Lisa Berman & Joseph Trần (BRKFST)
2026 Choreography FELLOWs
Photo credit: Adam Adolphus
LISA “MONALISA” BERMAN and JOSEPH “MN JOE” TRẦN are St. Paul-based choreographers and Co-Founders / Co-Artistic Directors of BRKFST Dance Company. BRKFST combines breaking and non-codified dance vernacular to produce works that are emotionally resonant and physically rigorous. As collaborators, they have premiered original works at local venues including the Walker Art Center, Southern Theater, and Orchestra Hall with the Minnesota Orchestra; nationally and internationally with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Des Moines Symphony, Bates College (ME), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (WI), Dance2Connect Festival (Ireland) and Vancouver International Dance Festival (Canada). Together, they have set repertoire at the University of MN - Twin Cities, Carleton College, St. Olaf College, Winona State University, Bates College, and Dance2Connect Festival.
Berman is a respected breaker with a choreographic approach grounded in collaboration, storytelling and experimentation. She is the recipient of the 2016 McKnight Dancer Fellowship, 2008 Jerome Travel Grant and multiple Minnesota grants. She has performed as a solo artist in productions touring to Art Basel - Miami, Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, Salon 94 in New York, NY, Amsterdam Museum in the Netherlands and D2C Festival in Ireland. Trần is a world-renowned breaker and former member of Knuckleheads Cali—a breaking crew respected for their avant-garde style of movement. He is the recipient of the 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and 2019 McKnight Dancer Fellowship. He is known for his signature moves which have earned him multiple first-place victories in breaking competitions across the U.S., Europe, and South America.
Helen Hatch
2026 Choreography FELLOW
Photo credit: Brianne Bland
Helen Hatch is a Minneapolis-based choreographer, performer, director, and educator. Named one of Minnesota Monthly’s 10 Artists to Watch in 2012, she began her professional career with Minnesota Dance Theatre, where she performed a wide range of repertory and created her own choreographic works.
In 2018, she formed Hatch Dance to house her choreographic work. Under her direction, the company has cultivated innovative collaborative processes that have resulted in critically acclaimed performances combining dance, music, and theater.
Alongside her work with Hatch Dance, Helen has maintained an extensive freelance career, performing with The Moving Company, Minnesota Opera, and HoneyWorks, among others.
Helen holds a BFA in Dance from the Ailey/Fordham University BFA Program, graduating with Departmental Honors in 2011. Her choreography has been presented at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out Festival, The Southern Theater, and The Cowles Center, as well as throughout Mexico and Guatemala through the Juntos Collective. She has been commissioned by Minnesota Dance Theatre, Saint Paul Ballet, Aveda, Mareck Dance, and MODERN REP. In 2022, Helen was selected for the Choreographic Institute Residency at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The following year, she served as an Artist in Residence at Moulin/Belle in Mareuil-en-Périgord, France.
Since 2013, she has taught ballet throughout the Twin Cities and currently serves as a teaching artist with Saint Paul Ballet and Minnesota Dance Theatre. www.hatchdance.com
Marciano Silva dos Santos
2026 Choreography FELLOw
Photo credit: V. Paul Virtucio
Marciano Silva dos Santos is a Brazilian choreographer and the Artistic Director of Contempo Physical Dance. Since immigrating from Brazil to the Twin Cities, he has garnered acclaim for shaping a distinctive movement aesthetic that fuses Afro-Brazilian rhythm with the nuanced physicality of contemporary dance. His artistic drive to explore emotional, cultural, and spiritual forces through physicality continues to fuel his choreographic work.
Marciano was recognized by the American Folkloric Society as a “Brazilian artist of unique and exceptional ability and merit.” Upon moving to Minnesota, he developed a mission to create work that is artistically exceptional, riveting to watch, and deeply rooted in the cultural dynamics of his Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous ancestry. His work is driven by a deep interest in contemporary movement and the ways it intersects with traditional forms and diverse perspectives.
Founding Contempo Physical Dance in 2011, he has since dedicated himself to creating dynamic, highly physical work. He was named “Best Dancer” by City Pages, hailed as “one of the most graceful movers on any Twin Cities stage” by the Star Tribune, and called “one of the hottest choreographers in town” by Minnesota Monthly Magazine.
