Expanding Gibney’s support for dance artists in New York City, OPEN INTERVAL is a residency program for emerging and established choreographers created through a pioneering partnership between Gibney and the Simons Foundation. Focusing on research and process to explore the connections between science and dance, the 10-month residency features significant support for two curated artists–a $10,000 stipend and 100 hours of free studio space at Gibney. In OPEN INTERVAL, each choreographer is paired with a scientist based at the Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute. Together, artist and scientist develop unique ways to conduct informal and non-product oriented research and experiments related to their individual practices and professions through exchange, dialogue, collaboration, and play.

The third year of the residency in 2024-2025 welcomes choreographer, performer and producer Sophia Noel working with Research Fellow Kyle Eskridge, Ph.D., and choreographer, dancer and teacher Colin Heininger working with Research Fellow Joseph Long, Ph.D.

In a special initiative within the Open Interval Residency program,  Gibney and the Simons Foundation will facilitate a unique collaboration between the American postmodern dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs, known for her unique style of choreography that utilizes patterns, repetition, dialect and technology, and Michael Shelley, Ph.D., an applied mathematician and director of the Center for Computational Biology at the Flatiron Institute. Taking place in the spring of 2025, this collaboration is in the context of the creation of a new work by Childs for Gibney Company, the contemporary repertory dance company led by Gina Gibney, Artistic Director and Gilbert T Small II, Company Director, which will premiere  at The Joyce Theater on May 6, 2025.

The mission of the Simons Foundation is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.

Co-founded in 1994 in New York City by Jim and Marilyn Simons, the foundation exists to support basic — or discovery-driven — scientific research undertaken in the pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world. Marilyn Simons served as president of the foundation until 2021, when David Spergel was appointed president of the foundation.

The Simons Foundation’s support of science takes two forms: They support research by making grants to individual investigators and their projects through academic institutions; and with the launch of the Flatiron Institute in 2016, they now conduct scientific research in-house, supporting teams of top computational scientists.

The foundation’s Science, Society & Culture division seeks to provide opportunities for people to forge a connection to science — whether for the first time or a lifetime. Through their initiatives, they work to inspire a feeling of awe and wonder, foster connections between people and science, and support environments that provide a sense of belonging.

simonsfoundation.org

SOPHIA NOEL

Sophia Noel is a New York-based contemporary dancer, known for blending Hip-Hop, Salsa, Swing, and Ballet into her dynamic performances. After spending five years in Tokyo as a professional dancer, model, and actor, she honed her craft further at Steps on Broadway in Manhattan. Alongside her work as a choreographer and performer, Sophia is the executive producer of Tonari, a cross-cultural and cross-generational storytelling project. Tonari debuted as a live performance in Tokyo and San Francisco, and its evolution into an award-winning short film continues to inspire audiences with its fusion of jazz and contemporary dance. Sophia holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University.

KYLE ESKRIDGE

Kyle Eskridge joined the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) as a Flatiron Research Fellow in June of 2023. His main focus is contributing to the ongoing auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) software project, which aims to provide a usable, general purpose open source AFQMC code to the scientific community. Prior to joining the CCQ, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at William & Mary where he implemented spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in ab initio AFQMC and applied it to single molecule magnets. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. from William & Mary in physics.

COLIN HEININGER

Colin Heininger is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher based in New York City. He recently has danced for Twyla Tharp, ZviDance, and Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, where he has also served as company coordinator and rehearsal director. Originally from Hollidaysburg, PA, Colin graduated as an Honors Scholar with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Musical Theater from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he was named the Valedictorian of the School of Dance and received a full tuition scholarship. In the past couple of years, Colin has set work on Peridance Contemporary Dance Company and the Youth Ensemble at Peridance, was commissioned to create a new work in New Hampshire for the Lila Dance Festival, has premiered works at The Brick Theater during several ?!:New Work festivals, has shown work at Dixon Place, is a choreographer for Dance Lab New York’s Fall 2024 Cycle, and is creating a new work on the BFA students at Ailey/Fordham.

