The Zaccho Studio AiR Program extends subsidized studio space to outstanding established and emerging artists in the fields of contemporary dance, aerial dance, circus art, and theatre. Each Zaccho Resident Artist and Company is given a platform to engage topics specific and relevant to their personal movement research as well as an opportunity to present affordable master classes and professional showings at Zaccho Studio. Resident Artists and Companies also gain visibility through representation in Zaccho’s widespread media campaign and blog.
Please see the AiR Application for specific details on the Zaccho Artist in Residence program. Zaccho Studio accepts AiR proposals on a rolling basis and are assessed based on the quality of the proposal and studio availability. Starting this year, Zaccho Studio will accept AiR proposals twice a year – in the Spring and in the Fall. The Spring 2024 deadline is May 3rd, 2024. The Fall 2024 deadline is October 1st, 2024. Applications are assessed based on the quality of the proposal and studio availability.
Amy Seiwert’s Imagery, a contemporary ballet company in San Francisco, believes that ballet is an expressive and vital voice relevant to our times. Imagery’s artists share the belief that through collaboration & experimentation, vibrant and courageous ideas are expressed and habitual reactions are discouraged. Imagery’s mission is to expand the definition of ballet by exploding preconceptions of what ballet is and can be.
Dan Griffiths is an award winning theatre maker, director, and teacher. He has created and performed numerous original theatrical works in over 45 states and 25 countries since 1988. and has served as faculty for Clown Conservatory San Francisco, The School for Mime Theater, Columbia College Chicago, Roosevelt University, Academy of Art University and Indiana University Northwest. Most recently he taught Clown at The Wu Qiao International Circus Festival in Shijiazhuang China and at The Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater. Dan has studied with Marcel Marceau, Gregg Goldston, Moni Yakim, David Shiner, Stefan Niedzialkowski, at The School for Mime Theatre and The Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater. Dan holds an M.A. in Experimental Performance from New College of California and an M.F.A in Interdisciplinary Art from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Jo Kreiter is a nationally recognized choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. She makes large scale public art via apparatus-based dance. She engages physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Her work democratizes public space. Jo has spent 25 years building coalitions with women marginalized by race, class, gender, and workplace inequities. Noted partners include Essie Justice Group, UC Hastings Center for Work-life Law, Tenderloin Museum, Code Tenderloin, Au Co Vietnamese Cultural Center, and Tradeswomen Inc.
Recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020); Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship (2017-2019); the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Creation Grant (2017-2020); and the California Arts Council’s Creative California’s Communities Award (2017-2019). Additionally, Kreiter/Flyaway is a recipient of five Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (2010 to 2019).
(You can see more Awards and Honors in the following section)
Her articles have been published in Aerial Dance, Contact Quarterly, In Dance, STREET ART San Francisco, and Site Dance — the first book written on contemporary site specific performance. In the 2015 book, “Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performances” by Victoria Hunter and published by Rutledge press, Jo Kreiter’s work is highlighted in the chapter, “Civic Interventions: Accessing Community” using her work as an example of “the politically-driven work of the experienced and prolific site dance artists.”
She is currently creating The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time. PART ONE (2019), The Wait Room, honors women with incarcerated loved ones. It has been performed in San Francisco and Richmond, CA, and next to Sing Sing Prison in NY; PART TWO (2021), Meet Us Quickly With Your Mercy, calls Black and Jewish voices to work together to amplify racial justice via an end to mass incarceration; PART THREE (2022), The Apparatus of Repair, centers restorative justice via a creative process, from which material will be transformed into public art.
She is also the founder of GIRLFLY (founded 2006), an award-winning dance and activism program addressing the lack of arts training opportunities and gender-specific social pressures faced by low-income teen girls/GNC youth. She started GIRLFLY because she felt that her generation has failed to create a full state of equity for women and girls, and GIRLFLY is her way of addressing that challenge.
BODYSONNET
Founded in 2019, BODYSONNET is a collective of contemporary dance makers and performers committed to making work in non-traditional spaces. BODYSONNET initiates projects in an array of communities that provide unique and inclusive performance experiences. While the collective’s most fluent language is dance, the work also demonstrates the intersection of many mediums. To create highly collaborative work, BODYSONNET employs horizontal working practices and considers every artist in the room equal parts dancer and creator. The collective has produced full length performances, dance films, zines, and mixed bills for virtual and live audiences in Northwest Arkansas, San Francisco, The Hudson Valley, New York City, and Western Massachusetts.
OTHERSELF
OtherSelf is a mixed bill of three duets produced by BODYSONNET. Each duet takes a different stance on the dynamic of the two bodies in space as a vulnerable and evocative performance device. OtherSelf features world premieres by a cohort of dance artists who harness the power of self production to present an evening of post contemporary dance through the lens of the next generation of multi hyphenate creatives.
June 3-4 2023
PRODUCER BIOGRAPHIES
Charmaine Butcher (she/they) is a dance artist based out of San Francisco. They received training from Alonzo King LINES Ballet's Training Program in San Francisco. Charmaine has worked with Coriolis Dance, Post:Ballet, the Seattle Opera, Sharp & Fine, and Verlaine & McCann’s. Charmaine is a co-producer of OtherSelf.
