Veronica Blair is a professional aerialist with over 15 years of performing and teaching experience. She is currently Aerial Director for Celebrity Cruises Entertainment

Expanding her portfolio beyond performing, Veronica launched the development of “The Uncle Junior Project” in 2010. The ongoing documentary shines a light on the careers of African-American circus performers, including Emanual “Uncle Junior” Ruffin who remained largely uncredited for his contributions to American Circus until after his death. In 2010, she was invited to speak at the Smithsonian FolkLife Festival about her experience as producer and director of “The Uncle Junior Project”, and served as organizer and moderator on a panel highlighting the African-American circus experience. She’s also worked with the African-American Art and Culture Complex to stage "Entrapment to Entertainment: A Celebration of Blacks in American Circus", a three-month exhibition that ran from October, 2013 – January 2014 with over 1,000 attendees.

Since graduating from London Contemporary in 1984 Lindsey has worked with numerous dance, theatre and opera companies as a dancer, aerialist, teacher, mentor & choreographer. Her dance credits include; Extemporary Dance Theatre, Walker Dance/ Park Music, Darshan Singh Bhuller, Vincent Dance Theatre & Siobhan Davies Dance Company. Circus credits include; Ra-Ra Zoo, Gandini Juggling Project, The Dream Engine, Scarabeus, Momentary Fusion, Fidget Feet and Upswing to name a few. As a dance and aerial practitioner she has over 36 years of professional practise and has been creating vertical-dance for almost 20 years. In 2003, (after winning the Jerwood Award for Circus), Lindsey founded the aerial dance company, Gravity & Levity (G&L) to provide a vehicle for her artistic vision. What drives her work is a passion and curiosity for combining dance and aerial suspension techniques to liberate and intensify the possibilities of each. Under Lindsey’s direction, G&L have created 3 full length touring aerial dance productions, an outdoor piece and several site-specific commissions and won the Dance for Camera award and are currently touring a re-creation of a piece they made 15 years ago, vertical dance duet ‘Why?’

G&L also founded and run the annual European Aerial Dance Festival in August and have just completed their 10th year.

Much of Lindseys’ aerial choreographic work over the last 20 years has been 'building based' vertical dance commissions and she teaches master classes both in the UK and Internationally; France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Croatia, Canada, Panama & Brazil.

She is also a founder member of the Vertical Dance Forum, a transnational group whose aim is to disseminate this practice and support the development of the art form.

Marco Castelli is one of Italy's most talented sax players with a brilliant and prolific career. He has travelled without prejudice across many different musical languages, highlighting the qualities present in each form of expression, and always pursuing a very personal sound, free of clichés yet rich in emotions and atmospheres. In addition to writing and performing jazz music, Castelli is an orchestra conductor and composer for theatre and modern ballet. As a sound designer, he has creatively interacted with various media: poetry, video art, visual arts.

Castelli has participated in international jazz festivals such as the Singapore Art Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Bohemia Jazz Festival, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Athens Jazz, and San Sebastian, collaborating with prestigious artists like Lee Konitz, Markus Stockhausen, Philip Catherine, and many others. He has brought his music to audiences all over the world: Singapore, Canada, Thailand, Senegal, Tanzania, Morocco, Tunisia, Brazil, Venezuela, Jamaica, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Uruguay, Israel, Jordan, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Portugal, Lithuania, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, and Czech Republic.

