Virtual retreat#1
spring 2022
Schedule & hot topics:
Mar. 31, 1pm - 3pm: Movement meditation via the song of increase
Apr. 2, 12:30pm - 2:30pm: naming the vision (pt. 1) + roles now & Future
Apr. 3, 1:11pm - 2:22pm: Ancestral vision quest / communion w/ the vision
Apr. 4, 9am - 10:30am: Expanding audiences
Apr. 4, 3pm - 4:30pm: brand building, team management, & scaling
Apr. 7, 4pm - 5:30pm: identifying ED/Honey Pot Queen + Hybrid Model Case Studies
Apr. 14, 10am - 11:30am: Nomadic Living & Authentic Social Engagement through Pleasure
Apr. 14, 1pm - 2:30pm: Naming the vision (pt. 2) + Mid-Retreat Synthesis & Reflections, OPEN SCORE
Apr. 14, 4pm - 5:30pm: Which Honey Pot Should Be Designed First?
Apr. 16, 1pm - 3pm: [Designing Queericulums, Accountability/Navigating Harm within and outside of organizational ecosystems] + [MBA/MA Program Deliberation] + {who is hiring?}
Apr. 18: 1:30pm - 3:30pM: Formalization, Building Fiscal Capacity, Closing Circle Movement Meditation
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Spring 2022 Retreat circle of trust / thought partners
María Regina Firmino-Castillo is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who participates in and writes about performance across national and colonial borders. She has created documentary, performance and experimental video pieces that interrogate the paradoxical social imaginaries of the Guatemalan post-war period and depict the complexities of the Central American diaspora. With Tohil Fidel Brito, she has co-directed site-specific sculpture, installation, and multidisciplinary performance projects in Guatemala, México, and the United States. As an assistant professor of critical dance studies at the University of California, Riverside, Firmino-Castillo teaches courses on decolonial approaches to dance studies, transdisciplinary performance, and the anticolonial intersections between Black and Indigenous performance. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Choreographies of Catastrophe, is a multi-sited work that investigates how bodies are sites of ontological violence in the context of genocidal coloniality and its complex and transnational reverberations across the hemisphere. Through the work of artists in Guatemala, México and the United States, the book also attends to ways that those affected by the multiplicitous catastrophes of coloniality deploy insurgent corporeal strategies not only to survive, but also to enact otherwise bodies, worlds, and lives despite ongoing necropolitical control and violence .
ash baccus-clark is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based Molecular & Cellular Biologist and multidisciplinary artist who uses new media and storytelling to explore themes of deep learning, cognition, memory, race, trauma, and systems of belief.
She currently consults in virtual reality production and is working on her first feature. Ash is currently represented by Mssng Peces, is an Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, an RLabs XR Beta Resident, and a 2019 United States Artist fellow in Media.
In her work with Hyphen-Labs, Ash served as the Director of Brand Marketing & Research, writing and producing an award-winning immersive installation project, NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (NSAF), a three-part digital narrative that sits at the intersection of product design, virtual reality, and neuroscience that was originally inspired by the lack of multidimensional representations of Black women in technology. NSAF incorporates object-based design, virtual reality, and cognitive impact research that reimagines the future of Black women in STEM fields.
NSAF first premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and has been shown at Sundance Film Fest, SXSW, Tribeca Film Fest (Jury Honorable Mention), Gray Area Art & Technology Festival, Primer Speculative Futures Conference, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Stony Island Arts Bank & Rebuild Foundation, New Inc: Versions Festival, Refinery 29's 29 Rooms, and more.
Previously, Ash served as a brand manager on the retail brand management team of Warby Parker and worked as a molecular biologist at the University of California San Francisco researching cell and developmental biology with an emphasis on stem cell research.
mikhaila fendor is the founder of Equilibrium: Center for Restorative Wellness, a virtual conflict resolution center that works primarily with folks of color and organizations who are driven to use empathy, compassion, and creativity to address deep conflicts around race and build new working systems.
Outside of that, she is also a trainer and facilitator in homeless services.
Www.equilibriumbalance.com & Ig: @equilibrium.balanced
Margit Galanter is a movement educator, cultural instigator, and dance poet living on Huchiun, unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land, aka California, East Bay. Margit’s work is assembled and offered through the vivid grove — a live art school for moving, learning, creative evolution, and collective liberatory practices. Margit has developed longterm projects such as Cave Forms, an exploration in performance, fecundity, and the environment, seeds festival, and Tuning Culture, a collaborative inquiry that utilizes Tuning practices to decolonize dance. Margit is fascinated by the inextricable relations made evident through subtle movement, reciprocity, and perceptual vibrancy. Their syncretic approach is based on decades of practice in movement/art lineages such as the Feldenkrais Method, Wild Goose Qigong, Suprapto Suryodarmo’s Amerta Movement, and Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores. Shx has written and edited various articles and creative writing pieces, most recently in Contact Quarterly and as co-editor of the book Embodied Lives: Reflections on the Influence of Suprapto Suryodarmo and Amerta Movement. It’s an honor to be included here on this site.
Patricia Garza (they/them) is Producer and Director of Los Angeles Programs at Los Angeles Performance Practice supporting the production and presentation of contemporary performance. They also manage Network of Ensemble Theater’s NET/TEN cornerstone grant program as Program Director. A former member of the artistic staff at Center Theatre Group for over a decade, Patricia filled roles spanning artistic, education and community partnerships, and management. They frequently speak at public events, facilitate group conversations, and have served as a grant panelist for the NEA, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and The Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, among others. Patricia’s passion is working with other theater professionals nationally on issues surrounding anti-racism towards collective liberation with a focus on the LGBTQIA+ community through artEquity.