Babatunji (he/him) began as a self-taught street performer, developing a unique approach to various styles of hip hop such as breakdance, popping, and krump. Babatunji has danced professionally with Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, Post:ballet, Ballare Carmel. He is a Princess Grace Award and Chris Hellman Award recipient. Babatunji is a co-producer of OtherSelf.
Moscelyne ParkeHarrison is a bi-coastal dance maker currently living in San Francisco. She is a graduate of The Juilliard School where she received the Joseph W. Polisi Award for Artist as Citizen. ParkeHarrison is Artistic Director of BODYSONNET, Resident Choreographer of Post:ballet, and a director of OtherSelves.
website: mzparkeharrison.com
Hope Mohr
Hope Mohr (she/her) has woven art and activism for decades as a choreographer, curator, community organizer, and writer.
As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown.
As a choreographer, Mohr makes work that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that just ride underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). Her work has been presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space (LA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Sonoma), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), SFMOMA, ODC Theater, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
She was named to the YBCA 100 in 2015 and was a 2016 YBCA Fellow. In 2014, Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron named Mohr as one of the “women leaders” in the dance field. She has held artist residencies at the Petronio Residency Center, Stanford Arts Institute, Bethany Arts Center, ODC Theater, Montalvo Arts Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for Art, Nature and Dance. Mohr's book, Shifting Cultural Power, is out now from the National Center for Choreography.
In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance to create, present and foster outstanding art at the intersection of the body and the brain. In 2010, she founded HMD's core program, The Bridge Project, to create and support equity-driven live art and center artists as agents of change. In 2020, she co-stewarded the organization’s transition to a model of distributed leadership and name change to Bridge Live Arts.
KT Nelson is an urban farmer, choreographer, and dedicated advocate for emerging artists and the environment. She was a dancer, choreographer, and co-artistic director of ODC/Dance from 1976 to 2020. Nelson has been awarded the Isadora Duncan Award four times: in 1987 for Outstanding Performance, in 1996 and 2012 for Outstanding Choreography, and in 2001 for Sustained Achievement. Her collaborators have included Berkeley Symphony, Bobby McFerrin, Geoff Hoyle, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Zap Mana, and Joan Jeanrenaud. Her most recent work, Path of Miracles, with ODC and Volti Vocal Ensemble received a NEFA National Dance Production touring grant. Nelson’s Dead Reckoning was presented in 2018 at Jacob’s Pillow and in the 2020 American Dance Platform at the Joyce Theater (see Fighting Climate Change with Dance | KQED Arts). Her collaboration with Brenda Way, boulders and bones, was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2017 Next Wave Festival. In 2012, she created new work for the Western Michigan University as part of their Great Works Dance Project. In 2008, her work RingRoundRozi, in collaboration with French-Canadian Composer Linda Bouchard, was selected to be performed at the 2008 Tanzmesse International Dance Festival and her collaboration One Long Breath with Korean based artist Na-Hoon Park was presented at the 2018 MODAFE Festival. In 1986, Nelson choreographed and directed ODC’s family production, The Velveteen Rabbit, which has been part of the San Francisco holiday tradition for the past 36 years. In addition to her work as a choreographer, Nelson served on the Zellerbach Community Arts Panel, ran the summer dance department for the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University 2003-2006, founded the ODC Dance Jam in 1997 and played a major role defining and implementing ODC’s outreach projects. She has mentored with Margaret Jenkin’s Chime Project and is a co-founder and mentor at RoundAntennae.
Yayoi Kambara has been a Bay Area artist since 2000. Kambara was a company member with ODC/Dance 2003–2015 and danced as a freelance artist with numerous Bay Area Dance Companies including Sara Shelton Mann Contraband, Scott Wells and Dancers, Flyaway Productions, Deborah Slater Dance Theater, STEAMROLLER, and Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians. She was the Rehearsal Director for AXIS Dance Company during Judith Smith's sabbatical in 2015 and continues to teach company class for AXIS. Kambara currently choreographs and creates staging for Opera Parallel, and Center for Contemporary Opera integrating visual design, including film, with voice and physical storytelling.
KAMBARA+ was founded in 2015 after her retirement from ODC Dance as a vehicle to produce her choreography, focusing on producing dance performance experiences that cultivate a sense of belonging. KAMBARA+ defines equity as belonging. As a creative partner in the studio, performer, or in the audience, belonging is the bridge built to narrate and perform new dynamic works. In her choreographic work, Kambara is interested in the authentic voice of the body and its inherent identity in performance. She focuses her choreography on diverse cultural, economic, and ethnic differences by creating space for empathy and dialogue. In a world becoming alarmingly more conservative and segregated, taking time to create with a diverse cast is her way of preserving optimism as dance can represent the ineffable resiliency of the human spirit to continue in the face of uncertainty.
Currently Kambara is curating a dance performance series at the Asian Art Museum responding to the varied diasporic histories within the Asian American community. She is finishing the final months of the 4th cohort of Association of Performing Arts Professionals Leadership Fellows, a program co-directed by Kenneth Foster and Krista Bradely. She is also a lead artist for Hope Mohr Dance's Bridge Project and leads Aesthetic Shift, a yearlong Community Engagement Residency. Aesthetic Shift is an exchange between dance educators, social justice activists, dancers and choreographers dedicated to interrogating and analyzing the overlap between equity values, creative practices, and organizations.