At the age of 15 Beth Clarke ran away with the circus, sparking a life-long devotion to the transformative power of movement and creativity. She suspended her studies at Mills College to attend the National Circus School in Montreal where she created a solo slack rope act that she has performed on five continents over twenty five years. She is one of a handful of women to perform foot juggling on the slack rope. Always fascinated with finding balance, in 2009 Beth stopped touring internationally, created the Bay Area circus troop Sweet Can Productions, became a Pilates teacher and married her love and acrobatic partner. Thanks to Pilates, her supportive family, and good fortune, she continues to perform to this day. Beth has been featured in photo books, music videos and the Discovery Channel’s series Amazing Aerialists series. She has performed with many companies including Cirque Du Soleil, Seven Fingers, Pickle Family Circus, and Cirque Eloize. She speaks five languages, is mother to two boys and is doing what she can each day to dismantle white supremacy and smash the patriarchy. YesYouCanPilates.com, SweetCanProductions.com

A lifelong climber, Terry Crane surrendered to restless urges that led him to walk away with the circus at the tender age of twenty. Now a veteran acrobatic performer, he has climbed ropes hung from the truss arches of big tops across the globe and the lofty grids of countless proscenium theaters, as well as the shoulders of many a fellow saltimbanque. He is the director of Acrobatic Conundrum, a contemporary circus company based in Seattle since 2012. Terry delights in sharing his love of aerial technique, circus creation, and collaboration via workshops and performances. He is an alumnus of the National Circus School of Montreal, Oberlin College, and a dozen circus companies. As a director, Terry is on a relentless quest to tell true fictions, contradict human isolation, and portray paradox.

Melanie DeMore is Grammy nominated singer/composer, choral conductor, music director and vocal activist who believes in the power of voices raised together. In her presentations, DeMore beautifully brings her participants together through her music and commentary. DeMore facilitates vocal and stick pounding workshops for professional choirs, community groups as well as directing numerous choral organizations in the Bay Area. She is a featured presenter of SpeakOut!-The Institute for Social and Cultural Change and was a founding member of the Grammy nominated ensemble-Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir. She became Music Director for Obeah Opera by Nicole Brooks as part of the Luminato Festival in 2019. She is a charter member of Kate Munger’s Threshold Choirs and conducts song circles with an emphasis on the voice as a vessel for healing. In here own words: “A song can hold you up when there seems to be no ground beneath you”.

Born in Portugal in 1989, Joana is an aerialist/acro flyer. She began singing and dancing at a young age and was a National Champion in Ballroom Dance for 7 years. From age 18 Joana entered in a Portuguese TV Song Contest, participated in The Eurovision in 2008, and was part of Fame The Musical and High School Musical I and II in Portugal. Joana studied circus at Chapitô in Lisbon, then moved to London to further her circus studies at The National Centre for Circus Arts and earned a BA degree. Since graduating Joana has performed in many circus shows, cabarets, cruises, and events in the UK and abroad. In 2019 she performed with Mimbre, an all female acrobats company, at the Dior Haute Couture Paris Fashion Week and at the Brits Awards. She is a cast member of Bedtime Stories, a family circus awarded show from Upswing. Joana is now in the process of creating her first own solo show called 89.

Pamela Donohoo is Artistic Director of Awaken Circus and Dance Theater and an international performing artist: aerialist, acrobat, dancer, and choreographer. She has worked with performing arts organizations throughout the US and internationally. She has done commercials, award shows, large-scale events and spectacular acrobatic shows.

Pamela received her degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University. She completed field research projects and worked with nonprofit organizations throughout Africa, India, Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research interests include: social justice, peacebuilding, sustainability and the environment, folklore, culture, and history. Pamela specializes in creating socially relevant and globally engaged acrobatic performances. Her vision is to generate art that inspires people to think critically and contribute positively to their world.

pameladonohoo.com

I am Deon Fox. I have been performing on Rope for just over a year. I am located in Seattle Washington where I mainly perform and coach. I have a small resume of performing with Acrobatic Conundrum, Emerald City Trapeze arts and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Since 1980 Joanna has been creating work that uses natural, architectural and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d'Avignon. She has also been honored with the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the United States Artist Fellowship, and a New York Bessie Award. Haigood is also a recipient of the esteemed Doris Duke Artist Award. Joanna has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists internationally at the National École des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, the San Francisco Circus Center and at Zaccho Studio.

