Lou Mandolini

Lou (Lindsey) Mandolini is nonbinary professional dancer, choreographer, and performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. They began their formal training in Chicago at the Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance and graduated from the University of the North Carolina School of the Arts High School Program. Mandolini went on to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where they graduated with high honors receiving a BFA in Dance and a minor in Art History. They have been a company member and dancer for New York-based choreographers Hee Ra Yoo (Yoo & Dancers), Regina Nejman (Regina Nejman & Company), and Erin Carlisle Norton (The Moving Architects). As a choreographer, they have presented their work at Symphony Space, Triskelion Arts, Dixon Place, and the Center for Performance Research; in addition to choreographing for music videos and live bands.

Mandolini was a member of the multidisciplinary LEIMAY Ensemble, artistic directors Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, performing in their 2015-2016 performance season including borders at BAM. They have performed in each annual LEIMAY Gala (HANASAKA, ALUNA SINTANA) KALAVINKA), Qualia-Transcendence at The Czech Center, and 2/4 LEIMAY Garden projects, commissioned by the New York Restoration Project. They performed as a guest artist with LEIMAY and managed their rehearsal space CAVE, in Williamsburg.

Testimonial – John Seaforth, SOAK 2012

I saw the performance of Butoh Master Ko Murobushi and his company and the work of Ben Spatz.

I am most impressed by the dedication and focus of the CAVE Art Space and its Directors.

CAVE provides an excellent environment for presenting performance art – as a savouring of beautiful experience.

This is how cultural experience should be.

– John Seaforth, English Theatre Director, 2012

Testimonial – Laura Cohen

I am consistently blown away by the creativity with which Ximena and Andrea approach and communicate movement. Classes are as mentally rigorous and inspiring as they are physically. I leave every week yearning to internalize more of LEIMAY LUDUS and to integrate its praxis with my life.

– Laura Cohen, 2024

Selma Trevino

“I will be re-visiting Etienne Decroux’s choreography “Washerwoman” and exploring ways to perform it according to my Brazilian heritage, investigating washerwomen culture from Brazil.”

Aya Hayashi

Aya will begin choreography for Okaeri Productions’ Godspell, which will run at the Main Street Theatre & Dance Alliance February 25-27, 2022.

Melani De Guzman

“I’ll be working on movement research, fine tuning acting monologues, and planning my experimental dance solo film.”

Shani Bekt

“I would structure the time to further flesh out and solidify pieces I’ve started choreographing and explore making new works. Ideally, I’d also like to film my work to use for artistic grant purposes.”

Kristel Baldoz

Drawing further into her research between movement and objects, Kristel will be improvising with a variety of materials that are connected to her historical past comprised of farmworkers and export laborers.

Article: “The Illumination of LEIMAY’s ‘Becoming-Corpus'”

“They offer a splendid merging/clashing of movement and light in patterns that approach and recede. Garnica and Moriya have been artistic and personal partners for 13 years. Their intimacy shows in the way that Garnica’s choreography is structured, framed, and permeated by Moriya’s lighting and Moriya’s light is populated and articulated by Garnica’s extraordinary choreography. The integration of movement and light makes Moriya’s changing visual design the eighth performer onstage.”

“The work is about the interplay of the spectators’ perception and imagination with these seven bodies gaining presence in the light and losing substance in the dark, not about tricks of illusion.”

“LEIMAY here is searching for beauty amidst the detritus of danced memory (in ways that are in concert with the turn butoh has taken in Japan).”

“The dancing was beautiful at the level of control, execution, and body language, and alternately horrific or sublime at the level of theme. It was simultaneously a dystopic universe, the end of the world, and “nothing more” than pure movement.”

“Becoming – Corpus is a model of the conjunction of visual art and physical dance theatre.”

–Carol Martin, Richard Schechner, TDR (2014)

Article: “Revolt of the body in stillness”

“Through the example of LEIMAY’s Becoming Series stillness is theorized as revolt. It is a performative act – a radical form of action confronting the viewer as a body with agency.”

“LEIMAY’s Becoming Series manifest political commitment established in its reflexive dynamics that empower subjects in their stillness.”

