Dance Place is proud to announce our new Artist Advisory Council. Our curatorial team is excited to engage a group of 6 working artists to advise us by examining curatorial structures and working practices within Dance Place. Dance Place’s new Artist Advisory Council is intended to:
Support Dance Place in serving artists by centering equity and justice
Provide a forum for dialogue, honoring between diverse perspectives in the dance field, to generate ideas that expand Dance Place’s mission and values and evolve our curatorial vision
Raise the visibility and profile of Dance Place as a presenter in the DC-area, national, and international field
The Artist Advisory Council members represent a wide range of perspectives and geographic locations. Dance Place has invited these established artists to bring their lived experience to the council as advocates for other artists while decentralizing their own direct artistic connection with Dance Place.
While not participating directly in the artist selection process, members will provide essential guidance to Dance Place by sharing their perspectives on trends, artist centered practices, and artists outside the radar of the curatorial team. We hope this council will catalyze innovation in Dance Place’s work to support artists and build both our local and national communities.
Continue reading below to meet our inaugural Artist Advisory Council!
2021 Artist Advisory Council
Holly Bass, (she/her) — Metro DC area, is a multidisciplinary performance and visual artist, writer and director. Her work has been presented at spaces such as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Museums, the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach (Project Miami Fair) and the South African State Theatre. Her visual art work spans photography, installation, video and performance and can be found in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the DC Art Bank, as well as private collections. A Cave Canem fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies. She studied modern dance (under Viola Farber) and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning her Master’s from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As an arts journalist early in her career, she was the first to put the term “hip hop theater” into print in American Theatre magazine. She has received numerous grants from the DC Arts Commission and is a 2019 Red Bull Detroit artist-in-residence and a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. A gifted and dedicated teaching artist, for four years she directed a year-round creative writing and performance program for adjudicated youth in DC’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services as well as facilitating workshops nationally and internationally. She is currently the national director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program which uses the arts strategically to transform schools facing severe inequities.
Michelle Fujii, (she/her) — Portland, Oregon, is a taiko artist, co-director of Unit Souzou, and educator, creating contemporary work centered in the art forms of taiko and Japanese folk dance. Michelle’s work navigates the multifaceted complexity of identity in our communities, a constant excavation to claim her own identity story. After graduating with a UCLA ethnomusicology degree, Michelle studied in Japan with foremost theatrical folk dance company, Warabi-za through a Japanese Bunkacho fellowship. Michelle has been a guest artist and collaborator with numerous North American and international taiko groups. In 2014, Michelle with her partner Toru Watanabe, fused their unique skills to build Unit Souzou, a Portland-based taiko ensemble creating an expressive blend of taiko and Japanese folk dance, reimagining new traditions for evolving communities.
She serves on the board of Arts Northwest, Artist Advisory Council of Dance Place, and is a Co-chair of Taiko MarGens in Solidarity. Michelle has been awarded individual artist fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Jubilation Foundation. Her newest work, Constant State of Otherness, is a National Performance Network, MAPFund, and New England Foundation for the Arts funded project, which centers on the historical and divisive ways that othering has pervasively and insidiously affected our communities.
d.Sabela Grimes, (he/him/they) — Los Angeles, California, a 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow and a 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, is a trans-media storyteller whose creative practice draws directly from Black movement systems and cultivates a devoted interest in the physical/meta-physical efficacies of Afribiquitous life practices. His dance theater works are a mix of socio-historical observation, self-examination and speculative exploration through layers of interconnected sonic, visual and kinesthetic arrangements. Sabela affirms that his primary intention is to center and amplify joy through expressive forms that play in the corrugated spaces of what he calls ‘Cosmic Blackness’. His most recent endeavor,ELECTROGYNOUS, declares that Black gender qualities are infinite, multidimensional and distinct manifestations of wombniversal consciousness. His current project, Dark Matter Messages, dreams Octavia E. Butler’s body of work into a modular multi-disciplinary performance/installation experience(s). He also creating audio-visual digital art or crypto art to be published on blockchain. Each experience realizes quantum Blackness as a means to play within the nowness of recurring futures. On faculty at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he continues to cultivate, Funkamental MediKinetics, a movement system that draws on the layered dance training, community building, and spiritual practices evident in Black vernacular and Hip Hop/Street dance forms. Sabela loves speculative fiction, declarative realness and pancakes.