Walter Kitundu is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on kinetic sculpture and sound installation, composition, public art, and teaching. He builds (and performs on) extraordinary musical instruments, while researching and documenting the natural world. Kitundu has created hand-built record players driven by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves. In 2008 he received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his art practice, and his capacity to make important cultural contributions. Kitundu was a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice, and in the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a Bay Area resident for 15 years and is honored to be a collaborator on Picture Bayview Hunters Point.

Jo Kreiter is a nationally recognized choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. She engages physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Kreiter’s tools include community collaboration, a masterful use of place, an intersectional feminist lens and a body-based push against the constraints of gravity. She makes large scale public art via apparatus-based dance. 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. Her work has been supported by Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellowships, New England Foundation for the Arts, the and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Work Fund, Wattis and Rainin Foundations, the CA Arts Council, SF Arts Commission, and by seven IZZY awards. She is currently creating The Decarceration Trilogy: Dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex One Dance at a Time.

Lomask sees the world as an amalgam of seemingly contradictory, yet synergistic perspectives. The daughter of a biomedical research engineer and a visual artist, Lomask spent her childhood going to laboratories and gallery openings. She weaves these two worlds into the tapestry of her work, creating highly visual, biological images and rhythms. She is an entrepreneur, a sculptor, a director, a producer, a choreographer, and an environmentalists.

Upon founding Capacitor in 1997, Jodi Lomask began exploring the meeting point between arts, sciences, and new technology. Under her artistic direction, Capacitor created works that tackle the past and future of reproduction (futurespecies 2000), Earth's place in the Universe (Within Outer Spaces 2001), the hero’s journey in video games (Avatars 2002), the deep Earth (Digging in the Dark 2004), forest symbiosis (biome 2007), flower reproduction (The Perfect Flower 2009), the ocean's vital forces (Okeanos 2012), creativity in the mind (Synaptic Motion 2014), early childhood (When We Were Small 2016), and 20 years of sculpture in motion (Left To Her Own Devices 2018). Lomask designs movement structures out of steel, bungee, fiberglass, and wood. Her choreography unites unique characters, original motion sculpture, with articulated movement vocabularies for Capacitor's signature synthesis of visual magic and raw athleticism. Defined by a sculptural approach to the body, costuming, and props, her inventive choreographic solutions emerge from problems born of conceptual, physical, and spatial parameters.

Her events, talks, and panel discussions are direct assaults on confusion - helping people to come together and tackle practical, critical issues. She has produced over a hundred events and has contributed creatively to many more. She has toured as a public speaker do to her ability to effectively bring scientists, technologists, and creatives together to achieve shared goals. Lomask has created for Disney's World Showcase and Future World and consults for IDEO. She has been commissioned to create original works for Apple, NASA, TED, SFO, the Discovery Channel, Computers and Structures, the California Academy of Sciences, The Crucible, and the Salvadorian Olympic Gymnastics Team. She helped launch the Volvo S60 in Malaysia, a new line of activewear with Athleta, and celebrate the mapping of the human genome with Celera. She recently directed a 180 stereoscopic immersive film with Adobe, produced by the SF Dance Film Festival. Her work has been covered by Nature Magazine, The Smithsonian Magazine, Fast Company, Wired.com, Res Magazine, SHIFT Magazine, NBC 11’s Tech NOW!, CNET Radio, TECH TV, NPR, Dance Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, The New York Times, among other media outlets. She appeared in National Geographic's 'Wild Chronicles' with canopy tree ecologist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni in 2007 and Discovery Channels 'Through the Worm Hole' with Morgan Freeman.

A choreographer and researcher, her dance studies focus on systems of proportion and the harmony of the space. She is the first dancer in Italy to have undertaken vertical dance in 1990, developing and spreading this practice before creating a specialist technique and creating performances in which space and movement merge in a single scene. In particular, her artistic project concerns the relationship with the architecture and the landscape, the dance insinuating itself in any vertical environment and conversing with it, adding a value that completes the actual place. Parallel to this is her research on how the structured space influences human movement. Her vertical dance performances have taken place at numerous festivals and various national and international events.

