B.S. in Performance Studies, Northwestern University
Max Abner is a PhD candidate, musician, and curator who hails from Louisville, KY, has deep roots in Chicago, and is currently based in Oakland. Working from an anti-colonial settler positionality, he draws together discourses from sound studies, Indigenous studies, and critical theory to approach what he calls settler sound, a concept that accounts for the ways in which contested relations to colonized land play out in aural aesthetics. His dissertation attends to settler sound in the Bay Area experimental music/sound art...
Rikki Amani is an essayist, family archivist, and a proponent of the Black Radical Tradition. Amani focuses on African American and diasporic aesthetic practitioners, particularly those whose lives converge at the intersection of both domestic and erotic performance.
Rikki’s work questions the materiality of staged performances as they slip into the performances of everyday life and everyday objects. She contemplates the creative and radical embodiments of Black mothers, sisters, and daughters through her...
MFA in Experimental Choreography, University of California at Riverside; MA in Literature, Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaiso, Chile
Rodrigo (He/Él/Fey) is a researcher, educator and performance art creator from Antofagasta (Chile), who developed his path in Guatemala. His current research explores the possibilities and complexities of bodily stillness, particularly within the context of neoliberalism in Latin America. His interests also include the evolution of Latin American performance art, comedy as a political and creative tool, and film studies. Rodrigo...
BFA in Dance, second major in Art History, New York University; MA in Dance Education, New York University
Deborah Black is a doctoral student in Performance Studies. Her research brings her artistic lineage of experimental dance/theater practice/philosophy into interdisciplinary connections with critical pedagogy, post-structural philosophy, queer studies, and decolonization. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, she spent over two decades in New York City (and a few in Europe) working as an artist, educator, and writer. Deborah is...
B.A. in Sociology, Harvard University; M.F.A. in Art, Carnegie Mellon University
Lena Chen is an artist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research examines the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. An internationally exhibiting artist, she has been awarded grants from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, and the Center for Cultural Power.
B.A. (Honors) in Music, University of Cambridge; M.St. in Musicology, University of Oxford
Leia Devadason is a writer, composer, and Odissi dance-learner from Singapore. Her dissertation focuses on what she calls "counterclassical" Indian dance, an emerging transnational genre which has bloomed in an intimate, antagonistic, and mutually constitutive relation to globally renowned genres of "classical" dance. Using rasa and Frankfurt School aesthetics, postcolonial poetics of Relation, and queer/sexuality studies as...
B.F.A. in Modern Dance, minor in Native American Studies, University of Utah
Talia is an enrolled member of the Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians. She aspires to research and document the performance of her peoples' culture and identity within both historic and contemporary contexts. Her research interests are informed by her years of practice as a movement artist, as well as the connection to place her family has maintained for millennia in the coastal mountain region of San Diego County California. She graduated cum laude with an Honors B.F.A. in Modern Dance and minor in Native...
AshEL SeaSunZ Eldridge, Chicago born, living in Oakland by way of NY. He has West African/Blackfoot ancestry. He has been working internationally with various shamanic practices since 2005. His ceremonial leadership includes Dagara divinitory and ancestral healing, Japanese spiritual purification, and Galactic Language Activation/Soul Cleansing via Tian Gong. He is Co-founder/Co-Director of Esphera, (umbrella for (...
B.F.A. in Community Arts, minor in Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies, California College of the Arts; M.A. in Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Laila Guadalupe is the daughter of a Roma mother and Mexican father, raised by her grandmother and aunties in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. She is an artist whose practice centers on the making of altars as rituals for the healing of the personal and the collective social body. Laila's research focuses on public altars, memorial murals, graffiti, ceremony, dance and other forms of ritual performances...
Born and raised in the East Bay, Ariah's research draws on the cultural richness of her upbringing. She explores food as a performance mechanism and means of resistance in creative communities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Her background in casual fine dining and dance studies guides her inquiries into how culture and memory are represented through communal food practices, the role of hospitality in cultural transformation, and the hidden narratives of Black and queer artists in avant-garde performance art. Ultimately, her work is fueled by a desire to reimagine how food can...
