Collaborators
Cristian Amigo
Cristian Amigo (Composer) is a Latinx sound/music/noise artist and designer for theater, immersive environments, live performance, movement, chamber ensembles, free jazz/blues/new music/ bands, opera, installation, and film. His awards include a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (music composition), a 2016-2019 Senior Fulbright Scholar/Artist Fellowship (Bolivia), and the Van Lier Fellowship from Meet the Composer. He earned a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from UCLA and has studied with masters from various world music traditions. The New Grove Dictionary of Music (Oxford Press) contains an entry on Amigo and his music. He is currently Sound Faculty in the Experience Design and Production program in the CalArts School of Theater, and an artist-in-residence at INTAR Latino Theater in New York City. Amigo has collaborated with hundreds of diverse theater, music, dance, poets, film, and performance artists.
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Image Description: Picture of Cristian Amigo outside in Liberty State Park with safari, hat, bandana, and art school glasses.
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Photo by Daisy Amigo.
Joro-Boro
Joro-Boro (Composer) established himself as a DJ with his seven-year residency alongside Eugene Hütz (Gogol Bordello) at the Bulgarian Bar (Mehanata) in New York City where he pioneered the Balkan music and Balkan Beat scene in the United States. He then moved on to become an early promoter of Global Bass and released remixes on various domestic and international labels. He has toured with Balkan Beat Box and Filastine and has performed with artists ranging from ?uestlove to Omar Souleyman and Tinariwen. Joro-Boro is currently exploring the intersection of various musical traditions with ASMR triggers and the deep side of bass music - a genre he calls Earth Bass. He is one-half of b e i n g ( ( : ) ) s o u n d - a ritual bass project that merges acoustic instruments with whispers, chanting, samples, and electronic sub-bass. He is part of Collective BAE.
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Image Description: Joro-Boro, a white male in his early 40s with short hair and a short beard, is seen onstage from below, dressed in black against a black background with a large glowing flowery red circle projected on a curtain behind. He is wearing headphones on his head and his face is lit from the DJ decks below. In the bottom left corner, a part of his white laptop juts out from the darkness.
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Photo © Sirin Samman.
Rebecca Bratspies
Rebecca Bratspies (Consultant) is a Professor at CUNY School of Law. A scholar of environmental justice, and human rights, Professor Bratspies has written scores of law review articles, op-eds, four books, including Environmental Justice: Law Policy and Regulation, and three environmental justice comic books Mayah’s Lot, Bina’s Plant , and Troop’s Run (w/ Charlie LaGreca). She serves on NYC’s Environmental Justice Advisory Board, and EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, is a scholar with the Center for Progressive Reform and a member of the NYC Bar Environmental Committee. ABA-SEER honored her work with its Commitment to Diversity and Justice Award.
Image Description: A woman standing in the subway wearing a mask that says vote.
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Photo by Rebecca Bratspies.
Dani Cole
Dani Cole (Dancer, Administrative and Accessibility Coordinator) is a movement artist, writer, and creative arts therapist in training based on stolen Canarsie-Lenape land. She currently works as a collaborator with jill sigman/thinkdance and ECHOensemble. Writing from Dani can be found in Eva Yaa Asantewaa's Imagining: A Gibney Journal. As a disabled and chronically ill mental health worker and artist, Dani believes centering the experiences and leadership of the most impacted is integral to current and future transformation in arts and health fields. She is on the community board of Hyp-ACCESS and is a part of various disabled gatherings in the NYC movement & therapy community. Dani is currently not making choreographies due to the pandemic and changes in how she interacts with the dance field. Instead, she is focusing on mutual aid projects, learning how to support plants beyond watering them, and releasing a book of short essays and poetry in 2022. In addition, Dani loves teaching — embodied writing workshops, movement for disabled and non-disabled humans, and is on guest faculty at various schools. In the past, Dani’s solo and group interdisciplinary works have been shared through the 92Y, TADA! Theater, Mana Contemporary, Actor’s Fund Arts Center, Bridge for Dance, Access Theatre, and the Emelin Theatre. Dani was part of the 92Y's Dance Up! next generation of young choreographers. In 2020, she was the commissioned choreographer at The Steffi Nossen School of Dance. In 2018/2019, she was a choreographic resident at Mana Contemporary, a national in-process art museum, and at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance Summer Program.
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Image Description: A November day in Riverside park. A slanted part of a hill holds dryer leaves that have already fallen on the ground. Dani stands on her knees at the front of the frame, head tilted to her right, one arm stretched long and the other folded at the elbow. She wears a white mask and is dressed in tan and brown layers. Others dance in the background along the hill.
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Photo by Lorena Jaramillo.
