RAW (resident artist workshop) photos & dates coming soon
Born and raised in San Diego, Tatianna Steiner is an Asian American movement artist mainly focused on performing and curating contemporary and modern dance. She has been dancing since the age of 5, training in ballet, jazz, tap, contemporary and modern. Tatianna is a recent graduate from UC Berkeley where she honed her passion, and had the honor of working with choreographers such as Lenora Lee, Iu Hui Chua, and Lisa Wymore. Currently, she is a freelance movement artist in the Bay Area.
Leah Volk is a student and dancer from the Bay area who seeks to explore the diversity and connection of life through her work. Leah will be working on a new work about Hegel’s Master slave dialectic.
Ann tap danced in New York from 2008-2020, after studying at the Eddie Brown Studio for the Arts in Berkeley, CA. She presented work across NYC at venues including Symphony Space, Peridance, Mark Morris and Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Art from UC Davis, and was strongly influenced by Della Davidson in her time at UC Davis. Ann worked on “Clouds from a Crumbling Giant” as associate choreographer under Shinichi Iova-Koga, which presented in 2023 at Joe Goode Annex and will return in 2024 at BAMPFA. Ann currently teaches tap dance at ODC.
Ann presents a tap dance set to the jazz standard “Dream A Little Dream if Me.” Showmanship and impeccable timing display sophisticated rhythms at their finest.
Apoorva Sastry is a Bharatanatyam dancer from Bangalore, India, and currently residing in Santa Clara. She has been dancing for 23 years under the tutelage of Prof. M.R.Krishnamurthy at Kalakshiti school of fine arts. She has Vidwat (Govt of Karnataka), is a Doordarshan artist and pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Bharatanatyam. She has given several group and solo performances and lecture demonstrations over the years.
Zoe Mork is a longtime resident of San Francisco. She has written and performed in the Bay Area focusing on issues of disability and sexuality. She has been a sex worker for 20+ years, starting with a stint in phone sex at age 20. She is also a published writer.
The show is entitled Singing the Songs of Whoredum. It is a 50-minute show with sung songs from Broadway talking about sex work and a story telling vignette that displays the beauty of living while dying and reasserts the included songs themes.
Maia Scott is an interdisciplinary artist and educator teaching accessible arts through City College of San Francisco’s DSPS program and working independently as an arts educator and activist advancing accessible arts programming and spaces throughout the Bay Area. Maia holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts from California Institute of Integral Studies in addition to other certifications and degrees in bodywork, sound healing, dance, therapeutic recreation and labyrinth experience facilitation. Maia’s recent work focuses on the labyrinth as a tool for creating gentle spaces in arts settings and beyond in which attendees follow the choreography of the winding path and inviting diverse bodies to be celebrated as elements of art.
“Bigger on the Inside” unfurls the lived and imaginal world of a blind woman as she journeys to find a place of belonging. Movement mantra, sounding, structured improv and spoken word open doors to liminal spaces where perspective is everything. With the meditative path of a labyrinth as its catalyst, “Bigger on the Inside” invites and incites witnesses to wind their way to seeing themselves and others anew.
Denali Huff is a professional contemporary and modern dancer and choreographer known for her innovative, emotive, and boundary-pushing work. With a focus on storytelling through movement, she creates dynamic performances that challenge traditional dance forms and inspire audiences to connect deeply with the art of movement.
This powerful piece, originally created during the pandemic, explores themes of isolation, loneliness, and the internal battles of mental illness. Through expressive movement, it portrays the struggle to break free from oneself and connect with others. Denali aims to offer solidarity and healing, inviting audiences to reflect and unite in their shared experiences.
Charlie Boyd Brown is a trans nonbinary dancer, bodyworker, facilitator, choreographer, and arts administrator based in Oakland, CA.
“For me, dancing is a practice of re-wilding.
I move to feel close to myself and the ecosystem;
to feel grounded, strong, sensitive, and connected.”
Esra Coskun started dancing in 2013, while working towards her PhD in Philosophy and Literature at Purdue University. She took jazz dance, modern dance, ballet, dance improvisation, contact improvisation and dance composition classes while doing research on semiotics and writing her dissertation. Esra’s doctoral research also informed her choreography for Purdue University Dance Department’s student concerts, Obsessive-Compulsive Dance, Purdue Contemporary Dance Company, and UPROAR: the Pole Collective.
After moving to the Bay Area, Esra founded Es “Delight” Co Dance in 2017 as a resident artist at SAFEhouse Arts. Having danced and choreographed for just over a decade, and recently completed her JD at Golden Gate University School of Law, Esra is now working towards her AA in Dance at Skyline College. Es “Delight” Co Dance continues to present work at SAFEhouse Arts, where Esra is also serving on the board of directors for the current term.