Chitra Kalyandurg, (she/her) — Metro DC area, is a performer, choreographer, and arts professional based in Washington, D.C. A practitioner of the South Indian dance style Kuchipudi, her inspiration comes from creating collaborative work that connects diverse audiences to the themes present in Indian classical dance. Chitra is a founding member of the Kalanidhi Dance Company. She trained and performed with the company for over two decades under the direction of her guru Anuradha Nehru. From 2018-2019, Chitra served as Kalanidhi Dance’s director of engagement and arts partnerships. Her recent choreographic work with the company includes Why We Dance, Poetry of Love and Bhoomi. Her original productions include The Nayika Project, and Leela: Play of the Divine. She has received multiple grants from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County in support of her work and was awarded the Princess Grace Dance Honoraria for her artistic excellence in Kuchipudi.
Chitra has more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of arts, nonprofits and policy, including serving as a consulting analyst with TRG Arts, administering education programs at Arena Stage, and managing policy fellowship programs at AAAS. She has also served as a consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk & Traditional Arts (F&TA) program. She is currently a legislative analyst with the Montgomery County Council’s Office of Legislative Oversight. Chitra holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications Studies from New York University and a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Cynthia Oliver, (she/her) — Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, is a St. Croix, Virgin Island reared dance maker, performer and scholar. Her work incorporates textures of Caribbean performance with African and American aesthetic sensibilities. She has toured the globe as a featured dancer with contemporary companies David Gordon Pick Up Co., Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, Bebe Miller Company, and Tere O’Connor Dance and as an actor in works by Laurie Carlos, Greg Tate, Ione, Ntozake Shange, and Deke Weaver. She earned a PhD in performance studies from New York University, is a New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award winning choreographer, a 2016 Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Mellon Fellow, a 2017 Center for Advanced Studies Associate (and now CAS Professor), a 2007 University Scholar awardee, and currently serves as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in the Humanities, Arts and Related Fields at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is a professor in the dance department with affiliations in African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies. She is a widely published author with articles in a variety of journals and edited volumes. Her single authored book is titled, Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean (2009). Her most recent evening-length performance work, “Virago-Man Dem” premiered at BAM’s Next Wave Festival 2017 and toured the country.
Karen Sherman, (she/they) — Minneapolis, Minnesota,makes dances, writes, and builds things. Her work has been presented nationally by Walker Art Center, PICA/TBA Festival, Chocolate Factory Theater, Dance Place, Fusebox Festival, CAP UCLA, and many others. Her longtime work as a freelance stage technician, technical director, and production manager helps her to realize her own projects and directly support other artists in the creation of their work. In conjunction with her show Soft Goods, which explored work, death, loss, and the occupational self-obliteration of stagehands, she partnered with Behind the Scenes, a national support organization, to create the first mental health/chemical dependency counseling fund in the nation specifically for technical production workers. Her honors include a 2020 Herb Alpert Award in Dance; a Bessie Award for her performance in Morgan Thorson’s Faker; multiple MacDowell Fellowships and McKnight Foundation Fellowships; a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University; and residencies through Vermont Performance Lab, Movement Research, ADI/Lumberyard, and the Bogliasco Foundation program in Liguria, Italy, among others. Her visual art has been shown at Hair+Nails, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, and Roman Susan Art. Her writing has appeared in various online and print forums including e-flux journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Hair+Nails Gallery Zine, Good Job, Criticism Exchange, and mnartists.org. She was a co-compiler of Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance, a collectively-authored call for radical change in the dance world. She is based in Minneapolis by way of NYC.
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