M'kali-Hashiki is a Somatic Storyteller & Erotic Ritualist. Her Divine Purpose is helping folx heal their erotic wounds so they can have the joyous & juicy life that is their Divine Birthright and move further along in their path to individual & collective liberation. A Certified Sexological Bodyworker; Certified Sound, Voice, & Music Healer; & Certified Tantric Sacred Intimate. she offers community journeys, rituals, individual coaching, instructional videos, and guided visualizations to help us survive & thrive during these chaotic times. She offers sexuality training & employee wellness/team building skills to organizations & companies; and is also a skilled Sensitivity Reader of manuscripts ensuring avoidance of explicit & implicit systemic bias. Her lived experiences as a fat, Black, queer, femme, trauma-survivor inform every aspect of her work. For more information, visit her site www.FiercePassions.com
Ayesha Jordan is a multidisciplinary performer and creator b ased between Oslo, Norway and New York City.She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree from the Norwegian Theatre Academy (Spring 2022) Her current research has been based in applied permaculture studies, regenerative community/ecosystem formation and adaptation, event curation, and how these can be explored through performance, or how they can inform performance methodologies.
She and her collaborators, Justin Hicks and David Sainte, recently presented the work Shasta Geaux Pop: Blended Therapy, November 2020, as part of The Shed’s Up Close and as a commissioned artist for their Open Call. Shasta Geaux Pop has been presented on The High Line (NYC) with collaborator Charlotte Brathwaite . Shasta Geaux Pop was also presented at Under the Radar Festival 2018, Right About Now Festival in Amsterdam, NL, and in Orange County, CA for the Off Center Festival at the Segerstrom Arts Center. In 2017 we were also at the La Jolla Playhouse's Without Walls (WOW) Festival, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Under the Radar Festival (Jan 2017) and at The Bushwick Starr (Sept 2016).
Some of her acting credits include the Broadway production of Eclipsed at The John Golden Theatre and returned to her role of "The Girl" at The Curran in San Francisco, March 2017. Jordan also performed in both Failure Sandwich and Ludic Proxy, by Aya Ogawa, Home by Geoff Sobelle, This is now, and now, and now, Stairway to Stardom and Harold I Hate You, by cakeface (HERE, Ars Nova & Triskelion), and Platonov: Or the Disinherited by Jay Scheib (The Kitchen). In 2015 she created Come See My Double D's at JACK (NY). She has performed abroad in Amsterdam, France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Australia, and Japan. Other projects created and developed by Ayesha include Enter & Exit: Family Reunion, Enter & Exit: Playing House, Inter 1-to-1, and video project Living Room Dance Breaks.
Megan Danielle Kendzior is a dancemaker and arts advocate, originally hailing from Seminole and Calusa lands (now known as Sarasota, Florida). Her research delves into the poetic entanglement of dance practice and community organizing, which is rooted in her years of labor as a choreographer, performer, administrator, educator, and activist. www.umbilicaltendrils.org
asha kohli
jas lin 林思穎 (they/them/ta) is a queer taiwanese/american performance artist, movement facilitator, filmmaker, and human becoming born, raised, and based on unceded Tongva land. beginning their history of dance at the age of two with ballet, jas was quickly introduced into the complexities of inhabiting a racialized and gendered body and practicing the performing arts; of being both the creator and communicator of signifiers while having significations structurally and historically projected onto oneself. as such, lin is committed to the life-long process of un-learning and un-teaching hierarchical, Othering, and superficial ways of moving, being, sensing, and knowing.
lin stages exorcisms for purging choreographies of the learned body and shutting down internal and external surveillance cameras that suggest there is a Proper way to move through the world. how do capitalism, colonialism, and cisheteronormativity inform the ways we live in, perceive, or erase our bodies? how can we systematically shatter the habits that limit the ways we move? what are the rituals and pathways for moving trauma sedimented in the muscles and joints through and out of the body?
lin’s choreographies, films, and workshops have been shared at distinguished cultural spaces around the world, including the British Museum, REDCAT Theater, IA&A at Hillyer, NAVEL, and MoCA Shanghai. jas seeks to inspire the wholeness of all bodies, recognizing the body both as a technology of freedom and site for transformative potential that ripples throughout our shared worlds.
Este (they/them/elle) is a queer 2-legged shapeshifter, re-indigenzing cornstalk, "mountain & shoreline" learning to be born. Their creation, listening (psychic medium), and body practices are devoted to “being” alive, play, queer constellations, and the body as a portal of connection. They walk with their blood and chosen family- jalisqueño, campesinx, nahua, spanish, queer, transpecies, and the soon to be remembered ancestors. As a life journey, Este is befriending the Madre Padres; Abueles De La Tierra who they are connecting with as a cosmic frijole liberating from colonial disembodiment and rooting in belonging.
Miranda WrighT IS a Los Angeles-based theater producer, and Executive Director of Los Angeles Performance Practice, an infrastructure and artists network comprised of independent artists and companies who create groundbreaking theatrical experiences through innovative approaches to collaboration, technology, and social engagement. Through LAPP, Miranda produced and curated Live Arts Exchange (LAX), a contemporary performance festival in collaboration with 105 local artists.
Specializing in international collaboration, Miranda has produced work with artists and organizations in Havana, Kigali, Kampala, and Prague. Most recently, she produced the English language premiere of You Should Have Stayed Home, Morons (dir. Manuel Orjuela, Colombia) presented by RADAR LA as a site-responsive travelling performance, and the U.S. premiere of Deborah Asiimweâ Cooking Oil at the ATX: Art + Innovation Center featuring an ensemble from Kampala, Kigali, and Los Angeles.
Miranda is Associate Producer at AUTOMATA, and co-Founder of The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2014 Richard E. Sherwood Award.