Makini is a choreographer, performer, and video artist, based between traditional lands of the Tutelo-Saponi speaking peoples and lands of the Lenape peoples, who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with siblings and cousins. He was introduced to “formal” dance training through Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique,  Umfundalai. Makini’s work continues to be influenced by various sources, including contemporary Africanist dance and performance, movement trainings with Irene Dowd around anatomy and proprioception, sociological research of and technical training in J-sette performance with Jermone Donte Beacham, and world-building ideations with Anderson Feliciano and Nefertiti Charlene Altán through the TERRESTRIAL projects. Through artistic work, Makini strives to engage in and further dialogues with Black queer folks, create lovingly agitating performance work that recognizes history as only one option for the contextualization of the present, and continue to encourage artists to understand themselves as part of a larger community of workers who are imagining pathways toward economic ecosystems that prioritize care, interdependence, and delight.

Nefertiti Charlene Altán is an afro-indígena, transdisciplinary performance artist, educator, producer, researcher, activist and language interpreter working towards embodied liberation through dance-based storytelling that centers Black and Indigenous memories, resistance, feminisms and futurist dreams. The daughter of Guatemalan migrants, she has collaborated with cultural workers from Africa, the Americas and Europe in more than 20 site-immersive experimental dance, theater, music and film works, presenting in Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Germany and the US. She has been based between San Francisco, California and Salvador, Bahia, Brazil since 2013, receiving a technical degree in dance from the Bahia State Cultural Foundation (FUNCEB) and co-founding the feminist production collective Deslimites Mediações Artísticas. She received her MFA in dance practice from Saint Mary’s College of California.

Anderson Feliciano is an Afro-Brazilian playwright, curator and performer from Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is the Coordinator of the Research Center on Black Performativities at Galpão Cine Horto in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He has curated works for the International Festival of Black and Mapuche Performing Arts Kurüche (Chile), and the National Platform for Black Arts (Brazil). He is the author of Pôr do Sol (2024) and Tropeço (2020), and co-authored O início, with Mário Rosa, (2022). He received the Leda Maria Martins Award for Prelúdio a Ismael Ivo (2023).

Saúl Ulerio is a Dominican-American theater artist. Ulerio has been seen in the works of Heather Kravas, ­RoseAnne Spradlin, Daria Fain, Kota Yamazaki, among others, and currently performs in the works of Antonio Ramos, Daria Faïn, and Ivy Baldwin. Ulerio was a 2011-2012 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist and a 2012-2014 Movement Research Artist in Residence.

Majesty Royale-Jackson is a Black Seminole performance maker and installationist working in dance, sound art, and digital media. Based in Durham, NC, they create interdisciplinary work that moves between theatre, galleries, and public space, engaging Black queer technologies that stretch from archival sources to traverse universes seen and unseen. Majesty has performed and presented work throughout the U.S. & Europe endeavoring to move toward practices that are in direct conversation with the communities and identities that they embody.

Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. He received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones is a 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2024 he was awarded the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching award from the American Dance Festival. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels, centering choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism, and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.

Cybel Emmanuel is a dual citizen of Nigeria and the United States and is currently a full-time student at Columbia University, where she studies psychology. Through her profession as a makeup artist, fashion stylist and her love for travel, she has worked with clients in three continents and visited more than 15 countries. Cybel enjoys shopping, listening to music, and walking around her favorite place, New York City, where she lives with her wife.

marco farroni leonardo is a Dominican artist working in dance, performance, oral history, and mix/media currently based in Seattle, WA. With a BFA in Dance from the University of the Arts, their work engages with themes and ideas around the home, the body as an archive, the diaspora, water, and memory, having presented work throughout Seattle. Marco is a member of Black Collectivity, and the second cohort of Wa Na Wari’s Seattle Black Spacial History Institute. Marco has had the honor to be in collaboration with nia love, dani tirrell, Nia-Amina Minor, makini, and Donald Byrd.

Germaine Ingram is a Philadelphia PA-based jazz percussive dancer, choreographer, song writer, vocal/dance improviser, oral historian, cultural strategist and archivist. She co-authored a chapter with Dr.Toni Shapiro-Phim for an international academic publication on the arts and human rights. She collaborated with musician/composer/curator Alex B. Shaw and filmmaker Aidan Un on a media installation for the 2023/2024 group exhibition Bahia Reverb, sponsored by the California African American Museum. She is part of an international cohort of improvisational vocalists and movers in Murmuration, a performance ensemble led by improvisational vocalist Rhiannon and Canadian dancer/choreographer Margie Gillis. Germaine’s work has been recognized with support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Leeway Foundation, Independence Foundation, Lomax Family and Wyncote Foundations, the Sacatar Institute in Itaparica Brazil, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and the Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Fellowship.

Brandon Kazen-Maddox is a Grandchild of Deaf Adults (GODA) and third-generation native signer of American Sign Language. Brandon is an ASL Artist, choreographer, director, dancer, actor, acrobat, and activist and has spent the last 13 years as a professional ASL interpreter. Brandon creates work with and for the Deaf and Disability communities, and highlights and empowers BIPOC and LGBTQAI+ artists, building bridges among people of all backgrounds and abilities. Brandon holds an MFA in Dance and New Technology from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is a co-founder of Up Until Now Collective, an arts and media company that focuses on developing and producing radically inclusive inter-disciplinary work. Brandon’s work has been profiled by The New York Times and The PBS NewsHour. 

Lou Pires (they/them) is a queer costume and footwear artist with a Master of Fine Arts in Costume Production from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Lou is from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, the vibrant heart of Afro-Brazilian culture, and has worked with costume and set designers on productions ranging from contemporary dance to pop music, often working with repurposed materials. In 2015, they launched their own non-binary footwear brand, Amarelo, where they researched, designed and built handmade footwear that challenge traditional gender norms. In the US, Lou has worked in three seasons at PlayMakers Repertory Company, two seasons at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and the Museum of Science Fiction (MOSF). In 2023, Lou joined the Department of Historical Costume and Dress in Colonial Williamsburg, VA. 

Melanie George is an educator, choreographer, scholar, and certified movement analyst specializing in rooted jazz dance and contemporary dance-theatre, currently touring as emcee/dramaturg/movement-explorer with LaTasha Barnes Presents The Jazz Continuum. She has worked with Urban Bush Women, Raja Feather Kelly, Hélené Simoneau, Alice Sheppard, Kimberly Bartosik, and SW!NG OUT. She is the Associate Curator and Scholar in Residence at Jacob’s Pillow, Assistant Professor in dance at Rutgers University, and has guest lectured at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, and The Juilliard School. As artist and scholar, Melanie has worked with NCCAkron, New York Public Library, National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Apollo Theater, The Joyce Theatre, and Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Named one of Dance Magazine’s 30 over 30, she is the recipient of the Outstanding Leadership Award from the National Dance Education Organization. 

angel shanel edwards is a blackqueerandtrans first-generation Jamaican and Philly-rooted artist. They utilize the creative modalities of movement, poetics, filmmaking, and photography to witness and re/member blackness as it moves through daily life, love, intimacy, and transitions [*gendered and otherwise]. Their debut experimental performance film, THIS IS FOR US, has screened at Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival and the Toronto Queer Film Festival. The Leeway Foundation, Small But Mighty Arts, Mural Arts Philly, Cannonball Festival, Queer Art’s Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant, and Jusdon Memorial Church’s Black Aesthetics have supported their creative/performance works. In 2021, Angel was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and is currently Artist in Residence at The Arts League. Angel recently received their MFA in Dance at the University of the Arts.