“…the audience is absorbed by and enveloped in the enduring, exquisite, and grotesque stillness – we witness the body trigger will, memory, history, anxiety, and responsibility. The audience is invited to “become” together…”

“Through the mixture of voices, sounds, light textures, and choreography of high physicality, “Borders” seeks to shrink the gap between space and time in order to expose the ambivalence in the way borders are created, perceived, traversed, and dismantled…”

…”one could easily drift into meditative states of sublime stillness suspended in time/space.”

“The dancers are abstracted beyond their social existence, bodies stretched out in ambiguity, defying definitions; they perform both the power of their transformation and the power to let the body transform, where the body seems to disappear to reveal the space itself. Becomings achieves this aesthetically critical potential in the moments that propel the audience to confront our own attentive and affective limits. Stillness in LEIMAY’s Becomings allows critical and creative capacity for ethical encounters that emerge across space and time.”

“The aesthetic form and the power of Becomings creates conditions to sense, connect, pause, decelerate.”

“Garnica and Moriya demonstrate their ceaseless commitment to generating spaces where their dancers/choreographers and their audience are free to explore alternative ways of being and relating in the world. LEIMAY dancers’ physicality seems effortless; they perform deeply felt space of undisciplined movements and intense gestures to awaken us to what lurks beneath; we all tumble together in a limitless fall into the depths of our subconscious/universe.”

“Becomings offers the language of the human body, the movements and forms in all of their exquisite density.”

“Profound and absorbing through the intensity of their specter…”

“Becomings, thus, offers a critical choreographed space for the willful quietness and slowness to stress the importance of bending bodies and histories; to reinforce the importance of politicizing and archiving the history of the bodies that resist, bodies that slowdown, complicate, decrease production, increase revolt.”

–Nadia Zukic, Text and Performance Quarterly (2022)

Abstract: “More-than-human Movements: Trans-corporeal Choreographies of the Anthropocene”

“…Correspondences’ more-than-human choreographies exposes the trans-corporeal exchanges that both structure and biologically alter the performers.”
“Correspondences as a case study to argue that if we are to persist through the ‘horrors of the Anthropocence,’ we must not only stay with the trouble, but move through the trouble.”

–Angenette Spalink, Performing SLSA: A Roundtable on Performance Studies and the Field’s Dispersions (2024)

Book Chapter: “Gen X Butoh: LEIMAY Ensemble: Shige Moriya and Ximena Garnica”

“The work of this artistic duo has been vital to the contemporary development of butoh in New York…They have played a pivotal role as curators and community builders, and now as artists who are forging their own path, inspired by those they have encountered along the way.”

“The New York Butoh Festival galvanized a new hub for butoh in the United States…With the 2003 New York Butoh Festival, New York was once again established as a beacon for butoh.”

-Tanya Calamoneri, Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies (2024)

Book Chapter: “LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival”

“CAVE fluctuates between being our home, our studio, the LEIMAY Ensemble studio, and a space for other artists; the private interweaves with the public, the personal with the social, and sometimes all of those spaces exist simultaneously. For some people, CAVE was a gallery, for others a center of butoh, for others the studio of the LEIMAY Ensemble, and for others an artist’s loft where they slept while staying or living in New York. From the beginning, CAVE has been a vortex defying categories. Live arts such as performance art, dance, experimental sound, and music were intermingled with photography, painting, sculpture, and installation. CAVE is constantly re-shaping in response to internal and external dynamics.”

-Ximena Garnica, The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018)

Review: “Floating Point Waves: Leimay at HERE, NYC”

“Leimay…created an immersive world of captivating videos, simple set pieces that produced bizarre visual effects, and evocative music”

“Floating Point Waves worked as an exploration of the intersection of human and electronic images with organic and electronic sounds, and the creativity that can come from inventive interactions with the simplest design elements.”

-Amanda Keil, backtrack (2012)

Review: “Choose Your Own Rhythm”

“The most notable exception to the problem of dance divorced from its environment was a kinetic installation by Leimay (a company directed by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya) in the grand Beaux-Arts Court. Four towering, delicate tents of iridescent white string, suspended from the high ceiling, each housed one statuesque, slow-moving dancer in white. A line reached from each performer’s back to the peak of his or her tent, so that any sudden motion — frog-like jumps, abrupt collapsing — caused the structure to pulsate or quake: the body an extension of its habitat, and vice versa.”