Pamela Gleason
2025 Choreography FELLOW
Photo credit: Roosevelt Mansfield
Pam Gleason has been creating, teaching and performing modern dance for over 40 years. From the mid-1980s to 2011, she was involved with the Nancy Hauser Dance Company/Hauser Dance as an apprentice, company member, teacher and choreographer. She has taught, performed and/or presented her work in many Twin Cities venues, several US cities, in Taiwan, Japan, Russia and Ireland. She has choreographed over 50 pieces, 8 theater productions, and has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Commission. Her body of work includes solos, group pieces, several evening-length dance concerts and films.
Pam is the director of MotionArt (co-founded in 2013 with Diane Moncrieff ), an organization dedicated to making dance and the joy of movement accessible to people of all ages and abilities. MotionArt ‘s evening-length shows, Space Encounters (2017), Games People Play (2018) and Collabulous (2019) were staged at the Conn Theater in Minneapolis, and Reel Imaginings (2024), a showcase of four short dance films, was presented at Center for Performing Arts and Parkway Theater in Minneapolis.
Originally from St. Paul, Pam taught in the University of Minnesota Dance Department for 15 years and continues to teach modern dance and host monthly improv gatherings through MotionArt. She is committed to enhancing the mental and physical well-being of others through her classes, choreography, and film work.
Emily Michaels King
2025 Choreography FELLOW
Photo credit: Roosevelt Mansfield
Emily Michaels King is an interdisciplinary performing artist based in St. Paul, Minnesota, exploring authentic expression and human depth through movement, multimedia, and visual compositions for the stage. Emily is known for her fearless personal work, provocative style, and collaged evening-length solo performances, including: her award winning show MAGIC GIRL, multimedia online work DIGITAL; IN PERSON, a companion to DIGITAL; the raucous CHICKEN WING, which was featured in Red Eye Theater’s 2023 New Works 4 Weeks Festival, and STAR KEEPER. An in-progress version of her piece, ELECTRIC, was performed at Arena Dance’s 2022 CandyBox Festival. Additionally, her work has been presented at the Walker Art Center, the Guthrie Theater, and Movement Research, among others.
Pairing minimalism and subtlety with cacophony and bared irreverence, Emily’s works employ the lush landscape of the inner world and the power of unapologetic vulnerability. They combine movement with text, graphics, sound, and technology to focus on themes of self discovery and reclamation, womanhood, and old expressions of personal truth.
www.emilymichaelsking.com
Kayla Schiltgen
2025 Choreography FELLOW
Photo credit: Roosevelt Mansfield
Kayla Schiltgen is an interdisciplinary artist based in rural Two Harbors, Minnesota, blending dance, film, and improvisation to cope with and communicate her experience of time and place as a rural, neurodivergent person. Distinguished by her intimacy, honesty, and intentionality, she creates screendance, installation, and performance—often combining forms—that resonate outward, affirming both artist and audience. Her mostly solo practice is rooted in the Rural, where Kayla works across choreography, performance, cinematography, editing, and sound design with place as collaborator.
Kayla is an Upstream Artist Fellow, a recipient of multiple Minnesota State Arts Board and Arrowhead Regional Arts Council awards, and recognized as a creative rural leader in the Upper Midwest by Springboard for the Arts. Her work has been presented at the Walker Art Center; the International Meeting on Video-Dance and Video-Performance (Spain & France); North Dakota Environmental Rights Film Festival; InShadow Screendance Festival (Portugal); Duluth Superior Film Festival; DanceBARN Screendance Festival; Wolf Tree Film Festival (MI); Arena Dance’s CandyBox Festival; RAD Fest; The Lab at NorShor Theatre; and the Minnesota Fringe Festival, among others. She recently completed a seven-stop rural and Greater Minnesota tour of her work is this magic?.
www.kaylaschiltgen.com
Vie Boheme
2024 Choreography FELLOW
Photo by: Canaan Mattson
Vie Boheme is a Motown native, blossomed creatively in Pittsburgh and refined in Minneapolis. She’s a multimodal artist; a choreographer, a dancer, actress, and poet. Her work brings athletic agility to her vocal performance by singing and dancing in unison, eliminating the boundary between the visual and audio experience. She designs theatrical dance experiences that weave sentiment and storytelling through poetry and monologues
using dance as the site of embodiment for the story being told. As a choreographer, her
work's intentionality produces a pathway and an environment for viewers to connect to
their own visceral human experience.
