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ARTISTIC DIRECTOR - ONYE OZUZU
Artistic Director Onye Ozuzu is a performing artist, choreographer, administrator, educator, and researcher currently serving as the Dean of the College of the Arts at the University of Florida. Since 1997, Ozuzu has been presenting choreographic work nationally and internationally at venues such as Seattle Festival of Improvisational Dance (WA), Kaay Fecc Festival Des Tous les Danses (Dakar, Senegal), La Festival del Caribe (Santiago, Cuba), Lisner Auditorium (Washington, D.C.), McKenna Museum of African American Art (New Orleans, LA), and danceGATHERING (Lagos, Nigeria). Other recent work includes Touch My Beloved’s Thought, a collaboration with composer Greg Ward. Ozuzu also facilitates work in a group improvisational score, The Technology of the Circle. For the past three years, she has been developing significant collaborations with African diasporic artists meeting in Lagos, Nigeria at danceGATHERING, a festival that she co-curates with Nigerian artist Qudus Onikeku. She continues to serve the field of dance as a thought leader, speaker, and curator. |
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PERFORMER - KEYIERRA COLLINS
Keyierra Collins is a dancer, teaching artist, and choreographer based in Chicago, IL. Collins earned a BA in Dance from Columbia College Chicago where she studied varies dance forms including West African, modern, jazz, ballet, some hip hop forms, and improvisation. As a dance artist, Collins has collaborated with a number of choreographers including Onye Ozuzu, Paige Cunningham, Margi Cole, Emily Stein, Anna Martine Whitehead and Sonita Surratt. As a choreographer, Collins's work explores how dance and movement can be used to heal trauma, particularly the collective and individual trauma experienced by people of the African diaspora. Having traveled and worked with artists in Haiti and Nigeria, Collins wants to continue to travel and collaborating with artists around the world. |
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PERFORMER - KEISHA JANAE
Originally from Georgia, and graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s BFA Dance program is a Teaching Artist for Columbia College Chicago, Community Engagement Program. Keisha is a second company member of the BraveSoul Movement Company and member of the Project tool collaboration with Onye Ozuzu. She has participated in many performances such as the “Amsterdam-Berlin-Chicago Festival at Links Hall,” “Chicago Jazz Festival at Jay Pritzker Pavilion,” “The Instigation Festival I’m New Orleans,” “ACDA Festival at The John F. Kennedy Center, and collaborated with Elana Jacob’s, “Cabin Fever Dance Company.” Outside of performance, she is passionate about creating and recently choreographed a solo performance for Links Hall "Set Free." |
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PERFORMER - AALIYAH CHRISTINA
Aaliyah Christina . curates, makes, and writes in Chicago, IL. Born in Ruston, Louisiana, she integrates her black southern roots with her primal, conscious voice evolving in her Southside Chicago communities. She founded catalyst movmnt (2017), a curating collective designed to highlight emerging movement artists of color. |
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PERFORMER - JESSICA MARASSA
Jessica Marasa is the founder of The Watering Can. She loves to dance, sing the incorrect words to songs and make faces that frighten her in the mirror. Moving studio time continues to exist as a container for uncertainty, friendship, inquiry, liberation, fluidity and connection. The Chicago dance community has served as a place of discovery for Jessica since 2007. At the onset of 2014 Jessica began presenting work independently to continue feeding her interest and investment in improvisational performance practices. These moments have been shared at Stage 773, Links Hall, Hamlin Park and Signal Ensemble Theatre as part of PRODUCE and have been work-shopped in settings led by Miguel Gutierrez, KJ Holmes and Lisa Nelson. |
SOUND DESIGNER - DAMON LOCKS
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist, soundmaker, and musician. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his BFA in Fine Arts. Since 2014, he has been working with Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project, teaching art at Stateville Correctional Center. A recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts and the 2016 MAKER Grant, Locks has also operated as an Artist Mentor in the Chicago Artist Coalition program FIELD/WORK, and recently became a Soros Justice Media Fellow. He is currently an artist in residence in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy. |
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MEDIA DOCUMENTATION & ARCHIVIST - JOVAN LANDRY
Jovan Landry is a Chicago based Filmmaker, Photographer & Hip Hop Artist. Jovan's mantra is to use her interdisciplinary skills to tell the true stories of the world, herself and others. Her expertise of 10+ years carries a B.A in Film & Video from Columbia College Chicago, an extensive body of films, photographs and self-released albums that are in collaboration with fellow musicians, artists, dancers, businesses, organizations, and fellow filmmakers worldwide, and most recently, the first all-women produced and performed Hip-Hop album "Synergy", featuring Chicago women/femme creators- funded by the Creator Award Grant from WeWork. |
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VIDEO PROJECTIONIST - SIMON ROUBY
Simon Rouby, born in 1980, Simon Rouby learned to paint the hard way, that is to say; with a spray can. He then went on to study Animation at the famed Gobelins school in Paris as well as Calarts in Los Angeles. Adama, his first feature lm was nominated for the Cesar and European Film Awards in 2015 and then went on to be projected in over 100 countries around the world, winning over 10 prizes. In 2017, he was awarded a one year fellowship at the French Academy of Villa Medici in Rome where he developed a new body of work using video installation. |
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DRAMATURG - BRIANNA ALEXIS HEATH
Brianna Alexis Heath is a dancer, writer, and curator currently working as the Program Director for Natya Dance Theatre, and a contributing writer for See Chicago Dance. Bri is a recent graduate of Columbia College Chicago (double major in Dance and Cultural Studies with a concentration in Urban Studies) where she studied with Onye Ozuzu, Dr. Raquel Monroe, Dr. Peter Carpenter, Darrell Jones, Dr. Nicole Spigner, and Dr. Erin McCarthy among others. Heath is the recipient of the 2017 Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Outstanding BA Thesis in Cultural Studies for her senior thesis: “Bodies as Living, Twirling, Sacrifices: Performing Black Girlhood, Liturgical Dance, and the Black Church Tradition.” As a curator, Heath has served as the co-director of the inaugural Black Arts Festival at Columbia College Chicago (2018), and the two-day gathering for emerging artists, Artist Convening (2019), in Kaduna and Ajuba, Nigeria. Heath's current research employs performance, installation work, and Black feminist theory to reimagine and analyze performances of Black girlhood in the 21st century. As one of the founding members of SAFE SPACE--a Chicago-based, black artist community--Brianna believes in the power of stories and curating spaces where artists of color can find support from each other in their different art forms. |
PRODUCTION MANAGER - ANDY LYNN
Andy Lynn is a multidisciplinary artist and arts manager. His work centers around the pursuit of catalytic experiences that educate, empower, and connect societies for momentous personal and public growth. He is the Production Manager for Silk Road Rising and Onye Ozuzu’s Project Tool. Currently serving as Production Manager on both film at theatre projects at Silk Road Rising, an art-making and arts service organization that shapes conversations about Asian and Middle Eastern Americans. Through storytelling and dialogue, they challenge disinformation, promote a culture of continuous learning, and explore what it means to be Americans. |
PROJECT MANAGER - KATE SPEER
Kate Speer is a dancer, choreographer, and organizer based in Denver, CO. Balancing life as an artist and arts administrator, I craft performance work while tending to the wellbeing and heart beat of dance makers and nonprofit organizations. Currently a Resident Artist at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, I have had residencies at PlatteForum (CO), Middlebury College (VT), Swarthmore College (PA), and Mascher Space Cooperative (PA), all of which emphasize community engagement that is inherent in my dancemaking. |