CANCELED: Black Womxn Summit I & II

After careful consideration of the news regarding Coronavirus (COVID-19), Gibney has decided to make Part 1 on 4/1 digital via Zoom, and Part 2 is canceled. 

With Black Womxn Summit I & II, Senior Curatorial Director Eva Yaa Asantewaa has invited a curatorial committee to design two special events celebrating community, artistry, and activism grounded in values and aspirations that have endured times of challenge. 

These events are by, about, and for Black Womxn. We are asking for only people who identify as Black women/womxn and POC folx of diverse genders to attend this event.

DIGITAL VIA ZOOM
Part I: Long Table
Strength & Solidarity: A Re/Connecting Of Black Womxn Artists
APR 1, 7:00-9:00 PM

Guest Host: Alice Sheppard
Core Participants: Kayla Hamilton, nia love, Shalewa Mackall, Channie Waites

Poet June Jordan reminded us that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Black dance artists who also experience gender oppression as non-binary, cis, fluid, trans, femme, a-gen folx continually answer the call to address a world that often excludes us. Let’s come together and check in with one another at this Long Table. How can we co-learn as we navigate careers in the dance field? How can we make room for being vulnerable and open with each other? We don’t know everything and don’t have to pretend we do. Instead, let’s hold space for all of our uniquely singular identities, experiences, intersectionalities, challenges—and wins!

CANCELED
Part II: Networking Night
Working Our Collective Knowledge
MAY 20, 7:00-9:00 PM

Facilitator: Indira Goodwine

Following our April Long Table (Strength and Solidarity: A Re/Connecting of Black Womxn Artists), we gather again to explore next steps and future possibilities for Black dance artists and art administrators. We continue to (re)build our individual and collective practice. We take the time to celebrate showing up as our full selves. Let’s focus on building relationships and get in touch with how each of us can both offer and receive a better quality of support.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Indira Goodwine is the new Program Director for Dance at the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) where she directs NEFA’s National Dance Project and major dance initiatives in New England. With a dual background in dance and arts administration, Indira most recently served as the Managing Director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers (CABD) where she shepherded the organization through the attainment of 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, established the organization’s founding Board of Directors, enhanced the institutional and individual fundraising efforts, and provided oversight of the development, implementation and continued growth of CABD’s dance engagement program, “EVERY BODY MOVE.” Prior to her leadership role with CABD, Indira held positions at Harlem Stage, collaborating with operations, community partnerships, finance, and programming of the annual dance program, “E-Moves.” A 2016 New York Community Trust Fellow, she has participated in notable programs, such as the American Express Leadership Academy and Dance/USA’s DILT Program, contributed to various panel discussions within the field of dance, and received several awards and citations for her work professionally and within her community. Indira holds a BFA in Dance Performance from Florida State University and an MA in Performing Arts Administration from New York University.

Kayla Hamilton is an artist, producer, and educator originally from Texarkana, Texas and now reside in Bronx, NY. Kayla earned a BA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University and an MS Ed in Special Education from Hunter College. She is a member of the 2017 Bessie-award winning collective of the Skeleton Architecture, the future of our world’s curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. In addition to Skeleton Architecture, Kayla dance with Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, Gesel Mason Performance Projects and Maria Bauman-Morales/MBDance. Kayla’s movement explorations have been supported by Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New Live Arts, Paloma McGregor/Angela’s Pulses’ Dancing While Black and Movement Research. Under the name K. Hamilton Projects, Kayla self-produced numerous projects, organizes community events, and write arts integrated curriculum throughout NYC. When Kayla is not dancing, she’s a special education teacher at the Highbridge Green School who loves to watch Law and Order on Hulu while sipping on peppermint tea.

nia love is a choreographer, performer, grand/mother, educator and activist. Her early dance training at the Washington Ballet and Duke Ellington High School of the Arts led her to apprentice with Alicia Alonzo and the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. She earned her B.A. in Theater Directing from Howard University in 1987, and her first major choreographic work received the L.A. Young Choreographer’s Award. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts from Florida State University in 1992 and was awarded the Delores Auzenne Fellowship for Choreography. In 1999, she formed her company Blacksmith’s Daughter and from 2000-02 she studied in Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship. She was a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, and a BAX Artist-in-Residence with the LOVE| FORTÉ Collective. She was awarded a “Bessie” Award 2017 for Outstanding Performer as part of the skeleton architecture collective, assembled by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. Currently, she is the Artistic Advisor to the Brooklyn Arts Exchange/BAX Artists-in-Residence and the New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks programs, and she teaches at Bard College, The New School, and CUNY Queens College. She is the recipient of a 2019-20 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship and is currently working with Liz Lerman on a new work, Wicked Bodies. 

Shalewa Mackall is inspired by aesthetic traditions and creative movements that recycle, repurpose, and reinvent. Layering identity and experience, Mackall writes, teaches, bakes, choreographs, and performs in Brooklyn. A two-time VONA/Voices Alum, she is currently developing a literary and performance project weaving the threads of movement, memory, and magic into an exploration of her personal narrative of life as a Garifuna-American woman in midlife. Her poetry has appeared in Lament for the Dead and The Visible Poetry Project and has been performed as part of the 50in50 Project.

Alice Sheppard studied ballet and modern dance with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. Sheppard joined AXIS Dance Company, an Oakland-based company where she toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent artist, Sheppard has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the United Kingdom and Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton in the United States.

An award-winning choreographer, Alice creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging with disability arts, culture and history, Alice’s commissioned work attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race. Alice is the founder and artistic lead for Kinetic Light, a project based collaborative working at the intersections of architecture, dance, design, identity, and technology to show how mobility – literal, physical, and conceptual – is fundamental to participation in civic life.

Channie Waites is a performing artist, voice-over artist, director, facilitator, educator and program consultant. She has worked and collaborated with youth, senior citizens and social justice leadership programs in the United States, Rwanda and South Africa. As well as facilitated workshops within supportive housing communities and within corrections facilities. Channie has toured and performed professionally within the United States and abroad. She is the actor for Literature to Life’s one-person adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk. Channie recently inhabited the role of Prospero in The Tempest with Connecticut Free Shakespeare and Dandelion Productions. Channie was a co-founder of Capacity Arts, a theatre collective that created highly interactive historical dramas and developed tailored leadership workshops to lift-up untold stories, build empathy across dividing lines, and deepen participants’ analysis of historical and present-day conditions. Channie has been program director for The International Theater Project (ITP) –Rwanda for the last five years where she has co-directed five original plays devised by youth and led professional developments in Rwanda. Channie has a M.A. in Applied Theatre from the School of Professional Studies-CUNY and has a B.A. in Theatre from Penn State University.

Photo of Kayla Hamilton by Travis Magee.

ACCESSIBILITY

Gibney 280 Broadway is accessible via elevator from the main entrance at 53A Chambers Street.

We welcome the opportunity to make this event more accessible. Please refrain from wearing scented products, so that people with chemical sensitivities can join us. Please request ASL interpreting, audio description, or open captioning 30 days before the event or submit other requests by completing our Access Requests and Inquiries Form or calling 646.837.6809 (Voice only).