-Siobhan Burke, The New York Times (2014)

Review: “Crossing Over: A Performance Adventure in Green-Wood Cemetery”

“Continuing, we soon encounter a ghostly body hanging from a tree in a net. Further along, we see a line of white clad figures standing above a row of crypts set in the hillside. Looking up, we observe them standing upright, facing us, then falling back, then standing up, then falling back, over and over, to beautiful and disturbing electronic music backing opera singing. It’s a subtle reminder that we’re all going the way of the people buried here.”

-Franklin Mount, Sensitive Skin (2014)

Review: “Impressions of The BEAT Festival’s ‘Crossing Over'”

“Everyone snaps to attention; Thresholds created by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya of LEIMAY, reminds us that the pall of death hangs over this place. A few paces later, we congregate in a circular pit as an opera singer intones an eerie, dire melody. Spotlights flash on, five of them, illuminating men and women standing on mausoleums. They are like paper doll cutouts, arms pasted to their sides, expressions stony. One pitches backwards, and then another and another as the lights blink off and on. Under the cover of darkness, these dancers scramble into standing positions to repeat their death dives. Chaotic flops replace these board-like falls before the lights turn off for good. Dying, whether a straightforward plunge or a violent tumble, ends the same — in darkness.”

-Erin Bomboy, The Dance Enthusiast (2014)

Review: “A Burial Ground Doubling as a Stage”

“And occasionally, around one bend or another, a poignant surprise awaited, foreshadowed by a distant noise or beckoning pool of light. In the first 15 minutes of the almost two-hour tour, after we had stopped at a mass grave of victims from the 1876 Brooklyn Theater fire, a shrill voice sounded, directing our attention to six bodies perched on a row of mausoleums, each lit from below. In seemingly random order, they began to fall backward and stand back up, to disappear and reappear, thanks to the simple but effective lighting. This was “Thresholds” by Leimay (directed by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya), and its efficient minimalism — including a rumbling soundscape by Jeremy D. Slater, engulfing Rachel Love’s operatic tones — made for the night’s most evocative spectacle.”

-Siobhan Burke, The New York Times (2014)

Review: “Leimay’s ‘Becoming-Corpus’ at BAM Fisher”

“A flash of light on a darkened stage reveals a group of almost-naked people standing stock still, in silence. Then wiry lines of light slice through the darkness: one, another; soon a bunch of bright ribbons of light illuminate various slices of seven dancers. Are the dancers moving, and even growing and shrinking before our eyes? No, this is only an illusion produced by Shige Moriya’s deft hand with the projector. “

-Henry Baumgartner, New York Theatre Wire (2013)

Review: “a three-hour tour: when ya gotta go…”

“At its heart, A Meal builds community around the act of eating; at the conclusion, you may find yourself hugging people who are no longer strangers and exchanging phone numbers. It’s not a passive experience; to get the most out of it, you need to become a participant, just like life itself.”

–Mark Rifkin, (2024) for A Meal

Beau Bree Rhee

I’m interested in exploring portraiture of close friends & family, within the context of landscape & environment.

Maxi Canion

originally from El Paso, TX, is a versatile artist immersed in durational performance, movement, and improvisation. Collaboration is integral to their work as they manifest sensory experiences, guiding viewers to where hyper-surreal and ordinary converge. Their work investigates themes of identity, failure, and intimacy.

Sasha Vega

I’m an artist who uses movement, poetics, and humor to invite focus into the ideologies that train bodies how to move. Creating across time-based media, performance, and writing, my practice encourages critical play in reframing genres of embodied instruction. My own body is imprinted by: American dance theater, Filipino karaoke parties, a Bolshoi ballerina, immigrant parents, suburban aspirations, Post-Modern chance forms, and slapstick comedy. Working in concert with performers and audiences alike, I’m invested in devising experimental spaces to test beliefs of authority, horizontal organization, and temporary utopias.

