Charli Brissey (University of Michigan) is
an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and teacher who works
choreographically with various technologies and materials.
This primarily includes bodies, cameras, objects, instincts,
language, and ecosystems. Their research integrates studies
in choreography, feminist theory, technology, and science
They are invested in movement practices to illuminate the
role of the nonhuman in formation-practices of self and
material environment, and turn to interspecies ecologies to
challenge distinctions between nature and culture. They
have been creating performances, installations, experimental
videos, and written scholarship for over fifteen years, and
have been presented in various galleries, conferences, film
festivals, and performance venues nationally and
internationally. This includes the National Queer Arts
Festival (San Francisco, US), Movement Research at
Judson Church (NYC, US), The Eye Film Institute
(Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Dance on Camera at
Lincoln Center (NYC, US), Center for Performance
Research (NYC, US), Vancouver Queer Film Festival
(Vancouver, BC), Zurich Moves! Dance Festival
(Zurich, Switzerland), Paris International Feminist Film Festival (Paris, France), The Arts in Society Conference (Budapest, Hungary), Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (Seattle, US), Queer Publics Symposium (Urbana, US), International Conference on the Image (Berkeley, CA), and several others. Brissey’s work has been funded through various University grants as well as Yellowhouse NYC, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. They received a BFA in Dance & Choreography and an MFA in Kinetic Imaging from Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a second MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brissey is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Michigan.
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Mauriah Kraker (everywhere) Mauriah Kraker is an advocate for slow travel: walking around the block and through the city as a means of attending to choreographic unfolding of time cycles in the body + land. Her background in athletics (competing as an Olympic level athlete, touring with Pilobolus Dance Company, and being raised in a family that walked and biked everywhere) is a driver in the creation of highly physical works attentive to precision, restraint and abandon. Her projects have included: walking + mapping 1200 miles of the flatlands of the Midwest, interactive walks through the Italian Alps, solos under hiways, and most recently, an evening length duet built on scores investigating exhaustion + endurance performed in a restored barn on the prairie. Mauriah holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where she spent her time performing a duet with Jennifer Monson, directing the Children’s Dance program, and walking the prairie + fields.
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Michael J. Morris (Denison University) moves, thinks, facilitates,
and writes within and between dance, ritual, performance art, gender and sexuality
studies, and somatic practices to support personal and collective healing and
liberation. Their work takes the forms of public rituals and community workshops,
participatory performances and dances for the stage, dramaturgy, public speaking,
academic teaching and writing, and collaborative art making. Their areas of
research include ecosexuality, historical and contemporary witchcraft, feminist
and queer pornography, transgender lives and livability, and artmaking as a vital
site for generating rituals needed to navigate an age of global crisis. Morris holds
a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, and they are currently a
Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University where they teach in the
Department of Dance, Queer Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and
Environmental Studies. Their work has been presented at universities, galleries,
community spaces, theaters, bars and nightclubs, films, domestic spaces, and most
recently the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ponderosa, and ImPulsTanz.They have
collaborated with artists and scholars including Keith Hennessy, Annie Sprinkle and
Elizabeth Stephens, Maree ReMalia, CoCo Loupe and Mina Estrada, Rashana Perks
Smith, Courtney Harris and Charli Brissey, Kelly Klein, and Catriona Sandilands,
among others. Their writing appears in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater,
TDR, Choreographic Practices, Dance Chronicle, the European Journal of
Ecopsychology, and Witchcraft Hysteria (forthcoming). They have been teaching yoga
for over ten years in academic and queer community contexts, and they maintain a
consulting practice called Co Witchcraft Offerings in which they bring together
astrology, tarot, reiki, and ritual practices to support people in making meaning
of their lives.
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Leah Wilks (New York City) is a dancer, choreographer, musician, and teacher originally hailing from North Carolina. She makes work that gets messy, loud, and is driven by an interest in strange intimacy. Collaborative practices are central to her making and understanding of the world. Her work has been produced at the Cordoba Center for the Arts (Durham, NC), the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (Urbana, IL), and on tour with the North Carolina Dance Festival. Most recentlyshe has performed with Renay Aumiller Dances, real.live.people.durham, Sara Hook, Tommy DeFrantz’s SLIPPAGE, and Kendra Portier/BAND. Leah has taught beginners through professionals at a variety of locations including the American Dance Festival, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, NC State University, UNC Greensboro, Elon University, Carolina Friends School, the Ponderosa Tanzland Festival (Germany), and the Hemispheric Institute’s Graduate Student Initiative Convergence (Toronto, Canada). Her additional service to the field includes helping found Durham Independent Dance Artists , an independent season of
dance in Durham, NC, and Culture Mill , an arts non-profit and performing arts laboratory in Saxapahaw, NC. Leah holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is the recipient of a UIUC Award for Excellence in Undergraduate
Teaching.