Chitra Vairavan
2024 Choreography FELLOW
Photo by Canaan Mattson
Chitra Vairavan is a contemporary Indian dancer, choreographer and educator of South
Indian-American descent, with roots in Kandanur and Rayavaram. Vairavan is immersed in both Thamizh/Tamil culture and progressive brown politics in the U.S. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, spatial observation, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory.
She chooses to gesture towards and embody within the practice of liberation
and decolonization in creative and collaborative choices. The aesthetic of her movement is through
both yoga and contemporary Indian dance forms – mainly a mixture of training in Bharatanatyam,
Odissi and Yorchha™. For more please visit: www.chitravairavan.com or https://linktr.ee/vair0002.
Vairavan has been a proud part of the Mni Sota Makoce dance community for 20 years. Her dance work has been featured transnationally as a founding member and company dancer with Ananya Dance Theatre for 14 seasons, and her choreographic works have been featured in spaces such as The Cowles Center, the Walker Art Center, The Southern Theater, Intermedia Arts, Red Eye Theater, Pillsbury House Theatre and Patrick's Cabaret over the years. Vairavan has been the recipient of the 2016 McKnight Dancer Fellowship, 2018 Naked Stages Fellowship with Pillsbury House Theatre, and the 2020-2021 Springboard for the Artsʼ 20/20 Fellowship among other honors.
Pramila Vasudevan
2024 Choreography FELLOW
Photo by Canaan Mattson
Pramila Vasudevan is a movement-centered artist, cultural worker, and maker of
community-rooted/routed transdisciplinary work. Vasudevan is the founder and artistic
director of Aniccha Arts (est. 2004), an arts collaborative producing site-specific
performances that examine agency, voice, and group dynamics within community
histories, institutions, and systems. She is an artist associate of Pillsbury House Theatre.
She has been honored with a Joyce Award (2022), and also United States Artists (2022),
Guggenheim (2017) and McKnight Choreography Fellowship (2016). Vasudevan has been
invested in cultivating art spaces and artist growth as the director of Naked Stages
(2016–21), a fellowship program for early-career performance artists at Pillsbury House
Theatre, and as a teaching artist with Upstream Arts (2015–19), which activates and
amplifies the voice and choice of individuals with disabilities at every stage of life.
Her current practice involves gardening, hosting conversations and community
gatherings, and developing improvisational movement sessions inspired by growing
practices in gardens and greenhouses and by plant cycles in the urban park systems.
Her work engages with physical sites, ranging from human-constructed locations (like a
suburban parking ramp) to natural environments (such as along the Mississippi River).
In this process, she learns about the site’s history and current uses, the people that
have come and gone, the embedded politics, and the materials that physically make it
what it is. In responding artistically, Vasudevan orients from the body while layering in
other media (sound, drawings, sculptural elements, and so on) that illuminate a
multiplicity of perspectives.
Joe Chvala
2023 Choreography FELLOW
Joe Chvala has created over 30 original works for the stage that have toured from New York to Paris and from Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival to Litle Falls, MN. He is the founder and artistic director of the highly acclaimed percussive dance company, Flying Foot Forum. Articles and reviews of his work have appeared in national and international magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, La Monde, the Chicago Tribune, Dance Magazine, and the Village Voice. The range of his work has been described as "somewhere between Sammy Davis, Jr. and Samuel Becket" and has
earned such accolades as "Fred Astaire on acid" and "the Agnes DeMille of the tap."