Maggie Joy

is a freelance dancer living in New York. A Dallas TX native, Maggie is an honors graduate of Booker T Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. She graduated summa cum laude with a BFA in Dance from NYU Tisch, and also studied internationally at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. Maggie is currently performing with Dual Rivet and cullen+them. Other recent credits include Kayla Farrish Decent Structures Arts showing at Triskelion Arts, Helen Simoneau Danse’s The Delicate Power Project Research Lab, participation as a dancer in Jacob’s Pillow, Ann and Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow Program, and participation in the inaugural cohort of the GLUE x TRISK program.

Kayla Yee

I will vacillate between free-form movement exploration and structured sequence building for the sake of environmental art-ivism.

What does incubation mean to you?
Pressurized containment for the sake of creativity.

Gabriella Carmichael

I will be working to reinvigorate my practice and hopefully develop more consistency and uninhibited creativity.

What does incubation mean to you?
Incubation to me is the time prior to insight. It’s getting ready, it’s patience.

Maya Balam Meyong

Alongside my fellow artists, I seize LEMAY residency opportunity to start crafting an immersive and multi-faceted performance on the theme of environment.

What does incubation mean to you?
Dedicated time for exploration, craft and growth.

Nicole von Arx

This Fall I will be developing new dance and theatrical material for a work premiering at Triskelion Arts April 2023.

What does incubation mean to you?
The beginning of something that keeps evolving and growing.

Hollis Bartlett & Nattie Trogdon

Through choreographed films and live performances, we’re working to challenge the status-quo and create unconventional and radically vulnerable work which helps us make sense of our changing world and reimagine how dance exists in our spaces and in our bodies.

What does incubation mean to you?
“an environment that allows an idea to develop, mature and reach its full potential.”

Ankita Sharma

I will be working on a new piece that situates nationalism and ensuing warfare on brown bodies within myth

What does incubation mean to you?

Loving on your ideas with inspiration, space, and time.

Review: “Correspondences”

“It’s like going to an art gallery, but more immediate…I am moved by what looks like gas masks that the performers are wearing; what might be whimsical seems darker. The human body contains more than light or heat or air.”

-Marcina Zaccaria, Theater Pizzazz (2020) for Correspondences

Review: “What Is Beauty?”

“With its decidedly non-narrative engagement with its theme and high degree of experimentalist abstraction, Beauty will most directly appeal to aficionados of avant-garde dance or movement theater.“

– Leah Richards & John Ziegler, Culture Catch (2017) for Frantic Beauty

Review: “The Primordial Becoming of Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya’s Frantic Beauty

“Frantic Beauty is both alarming and compelling in the performers’ ability to bring opposing energies seamlessly together into one performance— they propel themselves in a continuous state of manic, almost violent energy, and then suddenly slow to a calm and pensive state. In one section, the dancers are crouched and motionless like Dali sculptures, with scattered moving black flecks of video projection traveling over their bare bodies like a massive crowd of ants. At either end of the energy spectrum, whether high or low, the sustained intensity of Frantic Beauty ushers the audience into a trancelike meditative state, leaving the audience with the strange experience of having witnessed something reminiscent of both birth and death, becoming and un-becoming.”

– Marlynn Wei, HuffPost (2017) for Frantic Beauty

University of California, Riverside

LEIMAY presented Frantic Beauty in Winter 2019 as part of a three-week residency with the UCR Dance Department, leading master classes and transmitting excerpts from Ensemble repertory pieces to UCR dance students.

Ximena Garnica was a Visiting Assistant Professor for Fall 2018-Winter 2019.

MIT

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya participated in the 2021-2022 MIT Performing Series, exhibiting a performance installation of Correspondences:

During the fall 2021 semester, MIT Lecturer Daniel Safer collaborated with LEIMAY to develop a new layer of the work via a constellation of lectures and performances by MIT faculty, students, and groups, culminating in a future large-scale presentation.

The residency included a durational multi-channel video installation and models of kinetic sculptures, an evening of screenings of short films from Correspondence’s first phase and a live performance of in-progress choreographic materials related to the company’s LUDUS practice, followed by a conversation with the artists, as well as public contributions to Correspondence’s interactive archive.