In 1994, she and the musician Marco Castelli founded the Compagnia Il Posto www.ilposto.org in Venice. Since 2000 Moretti has focused her attention on site-specific creations for historical and museum sites. Ideal spaces for reflecting on the past and the future, for emotional explorations and experimentations, these spaces have acted as catalysers of the choreographer’s new artistic direction, in which the relationship with the place is of primary importance. Parallel to her choreographic work, she has also done personal research into the educational potential of dance in a social and extracurricular setting. She participated in the first Training Course for Dance Educators run by the Centro Mousikè in Bologna together with the History of Dance sector of DAMS University of Bologna and Aterballetto.

In 2002, she won the third Museum Education Competition run by the Veneto Regional Government with her project Le arti visive attraverso il corpo e il movimento (visual arts through the body and movement). She carries out educational activities, training courses and workshops for museums and other entities, and for many years has run a research programme working with prisoners in Venice’s women’s prison, developing a dance education pilot project that is the only one of its kind in Italy, working alongside the Ministry of Justice, the Veneto Regional Government and DES – the National Dance Education Association. She is registered with the Albo Nazionale Danzeducatori® (National Dance Educators Institute). In 2007 and 2008 she was a lecturer at the Faculty of Design and Art at the University of Architecture in Venice. Since 2008 she has worked on the M.Ed. in Theatre through Art Education; in 2011, she worked on the M.A. in Pedagogic Actions and Interactions through Narration and Theatrical Education at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan. She was a lecturer at the Faculty of Communication and Art Education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino from 2010 to 2011. She occasionally works with the Faculty of Motor Sciences at the University of Padua.

In 2010, she created the International Vertical Dance Network, which unites the most important companies in the world, a project presented on www.verticaldancecompany.com

In 2011, she created and developed Vertical Suspension Training®, a teaching method for dancers on a vertical plane. Since 2012 she has started a collaboration with the Ca Foscari University in Venice, courses in Design and Innovation Management and in Economics and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities.

In 2015 she created "Habitat Verticali" for the opening of the EXPO in Milan for Cascina Triulza Foundation and again in 2015 she realized the choreographies of the vertical roles of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" for the muscovite Company Ogennie.

Among the most successful creations she realized "Kinetic" in 2009 on commission of ENEL, "Exuvia" in 2010 from Teatro Cargo and Genova Festival, "Atto Bianco" (2012) Kuopio International Festival, "Little Nemo" (2014) International Festival of Bangkok, in 2015 opening of the Venice Carnival "Molto Tesa" on the Tese Cinquecentesche of the Venice Arsenal, "Forme Uniche" in 2016 Invisibles Cities Festival of Gorizia, "Sonora Lux", Teatro Politeama of Lecce. In 2017 "The Hill Sphere" aerial dance creation with 6 dancers suspended on a crane and "Full Wall" commission from Roma Europa Festival. In 2018 #Verdinaria on commission from Teatro Regio di Parma for the opening of the Verdi Festival. Her work has been performed in Italy, Portugal, Morocco, Lithuania, Thailand, Ireland, Croatia, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Botswana, Qatar, England, Slovenia, Macedonia, Finland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Germany, etc.

Moretti is founder member of Vertical Dance Forum composed by 7 European and Canadian Vertical dance companies aims to strength capacity and visibility of the vertical dance. Vertical Dance Forum is Co-funded (2017-2019) by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Annually she conducts training workshops for dancers and international research on vertical dance. Moretti continues with her creations on vertical surfaces and architecture, and publishes texts and articles on vertical dance and the possibilities of learning through the body in movement in relation to the space that surrounds us.

In 2018 at the end of one part of her research “The Routes of Vertical Dance”, she is starting to spread the results in public lectures “First Generation: origin and history”, she is currently engaged in the other parts of the research: “Moon and the Movement” and “Reason”.