Chvala has also choreographed, directed, and/or been commissioned to create new work for a variety of venues including the Walker Art Center, The Ordway Center, the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, The Guthrie Theater, the Minnesota Opera, Arkansas Repertory Theatre, The Children’s Theatre Company (to name a few). He has received Ivey and Minnesota SAGE Awards for theater and dance, as well as numerous other awards, fellowships, and grants from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, Target, and McKnight Foundation. Chvala also choreographs and directs dance for films. His first short film, COOKAPHONY, has been chosen as an official selection at 14 film festivals, winning four awards at various festivals including Paris Short Film Festival, Sedona International Film Festival, Vasteras International Film Festival (Sweden) and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Internatonal Film Festval.
Rita Mustaphi
2023 Choreography FELLOW
Rita Mustaphi is a choreographer, dancer, educator and disciple of the legendary master late Pandit Birju Maharaj in the Kathak style of Indian classical dance. She is known for her innovations in Kathak dance, her multi-disciplinary productions incorporating spoken word, live and commissioned music, and the utilization of production elements. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Katha Dance Theatre. Under her vision and leadership, the company has become renowned for its dynamic productions, distinctive movement style, and technical virtuosity. Her work, intelligently crafted storytelling, is recognized as being profoundly moving and effortlessly intimate.
Ms. Mustaphi is a recipient of a Leadership award from the Council of Asian Pacific Minnesotans, a Lifetime Achievement award from the India Association of Minnesota, and an Education award from the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in the category of Excellence in Vision. Most recently, she received the 2021 “Nari Shakti Award” from the Indian Government in New Delhi, India, given for her work in the cause of women empowerment.
With a career and a commitment to Kathak dance spanning 30+ years, over 500 performances, and 50+ original choreographic works, she still revels in the process of directing bodies in space, creating movement on her own body, and exploring what “moves” an audience to become engaged emotionally, intellectually and musically. Her works have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, The McKnight Foundation, three past McKnight Choreography Fellowships (‘88, ‘92, ‘98) the Jerome Foundation, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Target Foundation, and the 3M Foundation.
Deneane Richburg
2023 Choreography FELLOW
Photo by Canaan Mattson
Deneane Richburg (Choreographer, Dancer, former Competitive Figure Skater, Founder/Artistic Director of Brownbody) grew up a competitive figure skater—in spaces where she had to check her blackness at the door, as world skating was dominated by whiteness and rooted in values that subjugated her ancestry’s truths; to quote Zora Neale Hurston, she always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” Richburg realized the need to carve out space for her ancestral history hence her decision to establish Brownbody.
Since 2013 Brownbody has honored complex narratives of U.S.-based Black communities by disrupting assumptions, and disenfranchising ideologies, around blackness. She received her MFA in dance and choreography from Temple University in 2007, an MA in Afro-American Studies from UW Madison, and a BA in English and African American Studies from Carleton College. Richburg has been choreographing work for both the stage and ice since 2007 most recently completing an evening-length work called “Tracing Sacred Steps” which brings ring shout onto the ice. Deneane was a recipient of a 2017 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Leslie Parker
2022 CHOREOGRAPHY FELLOW
Photo by Canaan Mattson
Leslie Parker, a St. Paul, MN Rondo native, is a dance artist with art bases in Brooklyn, NY and in Twin Cities, MN. As a dance artist/maker, improviser, performer, director, collaborator, and educator, her work is awarded by National Dance Project (2021), National Performance Network Creation Fund (2020), National Performance Network Development fund (2021), National Performance Network community engagement fund (2021), and National Performance Network Storytelling & Documentation fund (2021).
She is an Outstanding Performance Bessie Award recipient and an inaugural Jerome Hill Foundation Artist Fellow. Growing up in the Rondo community rooted her in socially engaged art and led her to hold a BFA in Choreography and Modern dance technique from Esther Boyer College of Music & Dance (Temple University) and an MFA in dance from Hollins University in partnership with the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and The Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany.
Parker’s original works have been presented by New York Live Arts, HarlemStages EMoves13, Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center, Tribeca Performing Art Center, University of Minnesota Dance Program, Southern Theater, Pillsbury House Theatre, Pangea World Theater, Walker Art Center, and Painted Bride Arts Center. Parker co-directed the annual 44th (IHOB Puppet Theatre) MayDay Tree of Life Ceremony 2018. She was choreographer for Jimmy & Lorraine: A Musing by Talvin Wilkes and Collidescope 4.0 adventures in Pre and Post Racial America by Ping Chong and Talvin Wilkes; Penumbra Theatre’s 45th production of Black Nativity; and Parks, a portrait of a young artist.