Swathi Lakshmanan, myself is an Indian classical dancer. Choros Charas – Destination is my initiative to explore the world through arts. In this journey, Inhave collaborated and curated meaningful productions, concepts, and partnerships that’s serves arts with no boundaries.
Swathi presents The Pink Diary (tentative title).
Emma Andre is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher based in Oakland. They studied contemporary dance with an emphasis in ballet at Boston Conservatory, graduating in 2021. After graduating they lived and danced in New York City. Emma moved to Oakland in June of 2023. Since moving, Emma has received a Merdé Project grant, a SAFEhouse Arts RAW residency in collaboration with Henry Winslow, and a solo residency at Deborah Slater’s Studio 210. Emma’s work will examine their relationship to femininity, and the way that women are portrayed in popular culture/media. As a child that spent many hours in front of a television during the early 2000’s, Emma received contradictory messages about what it meant to be a woman and how society views them. Emma hopes to embody this dissonance and confusion in their piece.
Swati Pramod Hegde is a dedicated Bharatanatyam dancer currently training under the guidance of Meera Sreenarayanan. She began her training with Seema Bhagwat in India. After a gap of 11 years, which included relocating to the US, Swati reconnected with her passion for Bharatanatyam and resumed her training with Surabhi Bharadwaj. She has performed both solo and ensemble pieces across the US, including at the IDIA Dance Festival, Smaran Dance Festival etc. Recently, she participated in the Dancepts Dance Intensive in Guruvayur, Kerala, India where she immersed herself in intensive training with her teacher and other distinguished scholars. Alongside her dance pursuits, Swati works full-time as a Hardware Engineer.
Shawn Lee is the Artistic Director of Bay Area Independent Chinese Dancers: a collective of Chinese dancers, choreographers, & allied artists telling new Bay Area & global stories grounded in our cultures and traditional disciplines. This original choreography by Shawn Lee begins with the classic Chinese trope of lovers who recognize eachother from a previous life, but with the reminder that in Taoist reincarnation, gender is not a conserved quantity, but “fated pairing” is. Both Taoism and Buddhism take for granted that spiritual transformation necessarily must include a gender transformation (or in the Buddhist case, gendered detachment), but to eathly eyes those who can remember previous lives may appear comic in their references to their visions beyond, much like the translucent thinnest celadon pottery.
Janhavi Pillai, an aspiring Bharatanatyam artist, is a student of Meera Sreenarayanan. She has performed solo and in ensembles across the US and India, notably the IDIA Dance Festival and NY Erasing Borders Festival. Janhavi is the recipient of the ACTA apprenticeship grant and now pursues her master’s at UCLA.
Lydia Feuerhelm-Chiu & Haley Rowland are movement artists, designers, and technologists drawn together by their mutual interest in examining how our engagement with modern technology affects the body. Their work fuses choreography of the body with video, image, and movement to examine themes of virtual presence, disembodiment, and the physical consequences of a digital world. Foreground/Background (working title) is a multimedia performance exploration that delves into the relationship between technology—specifically cell phones and computer usage—and the human body. Integrating live dance performance, digital media, and interactive technology, Foreground/Background examines the ways in which our constant interaction with screens is reshaping our physical movement, bodily awareness, and social interactions.
Al Ellison (they/them) is a trans-nonbinary, mixed race, queer performance artist. They uplift movement as a way to work nonlinearly through collaborating with the body as an archiving entity. Al equips tools such as memory, improvisation, gestures, childhood, and the everyday with aims of healing, release, pleasure, and play. Al most recently received their M.F.A in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside (2023) and is currently getting their Masters of Social Work from Cal State East Bay.
Ms. Aubrey Hill (she/her) from Oakland, CA is an emerging poet and spoken word artist combining her love for creative writing with her volition to stand firmly in her deepest authenticity–endowed with radical self-love and acceptance which transforms her into a being filled with wisdom, compassion, vulnerability, love, poise, and grace–to name a few! A fiery humanist, Ms. Aubrey Hill invites her readers and audience to be grounded in their truth and humanity, unapologetically.
Varsha Sankar is a Bharatanatyam dancer, who has been learning and performing this art form for over 20 years. She has performed for several reputed organizations in India and abroad. She has received the prestigious CCRT scholarship from the Government of India and is a graded artist of “Doordarshan”, the Indian national television channel. Varsha belongs to a small community of dancers who practice and utilize 108 ancient dance movements called Karanas, which were out of vogue and reconstructed from old manuscripts and temple sculptures after extensive research.