BILL T. JONES (Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) was the Associate Artist of the 2020 Holland Festival and recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; the 2013 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!; a 2007 Tony Award, 2007 Obie Award, and 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation CALLAWAY Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2007 USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; the 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography forThe Seven; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and the 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 2010, Mr. Jones was recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”

HAWA ALLAN is a lawyer and writer of cultural criticism, fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in the Baffler, Lapham’s Quarterly, Boston Globe, and Time Magazine, among other places. Her debut book Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship interweaves legal history and personal narrative. “Eloquently mixing history, autobiography, and philosophy,” writes Publishers Weekly of Insurrection, “this powerful account sheds new light on the Black experience in America.”

OZ FRANKEL is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. He is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Social Research: An International Quarterly. His fields of interest include US history, America abroad, knowledge and its transmission, radicalism and its culture, social history, comparative and transnational history, history of the state, memory and commemoration, and the history of the book. Prof. Frankel’s first book, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) explores the early roots of the modern informational state. His second book, Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973 (Stanford University Press, 2024), traces social, cultural, and political exchanges between the US and Israel at the turn of the 1970s. His current book project explores the role of history and historical imagination in contemporary American public life as the past has become fodder for political skirmishes over the meaning of national symbols, public memory, and historical pedagogy. The project is tentatively titled, “Thinking Historically with Donald J. Trump.”

JOANNA KOTZE is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, dancer, and educator who has been a distinctive force in New York’s dance community since 1998, Kotze creates highly physical dance performances through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process, presenting ways to look at effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement as well as the body’s relationship to sound, light, physical materials and space.

As the eighth RCA, Kotze has been developing her new evening-length piece, this is the beginning, this is the end, with additional support through creative residencies at The Pocantico Center, Jacob’s Pillow, and Loghaven. Her 2022 work ‘lectric Eye premiered at The Space at Irondale, was reprised in New York Live Arts’ 2023 Live Artery Festival, and toured to the American Dance Festival and UtahPresents. Her acclaimed outdoor performance BIG BEATS has been realized in multiple communities across the U.S., and her virtual project LONG DISTANCE DANCE DIALOGUES continues to connect choreographers globally through conversation and shared movement.

Her work is recognized for its deep physicality, collaborative spirit, and multi-disciplinary layers, often involving musicians, writers, visual artists , and designers. Kotze is the recipient of a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2025 NDP Finalist Grant Award, and a FY2026 New York State Council on the Arts Grant Award, all of which are contributing to the making of this is the beginning, this is the end. Previously, Kotze received the 2013 Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer. Her 2018 piece What will we be like when we get there premiered at New York Live Arts as part of the Live Feed creative residency program and earned a Bessie nomination for Outstanding Music Composition by composer Ryan Seaton.

Her choreography has also been commissioned and presented by leading institutions such as New York Live Arts, The Yard, Danspace Project, Baryshnikov Arts Center, the Wexner Center,and international platforms including, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and Wanås Konst Sculpture Park in Sweden. Her extensive residency history includes support from MANCC, LMCC, The Camargo Foundation, The Bogliasco Foundation, Marble House Project, and Baryshnikov Arts Center, among many others.

Kotze is also an active performer, currently dancing with Kimberly Bartosik/daela, Stacy Spence, and Annie-B Parson. She has performed with Wally Cardona (2000-2010, 2018), Donna Uchizono, Tendayi Kuumba, Kota Yamazaki, Netta Yerushalmy, and many others. As an educator, she has taught at Movement Research, The Ailey School, NYU, Gibney Dance, The New School, and the American Dance Festival, among many others. She is originally from South Africa and has a BA in Architecture from Miami University.