Sarah Lawrence College

Ximena Garnica created a Performance Project with Sarah Lawrence College students, based on Becoming-Corpus. Ximena also taught the class Butoh Through LEIMAY Ludus at the undergraduate and graduate levels of the Dance Department in Spring 2024.

Mamiko Nakatsugawa

In this program, I am hoping to accomplish two things – one is to keep working on my latest work, While is Motion, and other is to create brand new work.

What does incubation mean to you?

Process that is full of discovery, learning, challenges, playfulness, joy, and connection with myself and the community.

Ari LaMora

My work is centered around the many varied layers we encounter in our lives, specifically the layers of gender and societal roles, and where I, as a non-binary gender non-conforming human, fit in. Breaking these layers down to get to the origin, I then use that origin to find different pathways that are separate from the “norm.”
Incubation to me is the period between exposure (to an idea) and the result from that exposure (creating, working, processing, thinking).

Niki Farahani

I will be doing a deep dive into a past solo with the hopes of a newer emergence. I will be conducting new research within disciplines in conjunction to movement. Additionally, I will be calling on Annie Heath for assistance, consultation, and collaboration.

What does incubation mean to you?
Presently, incubation means entering into an environment in which the conditions are geared towards my fundamental and intellectual development. Through certain fixed conditions, I believe avenues of experimental play and learning can appear more readily. It feels like sustained support with non linear possibilities.

Andrea Soto

Andrea Soto, raised in Juarez, is a first generation Mexican American movement artist and collaborator whose craft lives in performance and data-gathering. Her last public piece, Multitude (1-2) was presented at MAK Center for Art and Architecture for the opening of VALIE EXPORT: EMBODIED in Los Angeles. Andrea holds the body as our temple of pleasure and truth system; she creates poetic ecosystems rooted in non-hierarchical ways of making and being. A graduate from California Institute of the Arts, she is the recipient of the 2024 Barbara Ensley Award on behalf of the Merce Cunningham Trust, and the 2023 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Notable collaborations include projects with mentors such as Rosie Herrera, Julie Tolentino, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, Rosanna Tavarez, and Sam Wentz. Her performances span national and international platforms, and she continues to work as a dancer, performer, and movement director across Los Angeles, New York and London.

Chaery Moon

Chaery Moon embarked on her dance journey with the Korean National Ballet and the Korea National Institute for the Gifted in Arts, earning early recognition by winning the Tanzolymp in Berlin. She obtained her BFA at The Juilliard School and later joined the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon in France, where she expanded her repertoire across diverse dance forms and cultures.

Upon returning to the U.S., Moon pursued an MFA in Dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since then, she has been creating works that merge physical movement with the intricacies of human experience through collaborative processes with artists from various genres. She is a certified Cunningham Technique® instructor and actively participates in projects affiliated with the Merce Cunningham Trust, transcending Merce’s legacy.

In 2017, Moon founded Chaery Moon Dance (CMD), where she creates works for stage, film, and site-specific performances. Her creations have garnered recognition and support from NYFA, the Korean government, the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Downtown Brooklyn, and the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation. Her leadership in collaborative projects has been featured in The New York Times, Baryshnikov Arts, Schön! Magazine and Vogue Hong Kong. Moon’s writing has also been published in Dance and People and Dance magazines in South Korea. (www.chaerymoon.com)

Nikki Theroux

Nikki Theroux is a dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA in Dance Performance from Marymount Manhattan College and has additionally studied with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company’s International Dance Program under the direction of Danielle Ohn, and Big Bang with Stéphanie Decourteille in Montreal. Nikki has performed and presented work in venues including the Park Avenue Armory, the Joyce Theater, Westbeth, and Bryant Park. Currently, Nikki is working with More Fish Dance Company under the direction of Doron Perk. She is also a co-founder of Wildflower Collective, alongside her longtime collaborator, Dale Ratcliff. The two are developing their newest duet, “Return,” and have been supported by Moulin/Belle in France to expand the work in 2025. Nikki is very excited to be a part of the LEIMAY INCUBATOR Program and to dive into a patient creative process.

