-Out (installation, part of the Love exhibition, curated by Maria Vassileva, Raiko Alexiev gallery, 2012), Power Fridge Points (together with Natalia Todorova and Ivana Nencheva, Tanzquartier Wien, 2011), The War Of The Little Girls (together with Ivan Donchev and Boyan Manchev, Vaska Emanuilova gallery, 2010) etc. Among her last performances are A Play For Us (2018), Roadtrip to Hell (2017), The Murderer And The Whore (2017), Lovecraft (2016), Total Damage (2016), Maldoror (2015), A Play for You (2014). Her book What Is Contemporary Dance (2017) explores the complex processes and conflictual ideologies that stand behind the concept of contemporary dance. Between 2015 and 2018 she has been teaching history and theory of theatre and literature at New Bulgarian University and the Luben Groys Theatre College, where together with Leonid Yovchev she was leading an acting class in 2017-18.
Visiting and Guest Artists
Hollins 2024
shani collins
shani collins (SNIC) is crowned “Contemporary Revolutionary” by Thomas Lax in The Studio Museum Harlem Summer Magazine and featured in Dance Magazine as “Warrior Woman” by Eva Yaa Assentawa who says: “ It’s a sure bet that when she takes the stage, she will deliver not only the movement but the core, the bedrock, the very meaning and spirit of a dance.” A “Bessie” New York Dance and Performance Award and recipient of a Martha Myers Choreography Award, she has choreographed and performed in the NYC Off Broadway Production of The Vagina Monologues at New World Stages and has participated, as a choreographer, in the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. Her dance projects perpetuates women’s healing em(power)ment through performance, intercultural exchange, and community engagement/ dialogue. Her work has been commissioned throughout the East coast and abroad at Performatica’ Dance Festival in Cholula, Mexico, Kaay Fecc Dance Festival in Dakar, Senegal, including special teaching / performance workshops in Seoul, Korea, Dakar, Senegal, and throughout Ghana. Shani is currently Associate Professor and former Chair in the Department of Dance at Connecticut College, where she has served on faculty since 2009.
Elizabeth Corbett O’Malley
Elizabeth Corbett O’Malley is a dual U.S. and Belgian citizen, and resides between Memphis, TN, upstate NY, and Paris, France, as a freelance choreographer, teaching artist, and dancer. She received her dance training in Rochester, NY, at the National Academy of Dance in Champaign, IL, and with Maggie Black and Marjorie Mussman in New York City. She is a graduate of Hollins University (MFA ‘19) and a recipient of a Rosenberg Distinguished Artist grant from Towson University. Corbett was also a Hollins University Fellowship recipient, and received a Recognized Professorship through her engagement with the Beijing Dance Academy. She danced with the Milwaukee Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet before she moved to Europe. There she became a soloist with William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet and performed for over a decade in works including “Love Songs,” “Artifact,” “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,“ “Enemy in the Figure,” “Steptext,“ “Behind the China Dogs,” “Loss of Small Detail” and other works. Corbett was the dance program coordinator and ballet, improvisation, and Forsythe repertory teacher for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s school of contemporary dance, P.A.R.T.S., in Brussels, Belgium, for ten years. De Keersmaeker engaged her as an assistant to the choreographer for several new works and created a duo for herself and Corbett titled “For.” She has been a guest teacher worldwide including for Cullberg Ballet, Hollins University, Rosas, ImPulsTanz, the ADF, Movement Research/International Dance Dialogues, Dance Platform Istanbul, Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts and The National Academy of Arts, Oslo, Norway, among others. Corbett has been choreographing since the early ‘90’s and her work has been seen at Hunter College, and through COCA/The Big Muddy Dance Company, Dir. Kirven Douthit-Boyd, New Ballet Ensemble Company and School, Dir. Katie Smythe. Corbett was seen most recently with her dance collective TINATA at Hollins University Fall Dance, and at RADfest ‘24.
Penelope Freeh
Dance artist and educator Penelope Freeh thoughtfully transforms ballet’s transmission and embodiment. Sitting in the question of how aesthetics shape content and meaning, she makes new dance performance. Heightened theatricality, intimate gesture, coding, and visual design elements reveal deeply personal content. Freeh is a two-time McKnight Fellow for Choreographers, Sage awardee for Outstanding Performer, and her work is in the repertoires of many Minneapolis/St. Paul companies and groups. Inextricably linked collaborations include works developed with composer Jocelyn Hagen. Their dance opera Test Pilot premiered and won a Sage Award for Outstanding Design in 2014 and toured Minnesota in 2016. Choreographer for Minnesota Opera’s The Song Poet, she worked with librettist Kao Kalia Yang, composer Jocelyn Hagen, and director Rick Shiomi. The first ever Hmong-English opera, The Song Poet premiered in 2023. Freeh’s choral ballet Unfashioned Creature, created with composer Timothy C. Takach, fractures Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into revelatory and redemptive terms and was named a Top Ten Most Memorable Dance Event of 2023 by the Minneapolis StarTribune. Having danced with James Sewell Ballet for seventeen years and served as Artistic Associate from 2007-11, she is an affiliate Lecturer at the University of Minnesota and adjunct Assistant Professor at St. Olaf College. She holds a Dance MFA from Hollins University (completed 2019) where she has served as a Thesis Production Coordinator since 2022 and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Fall 2023. During covid she co-founded TINATA, a thriving long-distance performance collective with Hollins cohort colleagues Brynne Billingsley and Elizabeth Corbett.
