Sarah Ashkin’s research tarries 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
They/them/she/hersMFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado Boulder
eM asks ceramic questions, observing their body in relation
to the world in which it can touch through performative
material explorations that index fingers and tongues – movements
and language. For example, a fingerprint is recorded in clay and
preserved for all time when it is fired. These observations
of the ceramic artist body in action and in dialogue with clay
material drive eM’s research on the liberatory potential of clay.
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.
they/them/elleMFA Shakespeare & Performance, Mary Baldwin University (2017)MA Theater Arts, San Jose State University (2013)BA Theater Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz (2008)
Melinda is an educator, theater performer, and director
with an interest in performance history and dramaturgy, applied
rhetoric, languages/translation, and equitable and accessible
performance education practices.They are interested in further
exploring the practice and processes of creating shareable and
relatable performance languages to describe diverse cognitive
processes.
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.
Elmira is a video performance artist whose research-based
performances for the camera concern religious rituals and
their contribution to her cross cultural identity.
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 a PhD Candidate 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.
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.
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.
Deeply engaged in activist praxis, Ashley’s research interests
emerge from a decade long career as a birth doula. Her early work
began by asking questions about the impacts, intended and
unintended, of standardized institutional protocols on labouring
bodies in medical institutions, with a particular focus on trauma
and agency.