Sebastian Arredondo

Sebastian Arredondo, frequently known as Sea, is a multi-hyphenate movement artist from Southern California. Recently relocating to New York City, they are exploring the relationship between movement cultivation and music production, examining how these two processes intertwine. Drawing from a blend of contemporary modern technique and hip-hop styles, such as waving, they aim to challenge themselves by discovering new ways to create movement and immersive audience experiences that are sensory expansive. Now embarking on their journey into music production, Sea hopes to find ways to align their choreography with the original music and sounds they create themselves.

Julia Lawton

Julia Lawton is a New York-based dancer and choreographer, and the Artistic Director of Lawton Dance Collective. She graduated from Adelphi University in spring of 2024 with her BFA in dance, as well as a minor in Art and Design Education and as a member of the Honors College. Throughout college, she performed works by numerous choreographers, including Paul Taylor, Orion Duckstein, and Frank Augustyn. Julia currently dances in the professional division at The Taylor School and works as The Taylor School Associate and as a Community Director at Arts On Site.

Julia has presented her work at numerous venues, including Arts On Site, The Workroom Theater – Northampton, The Emelin Theatre, The Tank, Balance Arts Center, American College Dance Association Northeast Conference, and Mashup Dance International Women’s Day Dance Festival.

Lindy Fines

Lindy Fines is choreographer and artistic director of GREYZONE, an NYC-based collaborative dance project that she co-founded with creative director Justin Fines. Melding deconstructed ballet and modern dance vocabularies, visual arts, and time-based media, GREYZONE’s works for film and stage uncover non-narrative theatricality and highlight the rituals embedded in dance training and performance. Lindy received a 2024 Support for Artists award from New York State Council on the Arts. GREYZONE is a NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography through New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been supported by Harkness Foundation for Dance, New Music USA and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

GREYZONE has been presented by 92NY, Pioneers Go East Collective’s Out-FRONT! Fest (film series) and their Crossroads series at The 14th St Y Theater, Performance Mix Festival at Abrons Arts Center, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Brooklyn Ballet, The Space at Irondale (FLICfest), Nevada Museum of Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Oklahoma International Dance Festival, where GREYZONE was the inaugural artist-in-residence. Recently, Lindy has taught workshops and classes at Mark Morris Dance Center and Gibney Dance Center.

The Bogliasco Foundation

The Bogliasco Foundation was founded in 1991 to honor the legacy of the Biaggi family’s commitment to the arts and humanities. It provides a unique residency program for artists and scholars, offering an inspiring environment on the Italian Riviera. The Foundation fosters creativity and global collaboration, with a focus on interdisciplinary exchange. Since its opening in 1996, it has become one of the most esteemed residency programs worldwide, supporting exceptional artists from various fields.

Alexis Sánchez

Joven actor afro colombiano del valle del Cauca, con más de 6 años de experiencia en el medio artístico, con un trabajo que busca abordar e integrar las manifestaciones artísticas afro en el campo artístico y cultural. Maestro de Artes Escénicas de la Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá (ASAB). A nivel teatral a participado en diferentes obras como: LAS AVENTURAS DE PINOCHO ANTE LA COMISION DE LA VERDAD, obra que fue ganadora de la beca de creación (2023), ademas de ser partícipe de FIAV (2024). LA PARADOJA DE LA MARIPOSA, ganadora de jóvenes por el cambio (2024). EL CHAMPION, ganadora de Escena Joven (2022). Entre otras obras. En el medio audiovisual ha participado en producciones como: Enfermeras, Café con aroma de mujer, Nosotros los Caídos y María la Caprichosa.

Diana Jiménez

Maestra en arte danzario con énfasis en danza contemporánea de la universidad Francisco José de Caldas, tesis honorífica por el proyecto de investigación- creación “Pulso – creación interdisciplinar” obra financiada por la beca de investigación e innovación científica del centro de investigación científica (CIDC) de la universidad Distrital, interprete del colectivo de danza TerSer cuerpo en las obras “Arengas para un mismo techo” y “Materia prima”, Bailarina creadora de la compañía Siempre viva teatro con la obra “Solo cuando tengas frio”.