She has always been interested in the principles of choreography organization, in the last twenty years Wanda Moretti has proposed new approaches to documentation, research and teaching of vertical dance.

www.ilposto.org
www.verticaldancecompany.com
www.verticaldanceroutes.com

Laine Rettmer is a North American visual artist and opera director. Their work explores performance, gender, desire, and methods of social control. Rettmer’s work has been presented nationally and internationally and their opera productions have been praised as “wickedly smart” and “devastatingly funny” by The New York Times. They teaching performance and digital media in the Sculpture Department at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Amelia is best known as the founder and director of BANDALOOP, a dance company, that for thirty years has been on the vanguard of vertical dance. Based in Oakland, CA., the company performs and teaches locally, tours extensively and creates dance in technical mountain environments. A dancer/athlete, choreographer, writer, filmmaker, public speaker, Amelia shares a belief in our capacity for connection and transformation through creative explorations. Her work activates public and natural spaces, inspiring wonder and positive disorientation in audiences and students around the world. The dynamic, imagistic work, based in the unexpected use of gravity, investigates movement itself, social and environmental justice, human relationships and our connections with natural and built environments. Fusing post-modern dance, rock climbing technology and a spirit of adventure, the performances, which range from large scale shows and technical mountain films to intimate showings, strive to change what dance can be, and what it can do for audiences and communities. Amelia served for three years on the board of Dance USA and as chair of the council of managing directors for mid-sized dance companies. She holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in comparative religion from Swarthmore College and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Amelia has received over 40 grants and commissions and has been supported consistently for over two decades by the National Endowment for the Arts. Shared with millions of viewers worldwide through live performances, broadcasts, viral video and film, Amelia’s vision deploys the transformational and restorative nature of art to initiate a change of perspective, create dialogue and inspire courage in us all.

Marcus Anthony Shelby is an accomplished teacher, composer, arranger, and bassist. From 1990-1996, Shelby was bandleader of Columbia Records and GRP Impulse! Recording Artists Black/Note and is currently the Artistic Director and leader of The Marcus Shelby Orchestra, The Marcus Shelby Hot 7, and The Marcus Shelby Trio. Shelby was awarded a Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship in Chicago and a Fellow in the Resident Dialogues Program of the Committee for Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. Shelby also has had the honor of arranging for and conducting the Count Basie Orchestra featuring Ledisi, performing and recording with Tom Waits, and receiving the City Flight Magazine 2005 award as one of the “Top Ten Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area”. As the 1991 winner of the Charles Mingus Scholarship, Shelby’s studies include work under the tutelage of composer James Newton and legendary bassist Charlie Haden.

Accepting the outcome of a dare, dancer and choreographer Alice Sheppard resigned her tenured professorship to train with Kitty Lunn and Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Alice joined AXIS Dance Company where she became a core company member, toured nationally, and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent dance artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru/GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton. As a guest artist, she has danced with AXIS Dance Company, Full Radius Dance, and MOMENTA Dance Company. Alice has also performed as a solo artist and keynote academic speaker throughout the United States.

A USA Artist, Creative Capital grantee and Bessie Award winner, 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 was a 2018 AXIS Dance Company Choreo-Lab Participant made possible with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her choreography has been commissioned by producers from KQED and UCLA as well as physically integrated companies such as CRIPSiE, Full Radius Dance, and MOMENTA Dance Company.

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and such journals as Catalyst and Movement Research and Performance Journal.

Alice is the founder and artistic lead for Kinetic Light, a project based ensemble, working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology to create transformative art and advance the intersectional disability arts movement. Through nuanced investment in the histories, cultures, and artistic work of disabled people and people of color, Kinetic Light promotes intersectional disability aesthetics as a creative force and access as an aesthetic critical to the creative process and not a retroactive accommodation.