Felix Cruz (New York City) received his BFA in Dance and Choreography from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. After completing his undergraduate studies, Cruz toured nationally and internationally with choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones for the revival of Houston-Jones’s piece THEM. In addition, Cruz worked with mentor, friend, and collaborator Charli Brissey on the inception and growth of Maeko Productions. In the three years Cruz worked with Houston-Jones and Brissey, Cruz's artistic voice began to manifest into dance pieces Cruz presented in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. During this time, Cruz began to realize his passions for teaching dance and creating dance works which lead to an MFA in Dance at Arizona State University; received in 2017. The manifestation of Cruz’s experiences can be found in the dance collective, Cruz Control Collective. Since its inception in 2015, CCC has presented work at the San Diego Dance Theatre, the Florida Dance Festival, the BETA Dance Festival, Blacktinx-Phoenix, Impulstanz, Excessive Realness, and was a Permanent Artist in Residence for [nueBOX]. As the artistic director, Cruz intends to create work that is a queer social commentary on the effect popular culture has on our lived experiences. Through teaching, creating, and encouraging discourse, Cruz Control Collective seeks to create dance for social change.
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Charli Brissey
3 0 2 7 at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
Photo: Natalie Fiol
jess pretty (New York City) is on a quest for pleasure that transcends time and the spaces she claims to reside in. within her research she choreographs, performs, collaborates with other artists (will rawls, katie workum, cynthia oliver, leslie cuyjet, dianne mcintyre, jennifer monson and niall jones) and has a teaching practice in new york city (as well as universities around the u.s.) where she moved after receiving an mfa in dance and queer studies from the university of illinois at urbana champaign. her free time is filled curating methodologies for living past survival through being as unapologetically black as possible.
Mauriah Kraker
Photo: Mauriah Kraker
Stephanie Steinhardt (Michigan State University) is faculty in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. I am a tech developer-turned-ethnographer interested in the social and ethical consequences of technological development, particularly in building and maintaining large-scale transformational endeavors in the climate and ocean sciences. My research starts at the scientific realities that look somewhat like science fiction and asks what kinds of futures and whose futures are we ushering in? How do we build and maintain infrastructures for generations? How do we work with and around technology to act with care for both ourselves and the planet? This has taken me into worlds involving oceanographic research by sea and by C, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and radioactive baby teeth in St. Louis and most recently into a convergence of space and ocean scientists searching for life and climate answers on the icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn. My dissertation, The Instrumented Ocean: How Sensors, Satellites and Seafloor-Walking Robots Changed What It Means to Study the Sea, traces the shifting conditions of labor and life that accompany an unprecedented large-scale long term big data infrastructure development project in the ocean sciences in the U.S.
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My work contributes to and draws from a diversity of fields and subfields, particularly feminist technoscience and infrastructure studies, cyberinfrastructure and eScience, collaboration and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), human-computer interaction (HCI), queer studies, critical race studies, science & technology studies (STS), and science policy. For more information please click further in the menu bar above or see my CV
Angela M. Schöpke-Gonzalez (University of Michigan) is a researcher, choreographer, curator, and educator pursuing a PhD at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Angela's work draws inspiration from
deep investigations of history, civic engagement, policy perspectives, and emotional narratives. She is committed to holding spaces for dialogue about both cultural identity questions and contemporary political participation. Some of Angela’s past work in these areas includes founding and directing project Dance Afghanistan (www.danceafghanistan.com, 2016-present, Greece / Germany / U.S.); working with the Collective Action and Social Media Lab as a Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Research Assistant to support research about social, political, and cultural information networks (2018-2019, University of Michigan); and choreographing and performing Two Women, One Map (2017, New York / Philadelphia) and assistant choreographing work with opera Mata Hari (2017, New York). Angela also holds an M.S. in Information and B.A. in Dance and International Affairs.
Angela is currently studying how humans receive / internalize / express information as identity narrative, and how a relative system of power might talk about those same humans in similar or different ways. Using a range of methods from movement to topic modeling, Angela works to craft spaces where we can explore the tensions between humans and the systems of power that they both create and exist within.
Leah Wilks
armageddon or sunrise or something at Blue Stem Hall​