For more information, go to: www.leslieparkerdance.com
Pedra Pepa
2022 CHOREOGRAPHY FELLOW
Photo by Canaan Mattson
Pedra Pepa is a Venezuelan-raised, Minneapolis-based queer dancer / performance maker. Founder/director of Viva la Pepa, their works are fueled by the overlapping values of Latinx and Queer cultures: melodrama, passion, decadence, and sensuality. An inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Pedra continues a transnational collaboration with Argentinian choreographer Celia Argüello, spending time in natural landscapes researching the nature of the encounter. Pedra developed their recent work Contained, Alive as a U of MN Cowles visiting artist, in the Berkshires (MA), with Red Eye Theater, and through Candybox festival. Their previous work, Holy Doña, re-imagines the crucifixion as a queer performance ritual; they performed a preliminary iteration of this work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Pedra continues research weaving latinx immigrant identities, queer (gender/sexuality/activism) histories across the Americas: across time/colonizations, and nature; manifesting materially in their most recent 331 residency at Rosy Simas Danse space and continues in Guna Yala, May 2022. Pedra co-directs a children and family theater program Drag Story Hour, and entertains the adults at night as their draglesque persona Doña Pepa. Pedra is currently a teaching artist with Upstream Arts and with the Pillsbury House Theatre.
Rosy Simas
2022 CHOREOGRAPHY FELLOW
Photo by Tim Rummelhoff
Rosy Simas is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation. She is a transdisciplinary and dance artist who creates work for stage and installation.
Simas’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. She creates dance work with a team of Native and BIQTPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening.
Simas’ dance works include Weave, Skin(s) and We Wait In The Darkness, which have toured throughout Turtle Island. Her installations have been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, All My Relations Arts, SOO Visual Art Center, and the Weisman Art Museum.
Simas is a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow, 2015 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow, 2016 McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow, 2019 Dance/USA Fellow, 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellow, 2017 Joyce Award recipient from The Joyce Foundation, 2021 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award recipient, and has received multiple awards from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and National Performance Network.
Simas’ yödoishëndahgwa'geh (a place to rest) a micro-short film, performance, and installation, has been shared with audiences in New York City, Minneapolis, Colorado Springs, Miami, Niagara Falls, and Buffalo.
Simas’ upcoming work, she who lives on the road to war, will premiere in September 2022 at All My Relations Arts and the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration in the Weisman Art Museum, both in Minneapolis, and will tour Turtle Island in 2023–2024.
Simas is the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and three thirty one space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis, MN.
Ananya Chatterjea
2021 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW
photo by Canaan Mattson
Ananya Chatterjea/ অনন্যা চট্টোপাধ্যায় ‘s work as choreographer, dancer, and thinker brings together Contemporary Dance, social justice choreography, and a commitment to healing justice. She is the creator of Ananya Dance Theatre’s signature movement vocabulary, Yorchhā, and is the primary architect of the company’s justice- and community-oriented choreographic methodology, Shawngrām. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, a 2012 and 2021 McKnight Choreography Fellow, a 2016 Joyce Award recipient, a 2018 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, and recipient of the 2021 A. P. Andersen Award.
Ananya Dance Theatre is a company of BIPOC cultural activists and women and femme dance artists who believe in the transformative power of dance. In dancing stories where their lives and dreams occupy the center, they shift the landscape of mainstream culture, build understanding about arts and social justice, and empower artistic voices.
Alanna Morris
2021 Choreographer FELLOW
photo by Canaan Mattson
Alanna Morris (formerly Morris-Van Tassel) is a Brooklyn-born Dancer-Choreographer, Educator, Artist Organizer, and Curator, who danced with TU Dance (St Paul, Minnesota) under artistic directors Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands from 2007-2017. She was featured in works by Kyle Abraham, Gioconda Barbuto, Camille A. Brown, Ronald K. Brown, Greggory Dolbashian, Katrin Hall, Francesca Harper, Dwight Rhoden, and Uri Sands. In 2020 they served as the company's Artistic Associate and is a founding Teaching Artist at The School at TU Dance Center.
