Aramo Olaya is a non-binary queer Spanish dancer and researcher
in the fields of feminist and queer touch improvisation, and
performance theory. They hold a PhD in the Sociology of Gender,
and a bachelor in Philosophy, and are now a PhD candidate in
Performance Studies at UC Davis. They were a pioneer of queer
tango in Spain, and they hold a certificate in contact
improvisation by FCI Madrid. Current interests include developing
contact improvisation as a language in which to communicate with
cats and aliens, and to expand childhood embodied knowledges and
sexualities.
MA in Composition from Mills CollegeMFA in Electronic Music from Mills College
Gino Robair Forlin is developing strategies for improvisation,
with a focus on how shifts in cognitive load affect the
performer, using resources such as computer mediation, real-time
score creation/interpretation with physical materials, and
game-inspired, rule-based systems.
Sarah Ashkin’s research tarrys at the intersection of critical
whiteness studies, site specific performance, and liberatory
pedagogies. She is the director of GROUND SERIES dance and
social justice
collective and a co-founder of Practice Progress, a
body-based anti-racism facilitation platform.
he / him / hisPhD Candidate, Performance Studies - UC DavisMFA, Directing for Theater, Film and Television - UCLABA, Theatre and Dance - UC Davis
Tom finds motivation for his research in fatherhood, play, fun,
theatre, and games. His curiosity runs deep when it comes
to understanding the phenomena associated with joy, enthusiasm,
inspiration, and flow.
He founded the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble in 2004, where he
served as Artistic Director for over a decade. Tom also
presided over the historic Powerhouse Theatre as Managing
Director during the Ensemble’s tenure (2008- 2011).
M.F.A., San Francisco State University, Creative Writing
Diana Cage’s practice sits at the intersection of media and
media-making, visual culture, and performative
writing. Cage’s academic interests include feminist science
and technology studies, feminist data science, public health
and health equity, reproductive justice, critical race
studies, trans studies, and queer theory. She is the
author of six nonfiction books on sex and
sexuality, including the Lambda Award-winning The
Lesbian Sex Bible (Quiver, 2014).
Merging ethnography and performance, Jamie’s research regards
mediumship and danced spirit possession in Afro-Brazilian
religions. Her creative practice also involves experimental and
performative modes of writing about/with/as embodied practices.
She is the author of “Alternative
Texts,” winner of the Society for Humanistic
Anthropology’s 2020 Ethnographic Poetry Prize (third place) and
published in Anthropology and
Humanism, Vol.
Julian Gatto is interested in developing a methodology at the
intersection of film, sculpture, installation, performance,
design, poetry and painting
Thinking through acts of translation, framing and collaboration,
his work is centered around actively engaging spaces/formats
as collaborative endeavors performed by both non-humans and
humans alike, asking in whatever might be their accorded language
of preference on whatever clue, guidance or misdirection towards
an articulation of a collective we, however unstable this
formation might be.
M.A., Devised Theatre, Dartington College of Arts, Falmouth University, EnglandB.A., Theatre, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York City
Sarah Ashford
Hart is a socially engaged performance practitioner,
scholar, and educator from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American family
background. Over the past twelve years she
has developed her arts practice in Russia, England,
Venezuela, Chile and the United States.
M.F.A., UC Davis, Dramatic Art, June 2020M.A., University of San Francisco, Education, September 2004B.A., San Francisco State University, Interdisciplinary Art, May 1994
Colin Johnson is a PhD. Candidate in Performance Studies, with
Designated Emphases in Science and Technology Studies and
Critical Theory. Colin’s research, broadly, looks at the long,
contingent histories of surveillance in techno-science and their
intersection with the knowledge formation and creative activity.
In examining contemporary tools and technics for measurement,
evaluation and visualization, his work interrogates how daily
user repetitions and institutional structures come to embody
particular formations of power, political possibility and
affective relations.
she / her / hersUniversidad Pedagogica Nacional, B.A., 2014
Regina María Gutiérrez Bermúdez is a doctoral student in
Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis. She
holds an MFA in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Directing and MA in
Performance Studies, degrees obtained at the same university.