As a dancer they have performed works by Sharon Eyal, Ohad Naharin, johannes wieland, Robert Battle, Netta Yerushalmy, Andrea Miller, Helen Simoneau, Beth Gill, Sidra Bell, Norbert de la Cruz III, Adam Barruch, Yue Yin, Yoshito Sakuraba, Alice Klock, Jae Man Joo, Tommie Waheed-Evans, and Igal Perry. In addition, Colin attended the Jacob’s Pillow Contemporary program and Springboard Danse Montreal. Outside of the company, Colin teaches on faculty at the School of Peridance and is a professional math tutor.

JOSEPH LONG

Joseph Long joined the Center for Computational Astrophysics as a Software Flatiron Research Fellow in September 2023. He works on exoplanet and disk direct imaging, with a focus on data-intensive approaches for post-processing data to improve contrast. He is a member of the MagAO-X instrument team, developing extreme adaptive optics technology for high-contrast imaging on current and future telescopes.

Long earned his Ph.D. in astronomy & astrophysics from the University of Arizona in 2023. Prior to graduate school, he earned a B.A. in physics from Pomona College and worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where he supported James Webb Space Telescope and Roman Space Telescope mission preparations with optical simulations.

LUCINDA CHILDS 

Lucinda Childs began her career as choreographer in the early 1960s, as a member of the seminal Judson Dance Theater. She formed her own company in 1973 and three years later was featured in the landmark avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, for which she won an Obie Award. In 1977, she and Wilson co-directed and performed in I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, which they revived for the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 2021, where they also created an evening length work titled, Bach 6 Solo with the violinist Jennifer Koh.

In 1979, Childs choreographed one of her most enduring works, Dance with music by Philip Glass and film décor by Sol LeWitt, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Dance toured internationally and has been added to the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet, for which she has also choreographed Beethoven’s Grande Fugue. In 2015 she revived Available Light, created in 1983 with music by John Adams and a split-level set by Frank Gehry, for the Festival d’Automne in Paris. Available Light was presented at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York in 2018 and that same year Childs’s company performed some of her early work as part of the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In addition to work for her own group, Childs has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies. She has also directed and choreographed a number of contemporary and eighteenth-century operas, most recently, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten for l’Opéra de Nice Côte d’Azur with Childs’s role as the narrator on film. The premier was streamed in November 2020, and live performances took place in Nice in November 2021, and won the 2021 trophy for Best Lyrical Production by Opera Forum readers. Her additional opera productions include Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice for the Los Angeles Opera; Mozart’s Zaide, Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex, Vivaldi’s Farnace, and John Adams’s Dr. Atomic for the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg; Handel’s Alessandro at the Megaron Concert Hall in Athens; and Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys and Jean-Marie Leclaire’s Scylla and Glaucus for the Theater Kiel in Germany.

Childs holds the rank of Commandeur in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 she received the Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival award for lifetime achievement. She has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York, and received an honorary doctorate from the Université Côte d’Azur in 2021.

MICHAEL SHELLEY

Michael Shelley joined the Simons Foundation in 2016 to work on the modeling and simulation of complex systems arising in physics and biology. He is an applied mathematician who co-founded and co-directs the Courant Institute’s Applied Mathematics Laboratory at New York University. Shelley joined the Courant Institute in 1992 and is the Lilian and George Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics. He holds a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Arizona. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and a member of the mathematics faculty at the University of Chicago before joining NYU. Shelley has received the François Frenkiel Award from the American Physical Society and the Julian Cole Lectureship from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and he is a Fellow of both societies. He is also an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

YARA TRAVIESO & AMIN NEJATBAKHSH, Ph.D.