Alanna is the Artistic Director of I A.M. Arts (formerly Alanna Morris-Van Tassel Productions), founded in 2017 as a fiscally-sponsored project of Springboard for the Arts to sustainably provide opportunities for the development and presentation of new dance works, international collaborations, educational and community-development initiatives. For more on community development programs go here.
In January 2023, Morris premieres Invisible Cities, a collaborative reimagining of Italo Calvino’s metaphysical novel, interweaving cultural perspectives with a dynamic group of dance artists—Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy (Bharatanatyam), Berit Ahlgren (Gaga), Alanna Morris (Modern), Joseph Tran (Breaking)—and visual artist, Kevork Mourad, who creates Invisible Cities’ interactive, immersive projections in real time. For in-person and livestream tickets go here.
Alanna is a proud graduate of The Juilliard School with academic honors and of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (NY). She is an Artistic Advisor to Springboard Danse Montréal and was recently co-curator of the Walker Art Center’s 50th Anniversary of Choreographer’s Evening alongside Judith Howard in November 2022.
Darrius Strong
2021 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOW
photo by Canaan Mattson
Darrius Strong is a Twin Cities-based choreographer, instructor, and dancer. As the founder and Artistic Director of STRONGmovement, he uses the universal language of dance while blending styles such as Hip hop, Ballet, Modern, and West African to tell stories related to society and humanity. His passion for the youth has led him to the position of hip hop director at Eleve Performing Arts Center where he focuses on teaching young dancers how to connect their identity to movement.
Strong’s creative work is supported by the Walker Art Center’s Choreographers Evening, Rhythmically Speaking, and The New Griots Festival. He was also featured on an American Standard Billboard advertisement in NYC Time Square in 2016. Strong has created works for Threads Dance Project, Flying Foot Forum, Alternative Motion Projects, TU Dance, and James Sewell Ballet.
Strong is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a 2021 McKnight Choreographer Fellow, and a recipient of the 2017 Momentum New Works Award.
HIJACK (Arwen Wilder and Kristin Van Loon)
2020 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOWS
photo by Jaime Carrera
HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. HIJACK is the confluence and clash of two independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses. Their dances embrace juxtaposition. Their dances house unlikely intimates and question “who is the enemy?
Over the last 26 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, 9 Herkimer), Japan, Russia, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation.
HIJACK has enjoyed long relationships with Bryant Lake Bowl Theater (where their 1996 Take Me To Cuba was the theater’s first ever dance concert), Zenon Dance School (where they have taught every Wednesday morning for 19 years), and Walker Art Center (which commissioned redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK). In 2014, Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”, edited and instigated by Lisa Nelson. Jealousy (HIJACK’s 2019 installation/performance collaboration with Ryan Fontaine and Heidi Eckwall) was selected as one of the “Best of 2019” shows by the Star Tribune.
Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy
2020 CHOREOGRAPHER FELLOWS
photo by Ed Bock
Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy are Artistic Directors of Ragamala Dance Company, founded by Ranee in 1992. Through their work, they explore the dynamic tension between the ancestral and the contemporary, highlighting the fluidity between the secular and the spiritual, the human and the natural. Their training in the South Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam under legendary dancer/choreographer Alarmél Valli, known as one of India’s greatest living masters, is the bedrock of their creative aesthetic.
Ranee and Aparna are recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships, Research Fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy) and Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), and Doris Duke Artist Fellowships, among others.
The New York Times writes “Ragamala shows how Indian forms can be some of the most transcendent experiences that dance has to offer.” Ranee and Aparna’s work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, American Dance Festival, the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Walker Art Center, among others; and has been presented widely, highlighted by the Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Cal Performances, and National Centre for Performing Arts (Mumbai, India).
Ranee serves on the National Council on the Arts, appointed by President Barack Obama. Among her awards are a 2012 United States Artists Fellowship, and a 2011 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. Aparna is a recipient of a 2016 Joyce Award, and a Bush Fellowship for Choreography, among others, and was selected one of Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch for 2010.