Kai Recollet: An urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, Recollet’s work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other.

Emily Johnson: Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Emily belongs to the Yup'ik Nation, is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, Emily is based in Lenapehoking/NYC and Haudenosaunee lands. Since 1998, Emily's large-scale performance gatherings insist thrivance, radical reworlding, and just futures. Her gatherings function as portals and care processions, engaging audienceship within and through space, time, environment - interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, histories and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.

Emily hosts monthly fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Kai Recollet. Emily was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020. She was a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues, a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding and is currently co-lead for First Nations Performing Arts.

Marcela Torres

Bio Born in Salt Lake City, Utah. Residing between Brooklyn, NY and Chicago, IL. Torres received a BA in Sculpture Intermedia and a BFA in Art History from the University of Utah, They continued their studies with a MFA in Performance from School of the Art Institute Chicago. Torres has performed at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), The Momentary (Bentonville, AK), Fringe Festival (Detroit, MI), Experimental Actions (Houston, TX), Performance Space New York (New York City, NY) and Time Based Arts (Portland, Oregon). Torres has exhibited work at Recess (Brooklyn, NY), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL) UW-Parkside University (Kenosha, WI), Tropical Contemporary (Eugene, OR), Petzel Gallery (NYC, NY). Torres is a 2022 Chicago Dance Maker Forum Lab Artist, a Art/Industry resident at John Michael Kohler Arts Center and a Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park. In 2023 they were a IACA Artist Fellow in Performance-Based Arts. In 2024 they have exhibited a project at Recess (https://www.recessart.org/) with their Assembly (https://www.recessart.org/programs/3-assembly)program and a solo exhibition at Arts and Public Life (https://artsandpubliclife.org/exhibitions). They are a Full Time Assistant Professor at SUNY Old Westbury teaching performance and visual arts.

Kristel Baldoz

Kristel Baldoz is a multidisciplinary artist who works across performance, dance, and ceramics. Her artistic practice is grounded in the relationship between objects, materiality, and bodies. She is the daughter of migrant farmworkers and from a young age, she witnessed the repetitive, monotonous act of picking, which informs her experimentation with movement, and its racialized and feminized history. Her work has been supported by the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, New York Live Arts, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She was a 2019 EmergeNYC fellow at the Hemispheric Institute and, in 2022, an artist-in-residence at the Chautauqua Institution School of Visual Art and Art Cake. Kristel’s works have been featured in Brooklyn Rail and Fjord. As a performer, she has worked with Reggie Wilson, Anh Vo, Wilmer Wilson IV, Kate Watson-Wallace, and Alex Da Corte. kristelbaldoz.com

Ayano Elson

Ayano Elson is an Okinawan-American dancer and choreographer based in New York City. She was born in Okinawa, a small island colonized by Japan in 1879 and occupied by the United States from 1945–1972. She works with improvisation, archival materials, and interdisciplinary collaboration to make dance performances. Her choreographic practice critically investigates power and interpretation as embedded in contemporary Western dance. Ayano will be presenting new work in a shared evening with Wendell Gray II at Danspace Project on November 21-23. ayanoelson.com