Donna Costello
Donna Costello (Dancer) is a multi-faceted dance artist centering the body as a deep vessel of expression. She is committed to fostering investigation within and for community. She works with an inspiring array of artists performing in apartments, public parks, historic landmark buildings, pools, frames, and stages in the U.S. and abroad. Recent projects include works by choreographers Nicole Mannarino, jill sigman/thinkdance, Carrie Ahern, Kelly Bartnik, Vicky Shick, filmmaker Darryl Hell, visual artist Nick Cave, and theater artist Jennifer Sargent. She believes in the authentic voice of young people and works as a teaching artist and curriculum specialist for lead cultural institutions in New York; currently facilitating in schools for BAX, the Park Avenue Armory and Juilliard’s Global K-12 program. Her choreographic collaborations have been presented by Dixon Place, chashama, Triskelion, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Flea theater, Roulette, Estrogenius Festival, Women- in-Motion, Definitive Figures Festival (Co-Producer) and Performatica in Mexico.
Image Description: Donna, a white long limbed female dancer, is wearing an orange ribbed tank top, burnt orange loose pants and her hair is tied in a messy bun on top of her head. She is caught by camera looking pensively over her rolled forward right shoulder with the backs of her wrists on her waist, elbows and knees bent, and in a wide stance.
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Photo by David Gonsier.
Milan Eldridge
Milan Eldridge (Video Editor, Website Designer) is a filmmaker, stage manager, and theater designer who is fascinated by the ways these different disciplines can interact, inform, and influence each other. She is passionate about exploring peculiar interpretations of the world. She has served as a Teaching Fellow for Trenton Youth Theater. Milan is currently on the Programming Committee for the inaugural Bridgeport Film Festival and is an Associate Digital Producer for MELA Arts Connect.
Image Description: Milan, a young, Black woman smiles widely at the camera. She wears a jean-blue short-sleeved shirt. Her shoulder-length hair falls in a series of crinkles. Behind her is a bridge. The setting sun bathes the river in a warm amber glow.
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Photo by Robert Watson.
Christophe Fellay
Christophe Fellay (Composer) is a sound artist, musician, composer, performer and improviser living in Switzerland. He has shown interdisciplinary works, sound installations, live performances worldwide and composed sonic works and music for ensembles, solo instruments, radiophonic arts, theatre, movies, video, choreography and performative arts. His work has been shown internationally in London, Edinburgh, Paris, Montreux, Copenhagen, Zürich, Geneva, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Windhoek. His artistic interests include indisciplinarity, active listening, acoustics, sound architecture and ecology. He is particularly interested in the interaction between gesture, movement and sound. Christophe has achieved a PhD at the Brunel University in London and is professor, researcher and head of sound department at EDHEA (Ecole de Design et Haute Ecole d’Art) Valais – Wallis, Switzerland.
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Image Description: Christophe, a white man with white facial hair and darker curly hair, looks down at his drum set and drum sticks, including cymbals, in front of him. An apple computer is turned on to his left side and the background is bright white.
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Photo © Gilles Christen.
Irene Hsi
Irene Hsi (Dancer) is a performer, dance-maker, and movement teacher. She has been making movement-based performance for over 15 years in NYC, New England, and CA. The many artists and teachers Irene has had the honor to learn from include Barbara Mahler, Jill Sigman/thinkdance, Nerve Tank Media, Michelle Boulé, Anneke Hansen, Emily Beattie, and Allyson Green. Her creative interest is in putting questions about identity and politics in dialogue with the body. Teaching highlights include being an inaugural teacher for Midday Movement Series (Cambridge, MA) and teaching online with freeskewl in 2020.
Image Description: Irene, an Asian woman with long black hair and brown eyes, is smiling into the camera while in front of a white wall. She is wearing a dark blue shirt with multi-colored flowers on it.
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Photo by Irene Hsi.
Kristin Norderval
As both a composer and singer, Kristin Norderval (Composer) is inspired by hybridity, interactivity and the idea that everything we do is site-specific. She blends acoustic and electronic sound, is fascinated with de-tuned instruments, machines, and ambient sound. In her solo works for voice and electronics she processes her voice in real time often combining it with prerecorded sounds to create complex sonic layers and unusual soundscapes. Custom controllers allow her to manipulate the processed sound with physical gestures. Her works include opera, chamber music, sound installations, and music for dance, theater and film.
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Image Description: White woman with shoulder length brown hair and a strong chin, wearing a grey jacket and a turtleneck.
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Photo by Fin Serck-Hanssen.
Alyson Osborn
Alyson Osborn (Audio Describer) is a neurodivergent teaching artist long active in the performing, visual, and literary arts communities, working with groups such as Wobbly Dance, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the UK’s School of Hope, Disability Art and Culture Project, Write Around Portland, Willamette Radio Workshop, Portland Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Filmusik, Badass Theatre (founding member), Artists Repertory Theatre (founding member), and PlayWrite Inc - a creative writing program where students explore healing and empathy through the creation of theatre pieces based on their life stories.