Wendi Wagner
Wendi Wagner has a background in dance education, a foundation in somatic practices, and an interest in neuroscience. She currently contemplates how yoga might offer support for recovering and re-building resilience in the nervous system. Wagner completed a 200-hour registered yoga teacher training in 2014, a few years after receiving an M.F.A. in dance through Hollins. Yoga studies led to a certificate program in Ayurvedic lifestyle mentoring, in addition to coursework in Exploring the Vagus system. Recently she has traveled to Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Prague, working toward a 500-hour training in yoga therapy. She sees the movement practices of yoga and dance as eternal opportunities to return to the body as a source of wisdom; and the movement class as a field for deepening and sharing that insight.
Clarice Young
Clarice Young is an artist, teacher, choreographer, collaborator, and performer who researches the intersection of African Diasporic dance and contemporary modern dance. Melding elements of Afro-Caribbean, modern, and West African styles, she uses fundamentals from each to uncover ways to stabilize and release the body. Young received her B.F.A. in dance from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and her M.F.A. in dance from Hollins. A Louisiana native, Young was an original member of Camille A. Brown & Dancers and served as an assistant to the director. She was also a member of Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, acting as their first rehearsal director. She’s collaborated with fellow artist Francine E. Ott in Outta the Box at Dixon Place, performed her solo work i am… at Judson Church, and showcased her choreography re(belle) at the North Carolina Dance Festival. She has been a guest teacher at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee Summer Dance Intensive, American Dance Festival, and Hollins. As a choreographer she’s been invited to set work for undergraduate students at NC State University and UL Lafayette. In 2019 she started The Clarice Young Project to celebrate Black culture and life out loud through the art of dance. Since then, students along with faculty from UNC Greensboro and NC State University, have performed each year at Greensboro Project Space honoring Black History Month. Presently, Young serves as an assistant professor of dance and the director of undergraduate studies at UNC Greensboro.
Plovdiv, Bulgaria 2024
Jonathan Burrows
Jonathan Burrows danced for 13 yeas with the Royal Ballet in London during which time he also performed for experimental choreographer Rosemary Butcher. He has since created an acclaimed body of performance work including The Stop Quartet (1996) and Weak Dance Strong Questions (with Jan Ritsema 2001), as well as his long series of collaborations with composer Matteo Fargion including Both Sitting Duet (2002), The Quiet Dance (2005), Speaking Dance (2006), Cheap Lecture (2009), The Cow Piece(2009), Body Not Fit For Purpose (2014) and Rewriting (2021). Burrows and Fargion are co-produced b PACT Zollverein Essen and Sadler’s WellsTheatre London. Burrows is a founder visiting member of faculty at P.A.R.T.S Brussels and has been Guest Professor at universities in Berlin, Gent, Giessen, Hamburg and London. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge 2010) and has recently published a new book of talks and fragments of writing called Writing Dance (Varamo Press 2022). Burrows is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.
Kae Ishimoto
Kae Ishimoto was born into a family of traditional Japanese dancers. She began studying traditional Japanese dance from the age of three, jazz dance from the age of four, and has since trained in modern, contemporary, and butoh dance. Since 2002, she has been working with Hijikata’s disciple, Yukio Waguri. In 2011, she performed her solo Transformation Girl, choreographed by Waguri using the Hijikata method of butoh in 7 countries in Asia and Europe. She has been invited to perform in 21 countries in Asia, Europe and the US. As the director of Perspectives On Hijikata Research Collective (POHRC), with Rosa van Hensbergen, she has organized intensive workshops and events in Japan and UK for 7 years, and has been invited as a Butoh teacher to 13 countries such as Hong Kong, Bali and Mexico. Since 2020, she is the current curator of Tatsumi Hijikata Archive in Keio University Art Center.
Nikolay Korchev
Nikolai Korchev is a Bulgarian dancer and choreographer. He has graduated in Bulgarian Folk Dance from the National School of Dance Art and continued his studies at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts Prof. Asen Diamandiev. Nikolay Korchev is the founder of the Folklore Collective Pletenitsa, currently the largest collective for Bulgarian folklore in central North Bulgaria, reaching a total of 325 dancers and singers aged 7 to 67 years. He is also a team member of Taratantsi, an organization engaged in the digitalization of Bulgarian folk dances. Since 2019 he has been a guest choreographer in England, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Korchev has danced in hundreds of productions and is teaching classes and master classes nationally and internationally.