YARA TRAVIESO, ANTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST  

Yara Travieso is a Brooklyn based Cuban-Venezuelan-American anti-disciplinary artist (writer, director, filmmaker, & choreographer). Her films, performances, protests, and rituals are informed by a hyper womanist magical-telenovela-queeralism. She is a 2023 Resident Artist with NYC’s Chelsea Factory, a  2021 New York State Council For The Arts Individual Artist in Film & Media grant recipient, a 2019 United States Artist Fellow, a 2016 Creative Capital recipient, and a 2014 winner of The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant via The Ford Foundation. She is currently teaching an original course on multidisciplinary practices at The Juilliard School, where she received the 2023 John Erskine Juilliard Faculty Prize, as well as a Dance BFA in 2009. Travieso’s productions have been featured in NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Performance Space NY, The Public Theater, The Knockdown Center, The High Line, Opéra National de Lorraine France, New World Symphony Center, & The Experimental Media Performing Arts Center among others. Her films have been presented with El Museo, Film at Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, PBS, SXSW, NY Latino Film Festival, Museum of The Moving Image among others. VICE describes La Medea, Travieso’s touring production as “A modern-day Medea is mythology’s 'Nasty Woman’. Travieso co-founded the Borscht Film Festival in 2005 and co-ran it until 2010 when it was named “the weirdest film festival on the planet” by IndieWire and received the prestigious Knights Arts Grant and the Miami New Times Mastermind Award. In 2019 she collaborated with The Women's March and Chilean Feminist collective, LASTESIS to lead a performance protest of 25k women in front of the White House. In 2022 Travieso created ¡EPA! A healing ritual/party/happening aimed to raise significant funds, coats, and solidarity for our NYC asylum seekers in collaboration with NYC’s historic, The Clemente. She has led talks and lectures with: The Ford Foundation, The Park Avenue Armory, MoMa, BAM, NYU, National YoungArts Foundation (‘05 alum), Fordham, The New School, UnionDocs, and Ghetto Film School, among others. She is the recipient of residencies such as: EMPAC, PS122 RAMP, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BRICLab, STREB, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and The Bessie Schonberg AIR, among others.

AMIN NEJATBAKHSH, PH.D, FLATIRON RESEARCH FELLOW, CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE, FLATIRON INSTITUTE

I am a Flatiron Research Fellow in the Center for Computational Neuroscience and a Visiting Scholar at NYU. I completed my Ph.D. in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University primarily advised by Liam Paninski.

I work on statistical modeling of neural data and the overarching goal of my research is to causally understand biological and artificial recurrent neural networks and dynamical mechanisms therein. I’m interested in a wide range of topics including machine learning, statistics, causal inference, dynamical systems, neuroscience, and computer vision.

In ML and statistics, I’ve worked on applied optimal transport, partial information decomposition, switching linear dynamical systems, causal dynamical systems, and covariance estimation.

In computer vision, I’ve built automated tools for the segmentation, detection, and tracking of cells in microscopy images and videos. I’ve also developed statistical atlas construction methods for capturing structural variability across a population of animals. I’ve also extended non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to deformable NMF and applied it to calcium demixing in non-stationary videos.

In computational neuroscience, I’ve developed and applied functional and interventional connectivity estimation techniques. I’m currently working on representational similarity analysis for comparing neural representation across animals, species, and neural networks.

PALOMA MCGREGOR & TATYANA GAVRILCHENKO, PH.D.

PALOMA MCGREGOR, CHOREOGRAPHER

Paloma McGregor (Founder, Angela’s Pulse) is a Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer who makes Black work with Black folks for Black space. A former newspaper reporter, she combines a choreographer’s craft, journalist’s urgency and anti-racist organizer’s framework to activate creative communities and shepherd collaborative visioning. 