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She is an actor with over 60 stage productions to her credit, and is also an audio describer, grateful to have found opportunities to work with many extraordinarily dynamic people and programs over the years.
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Alyson currently teaches dance, theatre and improv at Multnomah Arts Center, and English Communication for Portland State University’s International Special Programs. In 2019 she worked with students from Washington State School for the Blind to create a tactile art installation, slated for possible display in the Portland Art Museum, where she also serves on the Teacher Advisory Council.
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Image Description: Alyson, a slender woman with light olive skin, beams with a closed mouth smile. Her long dark hair is piled atop her head in a bun.
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Photo by Alyson Osborn.
Anisah Sabur
Anisah (Audio Description Narration, Consultant) is a directly impacted woman of color, who has held several leadership roles in coalitions and campaigns to dismantle the criminal legal system in New York City and State.
She currently holds a position as a lead organizer for the People’s Campaign for Parole Justice, working under the Releasing Aging People in Prison Campaign.
She is an Activist, Advocate, and an Abolitionist.
In 2020 Anisah joined the Survivors Justice Project, a project which tracks and supports individuals with the opportunity to use the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act- a law enacted in 2019, in which she led the advocacy to change the policy that impacted survivors of domestic violence.
She is the founder of AAS Empowerment LLC which is her own LLC where she engages individuals, organizations & campaigns on power building and advises social justice reforms & activism.
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Image Description: This is a professional head shot of an African American woman in all white Islamic attire, wearing brown eye glasses that shape and contrast her brown eyes, and a slit smile can be seen, although her mouth is closed through the arch in her cheek bones.
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Photo by Nasir Images, LLC.
Jill Sigman
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Jill Sigman (Artistic Director and Choreographic Process) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and agent of change whose work exists at the intersection of dance, visual art, and social practice. Working with things we cast off such as “garbage” and “weeds”, Sigman helps us to re-see our environments, identify injustices, and re-connect with the natural world and each other in meaningful and empathic ways. In 1998, Sigman founded jill sigman/thinkdance to reflect on pressing social justice issues through the body, and in 2016, she founded “Body Politic”, a program of workshops, performance laboratories, and an artist-activist incubator that helps people to ask salient political questions somatically. She is currently launching a Social Justice Movement Lab that subverts the performance world’s emphasis on product and compensates dancers for social justice work. Sigman has been the inaugural Gibney Dance Community Action Artist in Residence; an artist in residence at Movement Research, The Rauschenberg Residency, Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology (Mexico), and the Kri Foundation (India); a Choreographic Fellow at MANCC and the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research at NYU; and a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University, where she teaches collaboratively with scholars in many disciplines. She grew up in Brooklyn, NY.
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Image Description: Jill, a white woman with a mint-colored kerchief and brown hair, looks directly forward from within the beams and branches of a structure she has built of waste. Her face is framed by twigs and the shadows of the twigs form a tattoo on her face and neck.
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Photo by Vanessa Albury.
Stacy Lynn Smith
STACY LYNN SMITH (Dancer) is a neurodivergent, mixed race/Black dance/performance artist with an extensive background in butoh, improvisational forms and experimental theater. Smith has collaborated as performer/improviser, director and choreographer across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists including: DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Saints of an Unnamed Country, Thaddeus O’Neil, Jasmine Hearn and Josephine Decker. Member of jill sigman’s artist/activist cohort, Body Politic. Smith performed iterations of solo series, “Crybaby” (92StY, Socrates Sculpture Park) and was a collaborating artist as choreographer/performer for “Revision Suite”, a site-specific meditation on architectural violence, worship and spiritual labor in response to the hidden “Slave Galleries” of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church (via Abrons Arts Center). Principal butoh dancer and company teacher with Vangeline Theater from 2008-2017. Main muse/collaborator of writer/director Michael Freeman from 2010-2016. Current collaborators: thinkdance, Rakia Seaborn, Donna Costello, Alex Romania, Kathy Westwater and Emily Johnson.
Image Description: Stacy Lynn Smith, a mixed-race/Black dancing body with an Afro, looks out while kneeling in the middle of a circle of playing cards.
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Photo by Stacy Lynn Smith.
Paty Lorena Solórzano
Paty Lorena Solórzano (Dancer) (BFA Texas Christian University, MFA University of Michigan), is a Mexican choreographer, dancer and Professor of Dance at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. She is the recipient of the 2021-2022 Young Creators grant award for Choreography by the Support System for Creation and Cultural Projects (FONCA), Mexico. Her choreography has been presented by Dance Source Houston, Foro Performática, Festival Primate Escénico, the Detroit Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts, Triskelion Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church, among others. Her most recent dance film project LLEVAMOS HORAS GRITANDO PRESENTE, in collaboration with filmmaker Natasha Rodriguez y Ramirez (MX), is the recipient of a 2021 PECDA grant from the state of Puebla, México. Paty is collaborator and dancer with jill sigman/thinkdance, Chavasse Dance & Performance, and Psophonia Dance Company.