Graduated in Dramatic Arts from the Universidad Pedagógica
Nacional (Colombia), she has a trajectory of more than 20 years
as an actress, performer, theater and dance educator, and is an
expert in movement, somatic, and energy work.
B.A. Theatre and Dance, James Madison University, 2006
Isa is a performing artist and somatic researcher who has
worked for over a decade with movement/dance modalities and
experimental theatre techniques that promote self reflection.
Through her developing methodology, Dialoguing the
Unconscious, and her Ph.D research, she is investigating the
question: How do we share/acknowledge knowledge that can’t (in a
“regular” way) be seen? She is deeply invested in pre-colonized
ways of knowing.
Karola Lüttringhaus was born and grew up in Berlin, Germany,
where she founded ALBAN ELVED DANCE COMPANY in 1997 to form an
outlet for her diverse artistic pursuits in dance, visual art,
film, scenic design and sound design. She has worked as a
freelance artist, choreographer and educator at theatres and
universities across Europe and the US. In 2007, she incubated the
SARUS FESTIVAL for Site-specific & Experimental Art in 2007 in
Wilmington, NC.
Sarah Haughn is a writer and PhD candidate in Performance Studies
with designated emphases in Studies in Practice and Performance
and African and African American Studies. Her research considers
how processes of birth and gestation as grappled with in the
literature of Black writers elucidate the violence operative in
western metaphysics’ recurrent use of gestational language to
explain being. Scholarly interests include critical black
studies, philosophy of antagonism, gender theory, science and
technology studies, and poetics.
he / him / hisCalifornia State University, Sacramento, B.A. Dance, May 2013
Diego Martinez-Campos is a Mexican artist whose practice
conjugates various art-making disciplines. He explores pathways
situated across the borders of choreography, dance, music,
drawing, writing, and painting. Diego’s research is oriented
towards anti-colonial, multilingual, transdisciplinary
embodiments, theories, methodologies, and pedagogies as means to
generate different relations with existing fields of knowledge.
he/him/them/they/dem/deyMA African American Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Maurice Moore is currently a doctoral Performance Studies
Candidate at the University of California-Davis. His critical
essays, fictions, and visual works have appeared in Existere
Journal, New World Theatre, bozalta Collective, Harbor Review,
Rigorous, Wicked Gay Ways, Storm Cellar Journal, Loud and Queer
Zine, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, Strukturriss
Quarterly Journal, HIVES Buzz-Zine, As Loud As It’s Kept
Magazine, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and Confluence.
Heather’s current research involves auto-ethnography and identity
development and performance related to the internet and social
media. She is working on pedagogical strategies for teaching a
kind of critical media literacy through embodied engagement with
media making. Heather has a Master’s Degree in Cinema and Media
Studies from UCLA and is currently a PhD student in Performance
Studies. She received a BA in Drama from Dartmouth College and
attended acting conservatory at the New Actors’ Workshop in New
York, founded by George Morrison, Mike Nichols, and Paul Sills.
Artist-researcher working at the intersection of dance and
improvisation, body installation, visual poetry, collaborative
dramaturgy, text composition and performance art. Interested in
co.creation and movement scores as relational study Caro
cultivates rehearsal as method to ignite inquiry and connect
people to questions that matter while crafting performance
pieces.
Nicole Peisl is a dancer, teacher and choreographer. She joined
the Frankfurt Ballet in 2000 and has continued to work with
William Forsythe as a member of The Forsythe Company until 2014.
Peisl’s trilogy Vielfalt, Ueberblick, and Spiefeld I, II have
been staged in Frankfurt, Dresden, Munich and Vienna. In 2019 she
debut with the choreographic work for_rest in the Bay Are as part
of The HMD Bridge Project “Signals from the West, Bay Area
Artists in Conversation with Merce Cunningham at 100″.
Eric’s artmaking, clinical work and academic research are
organized around the material aesthetics of psychoanalysis. He is
in private practice in Davis and San Francisco, and his project
is an aesthetic (mis)translation of developmental attachment
theory into a feminist materialist revision of the psychoanalytic
project.
