Photo by Nathaniel Phillips

luciana achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She began making work collaboratively with Levi Gonzalez in 1999, and has been making dance in NYC and Uruguay independently since 2002. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades; most recently a 2016 NYFA Fellowship. She was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY’s “Best of Dance”. Her ongoing project The Pleasure Project (2014), a public space intervention, has been seen in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland and at the American Realness Festival in NYC. She received the 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO which had been presented there at the Fusebox Festival, and had premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her latest work, An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, premiered at Gibney Dance in December 2015, was remounted with an all Uruguayan cast at the Festival Internacional de Danza en Uruguay this May; was presented outside as a performance/block party/urban ritual at the River to River Festival in Lower Manhattan this June, and was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production.

lachugar.org

Marissa Perel is an artist and writer based in New York. She is currently an AIR at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), where she is making solo and collaborative performance on subjects including choreography and disability, crip time and queerness, power and access, and pain and desire. Her work has been shown internationally, recently including the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY Konstfack, Sweden, FringeArts, Philadelphia, Medium Gallery, Slovakia, Roulette and the Chocolate Factory Theater, NY. Her chapbook, Angry Ocean 1-10, is published by Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs. She was the editor of Critical Correspondence, the on-line journal of Movement Research (2012-2013), and the founder of the column, Gimme Shelter: Performance Now for Art21 Magazine. She is a Lecturer at the Low-Residency M.F.A Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cori Olinghouse is an artist, archivist, and curator. She is currently developing an improvisational portraiture practice, Clown Therapy that explores the shape-shifting nature of identity and personhood. She was the recipient of The Award, conceived by Dean Moss (2015), a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Dance Development program made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2016-2017), and a panelist in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Storytelling in the Archives” forum (2015). Her work has been produced by New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, BRIC Arts Media, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Roulette, and Movement Research. She has performed in the works of Trisha Brown and Bill Irwin. As part of her graduate research at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University, Olinghouse is working on a series of hybrid projects that bring together her research in archives, curation and performance.

Kate Watson-Wallace is a choreographer, director and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Hailed for creating work where “wild imagination ruled,” by the New York Times, she creates experimental performance for the stage, site-based locations, and music videos. Her performance work has been funded by the Map Fund, Doris Duke Foundation through Creative Capital, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and The Independence Foundation. She is a 2007 Pew Fellow in the Arts in choreography.

Major works include Car, a performance for three audience members inside a moving vehicle, Store, a performance installation inside an abandoned Rite-Aid, Mash Up Body, a dance in collaboration with electronic composer HPrizm, and ALT/MODE, a multi-media stage show in collaboration with electronic musician RYAT, that premiered at Summerstage Central Park in August 2015. She has choreographed music videos for Animal Collective and Black Dice, with director Danny Perez.

Watson-Wallace has toured internationally as a performer, choreographer, and educator. She has been a guest artist/lecturer at the Massachusetts College of Arts and Design, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, Swarthmore College, University of the Arts, University of California Los Angeles, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bryn Mawr College, Drexel University and Moore College of Art and Design, and been in residence at The Yard. She is currently a 2016 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.

She is a graduate of the inaugural class of the Low Residency MFA in Studio Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.