McGregor is currently developing “A’we deh ya (All of us are here)”, a multi-year, interdisciplinary performance project that activates a choreographic call-and-response between the US mainland and her homeland, St. Croix, a current US colony at the frontlines of climate emergency. The first iteration, a dance film, was screened at film festivals in the US and internationally, and won Best Screendance Film award at the 2022 Denton Black Film Festival. In October 2022, McGregor performed a site-based solo iteration of the work at Loophole of Retreat, a gathering of Black women scholars and artists hosted by Simone Leigh as part of the Venice Biennale. “A'we” is the latest iteration of her project “Building a Better Fishtrap,” rooted in her father’s vanishing fishing tradition and three animating questions she’s asked since leaving her ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim? 

Working at the growing edge of her field, McGregor received a 2020 Soros Arts Fellowship and a 2022 National Dance Project grant for her choreographic work and has been an inaugural recipient of several major awards for her art-making and organizing, including: Mosaic Network & Fund (2020); Dance/USA’s Fellowship to Artists (2019); Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Institute Fellowship (2018); and Surdna Foundation’s Artists Engaging in Social Change (2015). In 2017, she won a “Bessie” Award for performance with skeleton architecture, a collective of Black women(+) improvisers. Paloma is currently an artist in residence at BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance as a recipient of the Artist Employment Program of Creative Rebuild New York. 

In addition to her art-making, McGregor has spent more than a decade investing in the leadership of other Black dance artists through Dancing While Black (DWB), which she founded in 2012 as a platform for community-building, intergenerational exchange and visibility among Black dance artists whose work, like hers, doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. She does all this work as founder of Angela’s Pulse, which cultivates art-making as a means of community-building, activating vision and illuminating bold stories.

TATYANA GAVRILCHENKO, PH.D., FLATIRON RESEARCH FELLOW, DEVELOPMENTAL DYNAMICS, CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY, FLATIRON INSTITUTE

Tatyana Gavrilchenko joined the Flatiron Institute in 2019 as a member of the Center for Computational Biology. She completed her graduate studies in physics at the University of Pennsylvania, studying the structure and function of biological fluid flow networks. Her current work focuses on searching for underlying physical principles of embryo development and tissue reorganization.

MARLA PHELAN & BLAKESLEY BURKHART, Ph.D.

Photo by Umi Akiyoshi

MARLA PHELAN, DANCER/CHOREOGRAPHER  

Marla Phelan is a New York City choreographer working within film, fashion, and stage to create movement at the intersection of technical rigor and intuitive humanness. Phelan’s work celebrates the profound strength of human connection and examines the turbulence of change by portraying defiant characters at the threshold of transformation.

She is a 2022-2023 Simons Foundation & Gibney Open Interval Resident Artist, a 2023 LMCC grant recipient for her upcoming multichannel film installation, Obscure Passage, a 2022 Sacred Heart University Emerging Choreographic Fellow, a 2021 Studio to Stage Resident Artist with Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company, and a 2020 AKC Fund Inc. grantee. Phelan founded the creative initiative, Movement Museum, through Gibney’s 2020-2022 Moving Toward Justice Fellowship, providing mentorship and career expansion to dance artists. 

Her work has premiered at Films at Lincoln Center, Future Dance Festival, SXSW, Dance Camera West, FringeARTS, WestFest, Dixon Place, Gibney Center, Edgerton Center, Jack Crystal Theater, PepsiCo Theater, KnJ Theater and publications Nowness, V Magazine, Refinery29, The NYTimes, and NYMagazine. Phelan directed and choreographed the award-winning short film The Fell of Dark and has directed movement for Fischerspooner, Michael C Hall, RCHRDSN Studio, Comedy Central, NBC, CBS, and brand campaigns for Maison Margiela, Mazda, GAP, Reebok, LOLA, and Stuart Weitzman. Currently, she is the Associate Choreographer/ Director to Broadway’s National Tour of Fiddler on the Roof.

