Aram Han Sifuentes
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who creates participatory projects that center immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; moCa Cleveland, Cleveland; and Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
Yoshinojo Fujima aka Rika Lin
Yoshinojo Fujima (aka Rika Lin) is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and Grandmaster in Fujima style Japanese classical dance. She is a “shin-nisei”, part of the postwar Japanese American diaspora. She has performed original work and as part of many collaborations at Links Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where she premiered her full length solo Asobi: Playing within Time in 2018. Her works embody her identity and tradition through performance as well as her teaching practice in Japanese classical dance. Yoshinojo is a 2021 recipient of the Digital Dance Grantand Production Residency by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and a 2021-2022 Fellow in Residency by High Concept Labs, for her ongoing virtual reality project “Kurokami E{m}Urge, #ChooseYourReality”. She was a John D. and Susan P. Diekman Fellowship Djerassi Resident Artist (2019), awardee of Ragdale Foundation (2019) and High Concept Labs (2018) residencies, a Links Hall Artistic Associate Curatorial Resident, 3Arts Make a Wave artist, and Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist (2017.)
Yoshinojo is founder and curator of the series “Beyond the Box”, launched in 2017 at Links Hall and that centers on female performers and creatives. Her own dance investigations alter the traditional pedagogy of Japanese dance with humor and subtle transgressions by way of questioning ideas of role and identity. Her collaborative project with puppet artist Tom Lee, Suji: Lines of Tradition, was featured as part of the 2019 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Links Hall 40th Anniversary LinkSirkus, as well as “Beyond the Box”. She performed in March 2020in Kyoto, Japan at UrbanGuild as part of the MushiHime Festival, just before the pandemic came into full force. She is a recent Master Apprentice Ethnic Folk Arts Grant recipient, and adapting the pedagogy of traditional Japanese Classical dance with her mentor/teacher.
For more information please www.yoshinojo.org/
Majel Connery
Majel Connery is a vocalist, composer and musicologist. She holds a BA in music composition from Princeton University and a PhD in musicology from the University of Chicago. She moved in 2013 to the Bay Area where she accepted an Assistant Professorship in Musicology at the University of California Berkeley. As Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University she commissioned and performed Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s “Contriving the Chimes” with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, staged by director Christopher Alden. As Mellon Visiting Artist at Wellesley College she commissioned and performed “Aeolus” by Rome- and Berlin Prize winner Ken Ueno. Delving recently into radio, she has written songs about porn, periods, and sad fish for Radiolab’s “Gonads” series, released in 2019 as a digital album on Bandcamp.
Juelle Daley
Juelle Daley is a 2019- 2020 Hatch curatorial resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition and curator for the exhibit, “Excavating Memory”.
After residing and studying in France for several years, she arrived in Chicago with an M. A. in Urban Planning & Design from the Institut Francais d’ Urbanisme and a B.A. in East Asian Studies (China) and Urban Studies from Rutgers University. She is currently Assistant Director at the Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University, and an MFA candidate in Film at DePaul’s School of Cinematic Arts.
All of this and more have transformed her into a hybrid cultural creature, a self-described nerd, dreamer, cinephile, Francophile, filmmaker, photographer and art lover. She is the co-founder of the itinerant pop-up art event Salon Caju that showcases the art of local Chicago creatives. She directed the short film, “Six Hour Pass” and is currently in post-production on documentaries titled “Tainted Name” and “Watered Down Memories”.
Like a plant, she grows towards the light.
Recently, she curated the exhibit “Ebony and Jet magazine covers of the 1960’s”.
For more information please visit https://www.juelledaley.com
Douglas R. Ewart
Douglas R. Ewart is a Kingston, Jamaica native (b. 1946) and inimitable composer, improviser, inventor, visual artist, and educator. He is a 2020 New Music USA Project award recipient for “Douglas R. Ewart: Expressions,” his first comprehensive solo presentation in the US and which takes place as an installation and a series of virtual live concerts across multiple platforms.
As a seminal composer and musician, Ewart is internationally recognized as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which he joined in 1967 and served as the organization’s president from 1979-1986. He has toured with AACM and as part of countless additional music projects throughout Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia. As a featured artist, he has performed original music compositions with his numerous ensembles at the Moers International Festival (Germany), the University of Puerto Rico San Juan, throughout Brazil, Italy, Japan, and the US, and for multiple engagements in Tokyo, Perth, Havana, Paris, Stockholm, London, Düsseldorf, and Berlin.
A prestigious 1987 U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship supported his study of both modern Japanese culture and the traditional Buddhist shakuhachi flute. He has received a Bush Artists Fellowship and is a multiple-recipient of Minnesota Composers Forum/McKnight Foundation fellowships and Jerome Foundation grants.
He has applied his continual learning in philosophy to a thirty year-tenure with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, until retiring in 2016. As aprolific inventor and visual artist he has been presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry. An immersive, evolving installation in 2020 at ESS’s Audible Gallery includes his personal collection of historical artifacts, film, sculptures, and memorabilia, and illuminates Ewart’s current multimedia work, and new works created with members from the international creative arts and music communities.