Celeste Betancur Gutiérrez

Celeste Betancur es una músico, artista digital e investigadora de Medellín. Además de sus logros musicales, ha desarrollado herramientas de software y hardware innovadoras para proyectos artísticos a nivel mundial. Diseña y construye instrumentos musicales expandidos, instalaciones a gran escala y esculturas. Como compositora, ha creado obras para ensambles y músicos internacionalmente aclamados y como solista, amplía los límites de la interpretación, fusionando herramientas de alta tecnología con configuraciones minimalistas que permanecen casi invisibles para el público. Sus presentaciones han abarcado prestigiosos escenarios a nivel mundial, incluyendo Islandia, Francia, México, EE.UU., Canadá, Colombia y Perú, completando cuatro giras mundiales en más de 20 países.

Centro Nacional de las Artes Delia Zapata Olivella

El Centro Nacional de las Artes es la infraestructura cultural más importante construida por el Ministerio de Cultura en los últimos años. Está situado a dos cuadras de la Plaza de Bolívar, en el corazón de Bogotá, cuyo Centro Histórico es Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación.

En marzo de 2023, abre sus puertas al público y a los artistas con una programación artística y de mediación que lo fundará no solo como uno de los principales escenarios culturales de Latinoamérica, sino como un punto de encuentro abierto, de creación y de diálogo con los territorios y el mundo.

Benja Thompson

A practicing queer archivist, Benja Thompson interweaves historical truths with radical imagination. With a background in filmmaking and audiovisual production, they bring a creative pragmatism to each project. Their filmwork has screened in San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, and New York, and they’ve trained in analog film preservation at Canyon Cinema and Other Cinema. With the Mill Valley Public Library, they established Marin County’s first queer archive, consisting of ephemera, photographs, digitized video, and oral histories. Initially introduced to LEIMAY as the 2024 Dance/USA Archive Fellow, they will be supporting the technical production of A Meal and continue growing the LEIMAY archive project

Shira Kagan-Shafman

Shira Kagan-Shafman is a New York based dancer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist. She has performed in works throughout theaters and museums in New York including, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Poster House museum, Arts on Site, Spring for Spring Dance Festival, Triskelion Arts and Green Space. She was a recipient of the 2023 B. Wilson Foundation grant for which she produced, choreographed and performed in a production at Baryshnikov Arts Center in the John Cage and Merce Cunningham studio and was a 2023 artist-in-residence at Mother’s Milk.

Kagan-Shafman has had the pleasure of performing in works by Joanna Kotze, Mariana Valencia, Peggy Florin, Caitlin Corbett, Kelley Donovan, Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, Dean Moss, Rebecca Stenn, jess pretty and the Aston Magna Music Festival. In 2021, she participated in Arts on Site Residency in process for her work, To Breathe Over Seas, which premiered in December 2021. She received her BA in Dance from the New School and spent a semester studying in Israel through DanceJerusalem. There she trained in Gaga and danced in Ohad Naharin repertory, including sections of Sadeh 21, Mamootot, Hora and Last Work along with performing in new works by Roni Chadash and Noa Zuk.

Her work often involves multidisciplinary collaborations including partnering with visual artists and sound artists. With longtime collaborator and violinist, Leandria Lott, her piece, Anchor in Continuum, premiered at Poster House museum and has been restaged at Triskelion Arts and Green Space.

Sofia Engelman & Em Papineau

Sofia Engelman & Em Papineau are life partners and choreographic collaborators living in Lenapehoking // Brooklyn, NY. ​Sofia + Em’s first collaborative project was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts while they were students at Smith College. Since then, they have held choreographic residencies at The Croft, Mana Contemporary, The Living Room, Ponderosa, The Dance Complex, MOtiVE Brooklyn, Sky Hill Farm Studio, The Floor on Atlantic, College of the Atlantic, and School for Contemporary Dance & Thought. In addition to presenting their work at these residency spaces, the pair have performed at festivals including FRESH Festival, EstroGenius Festival, AS220’s Providence Movement Festival, Queer Spectra, Post/Future Performance Festival, and Dancing Queerly Boston, as well as other spaces they love dearly such as Judson Church, Green Street Studios, BAAD!, Triskelion Arts, and freeskewl. Their work has been supported by NEFA, NYFA, FCA, and Northampton Arts Council and their individual performance credits include projects by Kathleen Hermesdorf, Tyler Rai, Michael Figueroa, David Appel, Christina-Noel Reeves, Claudia-Lynn Rightmire, Simon Thomas-Train, Angie Hauser, and Alice Gosti. They founded and directed freeskewl, a platform for dance, discussion, education, and reparations during the COVID pandemic.

