Shavon Norris is an Artist. Educator. Facilitator. She grew up in a Black Sci-Fi Christian home in the Bronx that sparked her curiosity about the magic, medicine, and meaning living within us. Shavon uses movement along with text, sound, and imagery to reveal the stories living in our bodies. Her work explores our relationship to our identities, our experiences, and to each other. An examination and celebration of what we feel, think, and believe. As an artist her work has been presented at venues in NYC and Philadelphia. As a performer, she has performed for Silvana Cardell, Leah Stein, Merian Soto, makini poe, and toured with Pig Iron Theatre Company. As a facilitator, she works with artistic, educational, and corporate institutions, offering learning on Creativity, Movement, Inclusivity, and Healing Centered/Trauma Informed Practices. Shavon’s artistic and educational philosophies are rooted in the desire to offer herself, learners, performers, and audiences, opportunities to deepen the understanding of self and the collective. She loves the living and working she gets to do in the world.

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma creating numerous performance works.

Collaboratively created with photographer and historian William Johnston, A Body in Fukushima (2014–) is a multifaceted project that records Eiko‘s solo performances in post-nuclear disaster Fukushima. It consists of photo and video exhibitions, mix-media performances, lectures, a book publication, and a feature-length film. 

Eiko is currently working on her 10-year project, I Invited Myself (2022–), a series of exhibitions and screenings of her media works. Its volume 3 was presented in Philadelphia in 2024 at Asian Arts Initiative and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Eiko has worked on the theme of death and dying for a long time, i.e. River (1995–1999), post-9/11 Offering (2002), Death Poem (2005) and Mourning (2007). More recently, in the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, she has presented A Body in Cemetery (2020), Mother (2022), With the Dead (2022) and Stone (2023). She has also performed in Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, NC (2021) and Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, CO (2024).

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of  the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow. 

Mel Hsu (she/they) is a sonic painter of impossible worlds. As a multi-instrumentalist, Mel often ventures from her classical roots as a cellist into unexpected, cross-disciplinary collaborations. Rooted in Philadelphia, Mel’s restless spirit finds adventure across time zones and oceans as musical and administrative support for others who inspire them. Mel is a spreadsheet nerd, a slow reader, and a shameless instigator of kitchen dance parties.