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Image Description: Paty gives a warm smile towards the camera. She has shoulder-length brown hair, olive skin, dark brown eyes. She is wearing a bright red, sleeve-less dress. The sun hits the right side of her face and upper torso as she sits against a blurred background of a lake and green grass.
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Photo by Kirk Donaldson.
Krishna Washburn
Krishna (Dancer) is the director and teacher of Dark Room Ballet, a pre-professional dance curriculum designed for the educational needs of blind and visually impaired people, the only course of its kind in the English-speaking world. Krishna holds a Masters of Education from Hunter College, a BA from Barnard College, and multiple certifications from the American College of Sports Medicine with a focus in biomechanics. Dark Room Ballet has been featured in USA Today (Green Bay Gazette, North Jersey News), BLOOM magazine, Speak Out for the Blind podcast, Eyes on Success podcast, and on Bloomberg Quicktake news. Krishna Christine Washburn has performed with many leading dance companies including Jill Sigman’s thinkdance, Infinity Dance Theater, Heidi Latsky Dance, Marked Dance Project, and LEIMAY. Krishna has collaborated with many independent choreographers, including Patrice Miller, ielepaloumpis, Perel, Vangeline, Micaela Mamede, Apollonia Holzer, and most notably with A. I. Merino, who especially created her signature role, Countess Erzsébet Bathory, and with whom she founded the artistic collective Historical Performances. Krishna boasts several ongoing artistic collaborations, including work with wearables artist Ntilit (Natalia Roumelioti). Krishna is the Artistic Director of The Dark Room, a multi-disciplinary project with fellow visually impaired dancer, Kayla Hamilton. Krishna is also the Artistic Director of the Telephone Dance and Audio Description Game, an on-going activist screen dance documentary project with choreographer and filmmaker, Heather Dayah Shaw.
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Image Description: Krishna, a thin, pale skinned woman with long dark hair pulled into a braid, poses on a studio stage. She is wearing a simple white dress with her shoulders exposed and a fluffy white headdress perched on her forehead and wrapping down her braid. She looks over her left shoulder as she lightly holds a straight cane between her hands and points her left foot behind her.
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Photo by Krishna Washburn & Micaela Mamede.
Kayva Yang
Kayva Yang (Dancer) is a New York-based artist exploring intimacy and regenerative possibilities between body and land through improvisational choreography, photography, archival research, and nature materials. Her current projects, Lost 40 and Elastic Elm go to a forest and city boulevard to contend with extraction, interiority and colonial matter. Her most recently completed project Body in Flora (2016) was exhibited at New York University's Kimmel Center and performed at Intermedia Arts and Southern Theater in Minneapolis. She dances for Jill Sigman/thinkdance and dustin maxwell and formerly, for Aniccha Arts and Ananya Dance Theatre. She is a 2020 Create Change Fellow of the Laundromat Project and received grant awards from the Jerome Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Yang is also an independent curator in the performing arts. She holds an M.A. in Art and Public Policy from New York University.
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Image Description: The artist who self-identifies as queer Chinese American born cis-gender female with chin-length hair wears a black top is smiling while standing in front of a white marbled wall.
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Photo by Kayva Yang.
Rishauna Zumberg
Rishauna Zumberg (Dancer) was born in Detroit and chose NYC as her home in 2000. Career-wise, Rishauna embarked on a path towards arts and social justice in the early 2000’s via completion of a masters in social work at Hunter College. She has over 20 years of experience in youth development and has worked as a facilitator, consultant, counselor, retreat leader, and director with various non profit organizations in NYC. As a movement artist, Rishauna has created participatory performances, processions, and improvisations, mostly in public spaces, and through funding from AUNTS, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Movement Research, and Friends of Inwood Hill Park. She was a participating artist with The Movement Party/Fleet Moves Dance Festival for five summers. Rishauna has worked with an informal uptown collective called Collective States on various site based projects and curation. She has also choreographed for theater (Pop Up Theatrics & The Anthropologists) and she danced with Mariangela Lopez/Accidental Movement from 2009-2018. Rishauna was privileged to manage the Solitary Gardens northeast tour in September 2018 which is a project created by artist, jackie sumell bringing attention to solitary confinement and imagining a world without prisons. Rishauna currently improvises most regularly with jill sigman/thinkdance.
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Image Description: Profile of a white woman smiling with hair back in a blue tank top holding a mesh net container of monarch butterflies about to be released.
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Photo by Jay Espinosa.