Maho Ogawa

Maho Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NYC. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated body movements, and she has built a database, “Minimum Movement Catalog” (https://minimum-movement-demo.web.app/movements). Maho Ogawa uses body, video, text, computer programming, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously.

Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture and cinema. She’s working on public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about “silence,” providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. The aim is to empower the erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as an archive and audience-participating event, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways.

Maho’s works have been shown in Asia and in the U.S.A., including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Emily Harvey Foundation, to name a few. Ogawa received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and creation support at LMCC, Culture Push, Emily Harvey Foundation, LEIMAY, and New Dance Alliance. She is a 2023 Associated Artist at the Culture Push.

Stephanie Acosta

Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist, director, experimental archivist and organizer who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of their practice. Blending performance with practice-based and studio research and engaging ensembles in facilitated processes, they create fleeting performance works that examine perception in shared experiences. Acosta has presented her works with and for Museum of Art and Design, MCA Chicago, Chocolate Factory Theatre, Knockdown Center, the Current Sessions, Miami Performance International Festival, IN>Time Symposium, Abrons Arts Center, and the Performance Philosophy conference.

As dramaturg Acosta has collaborated with artist Miguel Gutierrez, on multiple projects including Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us) Ballet de Lorraine, France, This Bridge Called My Ass in 2019 for American Realness, and Super Nothing premiering at NYLA Jan 2025. Recent choreographer collaborations include Jessie Young, Kayla Hamilton, Leslie Cuyjet and Amber Sloane.

The curatorial performance experiment Sunday Service ran for 6 seasons co-created by Alexis Wilkinson at Knockdown Center. Later reuniting with Wilkinson as curator for Good Day God Damn at the Chocolate Factory Theatre, a solo exhibition, with accompanying talk show Apocalypse Talks, speaking on themes of multi-crisis making and radical hope found in art practices. Delving further into lost histories Acosta joined as lead archivist for the AUNTS Archive and the Jo Andres Archive for which they have curated exhibitions of the artists catalogue alongside Laurie Berg.

Currently, Acosta is developing multiple performance works including a techno-opera with artist Alexa Grae, Tone Pillar, which combines mystical nightlife, surrealist staging and multi media production with live operatic scores alongside an series of studio works, videos and plays, Lichen Baby…It’s Me Moss, entangles dual research threads looking at lichen’s symbiosis and moss’s natural structure to find poetics of being.

Ash Rucker

Ash Rucker received a bachelor’s in Fashion Merchandising from Buffalo State University and the Fashion Institute of Technology. After graduating, Ash moved to New York and interned for Betsy Johnson, W magazine, and designer Mara Hoffman after shortly settling at Loreal. Since then Ash has shifted careers and is the founder of a non-profit organization Therapart. Working with youth has been impacted by the criminal justice system. Ash has recently completed a fellowship at the New School and Columbia University with her work centered around healing through modalities such as somatic-based movement, meditation, and art therapy practices. Aside from working with the youth, Ash holds somatic-based movement classes in NYC, LA, Mexico, and Europe which has led her down a path of intuitive-based movement direction. Ash uses her deep study of movement to develop her unique intuitive-led movement direction and facilitator. Ash has worked with brands such as Loewe, Rag & Bone, and photographer Ryan McGinley and recently performed at the New Museum. Ash is known to many as an energetic architect of the mind, body, and soul.

Dayeon Jeong

A Korean American artist and fashion design graduate, centers her practice on auto-ethnographic textile design. Garments become sculptures and are activated as performance through intuitive, embodied processes. As an associate costume fabricator and co-designer, she continues to explore the relationality of postcolonial and deeply cultural and entangled material histories. As objects and as narratives, the costumes in A Meal reflect and entangle Japanese and Colombian roots, evoking acutely local yet globally resonant cycles of food consumption.

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