For more information please visit https://douglasewart.com
Miranda Gonzalez
Miranda Gonzalez is currently a Producing Artistic Director at UrbanTheater Company (UTC) in Humboldt Park and works for The Nova Collective, a diversity equity and inclusion consulting firm. She was a founding ensemble member of Chicago’s All Latina Theater company Teatro Luna and has devised and developed plays since 2000. She is a 3Arts and ALTA nominee and recipient of the International Centre for Women Playwrights 50/50 Award. Her most recent play Back In The Day: an 80’s House Music Dancesical, World Premiered as a part of Chicago Latino Theater Festival Destinos Festival at UTC in the fall of 2019. Previous directing, writing, and script development credits include; Ashes of Light by Marco Antonio Rodriguez, La Gringa by Carmen Rivera, Of Princes and Princesas by Paola Izquierdo at the 2010 Goodman Latino Theatre Festival, Lullaby by Diane Herrera, Crossed, GL 2010, The North/South Plays a workshop at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; F.O.P and Crime Scene Chicago with Collaboraction; and Melissa DuPrey’s Sushi-Frito at Free Street Theater. She is also an Executive Producer for the web series 50 Blind Dates with Melissa DuPrey and has written for web series Ruby's World Yo created by Marilyn Camacho, Season 1 episode 3 and Season 2 episodes 1-4.
Brittany Harlin
Brittany Harlin is originally from Bolingbrook, Illinois, where she began dance in jazz at the age of six. Her original dance and music influences began in her close multigenerational family, and formational influences are the pioneers in Hip Hop and Modern dance. She studied dance at Loyola University Chicago. She is the founding artistic director of Chicago Urban Dance Collective, which is driven by Harlin’s purpose to represent the full spectrum of street dance to live music and dj’s on the concert stage.
Harlin is a former High Concept Labs Artist in Residence, in performance choreography and filmmaking. She is a 2017 recipient of the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, and the 2018 recipient of the Sybil Shearer fellowship. In addition to work for her company, her dancing and choreography has been featured at Ragdale Foundation, Links Hall, Elastic Arts, Aragon Ballroom, DRAMA Duo Music Productions, Black Ensemble Theatre, and Hip Hop International.
Her first short film, “Delinea Renda”, inspired by the work of visual artist and writer Barbara Chase Riboud, features original poetry, vocals and choreography by Harlin, music by composer Josh Luis, and engineer-producing by Peter Angorola and Melvin Rosario. The film’s development was a coveted 3Arts Project Match selection in 2018, surpassing the goal and receiving its release in 2019.
Her first length work for her company, “Breathing Through Vernacular Movement”, was premiered by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2018. Her latest full length piece for her dancers, ”Don’t Forget Your Mother,” is a choreographic memoir set to music and dedicated to mothers on Earth and ancestors beyond, and received its world premiere as part of the 2019 Pivot Arts Festival.
Harlin regards the body of work to date as a living investigation of social movement origins in the music and dance forms of Hip Hop, Modern, Funk Styles, Waacking, and House, which she combines with her growing knowledge of somatics and kinesiology. Her teaching artist pedagogy and philosophy are weighted in respecting the integrity of the vernacular movement by sharing what she’s been taught from respected community members. As an educator, she aims to bring dance to a place of complete body awareness, spiritual expression, and connection.
For more information please visit http://brittanyharlin.com/
Mark Jeffery
Mark Jeffery is a Chicago based performance/installation artist, curator and Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mark co - founded ATOM-r in 2012, a performance and technology group where he is a choreographer, director and performer in the company. He is the organizer of IN>TIME, a triannual performance festival presented by multiple venues in Chicago. Mark was a member of the former Goat Island Performance Group, from 1996 - 2009.
Meida Teresa McNeal
Meida Teresa McNeal is Director of Honey Pot Performance. She serves the Chicago Park District as Arts & Culture Manager, supporting community arts partnerships, youth arts, cultural stewardship, and civic engagement initiatives. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Choreography & Dance History from Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several awards including a Chicago Dancemakers Lab Award and a 3Arts Award in Dance. She has taught dance, community engaged arts, critical performance ethnography, and black diasporic cultural production at Northwestern University, Brown University, Governors State, and Columbia College Chicago. Positioned as an artist, scholar and administrator, she merges theory and practice into lived applications that cultivate dialogue, decolonize knowledge, and shift consciousness.
Stephan Moore
Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, programmer, engineer, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. Much of his work has been realized in collaborative projects, most notably with sound artist Scott Smallwood in their duo Evidence and with choreographer Yanira Castro in the collective a canary torsi. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. In 2019, he co-founded the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theater to promote and encourage the creation of multichannel audio works. He is a Distinguished Associate Professor of Instruction in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.
Zachary Whittenburg
Zachary Whittenburg has worked in Chicago’s cultural sector since 2002, in arts advocacy and journalism, marketing and communications, and as a consultant on a variety of programs for artist support and equitable funding. A regular contributor to Dance Magazine, Zac is founding board secretary for the Chicago Dance History Project and, as associate director of marketing and communication at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, he represented the organization on the Chicago Dancemakers Forum consortium. A working artist for 13 years in Canada and the U.S., Zac created and performed choreography with companies including BJM Danse Montréal, Hubbard Street, Lucky Plush Productions, Molly Shanahan / Mad Shak, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, after which he was dance editor at Time Out Chicago magazine and communications and engagement director at Arts Alliance Illinois. He is currently an arts program officer at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.