Sergiu Matis
Sergiu Matis is a Romanian choreographer born in 1981 in Cluj-Napoca. He received his dance education at the Liceul de Coregrafie in Cluj and the Mannheim Academy of Dance, and began his career at Tanztheater Nuremberg. He has been living and working in Berlin since 2008, creating his own works such as Keep It Real (2013), Explicit Content (2015), Neverendings (2017), Hopeless. (2019), UNREST (2021), DRANG (2022) and Blazing Worlds (2023). He has led workshops and educational activities at a range of institutions worldwide. In 2014 he completed his masters in Solo/Dance/Authorship at the Inter University Centre for Dance (HZT) / Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). His dance practice could be considered a relentless search through corporal and digitalized archives, in orderto place acritical lens on what has been filedaway,salvage what was presumed lost, and reinvent what was undocumented. The accumulation of history serves as an old map, which becomes a departure point towards the revelation of a new imagining of dance. His work provokes intense experiences which fracture accepted ideas and reflect the turmoil of our times.
Boryana Rossa
Boryana Rossa is an interdisciplinary artist andcurator who works in the fields of video, film, bio-art, performance, and painting with a focus on body, gender, and technology. In 2004 together with filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti, Rossa establishes ULTRAFUTURO – an international art-collective engaged with issues of technology, science, and their social implications. In 2012 has finished her Ph.D. on Post-Cold War Gender Performances, Rensselaer, Troy, NY. She is also a director of Sofia Queer Forum, together with philosopher Stanimir Panayotov. Associate Professor in the department of Film and Media Arts, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Boryana Rossa has shown work at Brooklyn Museum, NY and National Gallery, Sofia.
Angel Simitchiev
Angel Simitchiev is a musician, composer, and Sound Art lecturer at the National Academy of Art, Sofia. Beyond his solo music practice, his work is developed through collaboration with video art, film, art installation, ads, fashion, theatre, contemporary dance, and performance. Angel Simitchiev is a PhD in Musicology and 1⁄2 of the experimental label and booking crew Amek Collective.
Laurie Young
Laurie Young is a Berlin based Canadian dance artist who focuses on the embodiment of unauthorised histories and their representation and how relationships are choreographed between human and other than human beings in the theatre, museum and city. Laurie embraces an expanded notion of choreography as a way of observing organisational patterns between bodies, of framing or revealing hierarchies and privilege. She has been working in transdisciplinary projects across the fields of dance studies, sensory ethnography and archival practices. Her career as a dancer saw her working with many international choreographers including Sasha Waltz, Meg Stuart, Benoit Lachambre, Eszter Salomon, Nasser Martin Gousset and Hannah Hegenscheidt. Laurie (with Justine A Chambers) was named Visiting Dance artist of the National Arts Centre (Canada) of 2019-2020. She was the recipient of the Tanzpraxis scholarship of the Senatverwaltung für Kultur und Europa 2020/2021. Her work has been presented at the Sophiensaele, Martin Gropius Bau, The Australian Museum, National Arts Centre, The Field Museum, Agora de la danse amongst others. She is currently studying somatic trauma therapy in a social justice context.
Leonid Yovchev
Leonid Yovchev is one of the most renowned Bulgarian actors. He has performed and toured nationally and international with Metheor’s productions, as well as continuously working on the big theatre stages and in major film productions. Leonid Yovchev is one of the few actors who develop extensively both their text/speech/classical theatre approaches and contemporary Physical techniques/body practices. Besides his work as part of Metheor, he has been part of the ensembles of The National Theatre, The Army Theatre a n d The Little Theatre Off the Channel, a s well as working freelance and appearing on the stages of various other theatres. In 2017-2018 Yovchev was acting professor, leading an acting class in Theatre College Lyuben Groys, together with Ani Vaseva. He gives workshops and lectures and participates in different educational, experimental formats.
Sigal Zouk
Sigal Zouk is a dancer/artist working in Berlin since 1997. She received her training at the Emek Izrael Dance School and joined the Bat Sheva Ensemble 1994-96. After moving to Berlin and working with artists such as Luc Dunberry and Juan Cruz Dias de Esanola, she became a member of Sasha Waltz and Guests 1999-2004. In 2005, she began her collaboration with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods; first as a dancer and then as choreographic advisor/outside eye for the work of Stuart and Gehmacher as well as Stuart’s following works. In 2007, she began her long time collaboration with Laurent Chetouane in which she created 10 dance and theatre works for the stage. She has worked with other artists such as Boris Charmantz (Musee de la Dans), AWST &Walter, Zeirkratzer, Simone Aughterlony, lan Kaler, Antje Shupp and Shanon Conny. During the past few years she has begun to develop her teaching practice where she guides professional dancers to locate their feeling body to a presence that has the potential to navigate in and through any situation. She teaches in several European dance departments and institutions including Tanzfabrik Berlin, ,ZZT Hochschule für Music und dance Köln, DDSKS Copenhagen, DOCH Stokholm, Cullberg Ballet Stokholm, Akademie for dance in Bukarest and Ponderosa. Zouk accompanies artists and choreographers such as Jared Gradinger/Angela Schubot, Meg Stuart, Sheena McGrandles, Antje Shupp, The progressiv wave, Tamara Rettenmund, Mor Demer and Moritz Majce on their artistic journey, helping them to work with their limitations and their potentiality. She was awarded the best performer in Dortmund Festival 2010 as well as dancer of the vear from Tanz Magazine 2011.