Phelan has danced for Gibney Company, Hofesh Shechter Company, Akram Khan, Azure Barton, Company XIV, Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof, and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and The Drowned Man. Phelan trained at The Juilliard School (BFA 2009), is on faculty at Mark Morris Dance Center, and has led workshops at NYU Tisch, Bard College, and Washington University.

marlaphelan.com

BLAKESLEY BURKHART, PH.D, ASSOCIATE RESEARCH SCIENTIST, CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL ASTROPHYSICS, FLATIRON INSTITUTE

Blakesley Burkhart, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute. Her areas of focus include star formation, studies of the dynamics of the gases that fill the space between stars, and the turbulent nature of galaxies near and far. Burkhart has received numerous research awards including the American Astronomical Society’s Annie Jump Cannon Award and the American Physical Society’s Maria Goeppert Mayer Award. She is a 2020 Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering and a 2021 Sloan Fellow, which are among the most prestigious awards available to young scientific researchers.

RAJA FEATHER KELLY & LATOYA ANDERSON

Photo by Kate Enman

RAJA FEATHER KELLY, CHOREOGRAPHER/DIRECTOR 

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T)–a Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company that he founded in 2009. Over the past decade, he has created 18 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim, most recently WEDNESDAY (New York Live Arts), and the UGLY trilogy (Bushwick Starr, New York Live Arts, and ImPulsTanz/Chelsea Factory). TF3T’s forthcoming work, The Absolute Future, will premiere in 2024.His choreography can currently be seen in White Girl in Danger at the Second Stage Kiser Theater (2023), written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. He choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon) and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA)–both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He was hailed by The New York Times as the choreographer who “can make your play move” for his extensive work Off-Broadway. Recent credits include Bunny Bunny (UC San Diego–the first production outside of TF3T for which he was the writer, director, and choreographer), –We’re Gonna Die (Second Stage Theater–his directorial debut), SUFFS (The Public Theater), and Lempicka (La Jolla Playhouse). Frequent collaborators include Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Benson, and Michael R. Jackson. Other theatre credits include choreography for Skittles Commercial: The Musical (Town Hall), The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente (Soho Rep), If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka (Playwrights Horizons), The Good Swimmer (BAM), and The Listeners (Oslo Opera). He recently choreographed Scenes for an Ending in collaboration with musician Emily Weeks for the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company.

He has received dozens of awards, fellowships and honors including a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2023-2025), a Mellon Foundation grant (2021), an Obie Award and Outer Critics Circle Award honor for choreography for A Strange Loop (2020), an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2021), a Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts (2019–2020), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019–2021), a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award (2009), a Creative Capital Award (2019), three Princess Grace Awards (2017-2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine‘s inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), a Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter (2018), and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (2017), a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard (2017), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), an ImPulsTanz Festival DanceWEB Scholarship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship (2016). He was featured on the cover of the February 2020 issue of Dance Magazine. 

Kelly has performed with Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, David Dorfman Dance, Kyle Abraham|Abraham.In.Motion, and zoe | juniper. He has also managed a number of dance companies: Race Dance, Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, zoe | juniper, and Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group.

Kelly has held teaching positions at universities nationwide, including Yale, Princeton, The Juilliard School, and New York University, among others. He is a Quinn Martin directing fellow at the University of California San Diego. 

He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College. He is currently earning a Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute certificate as an Ecker Fellow in Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts.

the feath3r theory

LATOYA ANDERSON, ASSOCIATE RESEARCH ANALYST, CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL ASTROPHYSICS, FLATIRON INSTITUTE

LaToya Anderson is an associate research analyst for the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute. Her research focuses on analyzing the electronic properties of 2d materials using computational materials science methods which won her the Best Student Oral Presentation Award in Condensed Matter Physics at the 2022 National Society of Black Physicists conference. She is also an AstroCom NYC and Team-Up Together Fellow while earning a B.S. degree in physics at Brooklyn College. She previously studied ballet and modern dance for over 10 years where she trained at the Peridance Center and the Alvin Ailey Summer Dance Program and went on to earn her B.A. degree in dance performance from New School University.