Xochitl Sosa is a Texas based aerial performer and instructor. She is a graduate of the New England Center for Circus Arts’ (NECCA) Pro-Track Program. In addition to NECCA, she has trained in Montreal with renowned coaches from Cirque du Soleil and the National Circus School. She performs her unique style of aerial work around the world in festivals, cabarets, and most notably with Seattle based company, Acrobatic Conundrum. After recently finishing a duo hoop contract with Cirque du Soleil, she is back in the USA working on new solo projects as a performer and a choreographer.

Jason Span is a former gymnast of eleven years and a former US Navy Hospital Corpsman based out of Jacksonville, Florida. He was honorably discharged from active duty in the United States Navy after serving for ten years to pursue his dream of becoming an aerial artist. Jason quickly developed his artistry on aerial silks in June 2015 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He relocated back to his home town in Jacksonville, Florida on October 2015 when he joined Bittersweet Studios. Always seeking to improve his skills, Jason began to cross train on multiple apparatuses such as aerial hoop, aerial straps and pole (dance). Jason began teaching and performing aerial arts at Bittersweet Studios and is currently touring with AIDA Cruises based out of Germany.

Since his journey, Jason has earned several accolades:
2018 Second Place: Pole Sports & Arts World Championships
2018 Champion: US Pole Sports Federation National Championships
2018 Champion: US Pole Sports Federation Pole Art National Championships
2017 Champion: Pole Sport Organization Southeastern Pole Championship
2017 Champion: Men’s Professional Pole FL Pole Fitness Championships
2017 Second Place: Silks Professional FL Pole Fitness Championships
2017 Second Place: Men’s Elite Division US Pole Sports Federation Championships
2016 Champion: Men’s Professional Pole FL Pole Fitness Championships
2016 Men’s Silks Finalist: U.S. Aerial Championships

Mary Ellen Strom is an artist, curator and educator. Her installations and site-specific projects unearth submerged narratives within art, history and cultural discourse. Her work has been exhibited in a wide range of contexts including museums, galleries, passenger trains, on rivers, cattle ranches, large-scale video projections onto industrial sites and mountain rock faces, in empty retail stores and horse arenas. Recent awards include an International Fulbright Scholar Fellowship, a Bogliasco Fellowship to the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, The MAP Fund, Artadia The Fund for Art and Dialogue, Art Matters and Creative Capital. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the ICA Philadelphia, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Walker Art Center, Mpls., the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH, the Pompidou Centre-Metz, Paris, the Satouchi Triennial in Japan, the Hayward Gallery, London, Nagoya Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan, Fundacion Union-Espacio Cultural Contemporaneo, Montevideo, Uruguay and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia. Strom is a Senior Researcher and Project Director for the Center for Art, Design and Social Research. She is a professor, Media Arts at Tufts University in Boston, MA.

Choreographer Julia Taffe combines art, environment and adventure, making dances for buildings, mountains, neighbourhoods, theatres and trees, finding new movement perspectives in the realm of suspension.

Julia is the artistic director of Aeriosa, a Vancouver-based vertical dance company. She has choreographed over 25 works on location including: Stawamus Chief Mountain in Squamish BC, Taipei City Hall, Cirque du Soleil Headquarters, Vancouver Library Square, Banff Centre, Scotiabank Dance Centre and Toronto’s 58-storey L Tower.

Prior to founding Aeriosa, Julia performed across Canada with Ruth Cansfield, and around the world with Bandaloop. Julia attained ACMG Rock Guide certification in 1997. She has worked as a co-producer, choreographer, cast member, stunt performer, mountain safety rigger and creative movement consultant on various film and television productions in Canada and abroad.

Most of Lauren Weinger's works are related to specific sites and were created as part of mixed media performances that often include dance and visual arts. She rarely documents and release her pieces. A recurring theme in her oeuvre is the creation of natural-sounding sonic environments and the reconstruction through sound of places that no longer exist (selected sound sources bringing back specific memories) or the evocation of an object (in the form of sound portraits). The historical aspect is usually deeply integrated in the work as part of its essence rather than displayed in a didactic way. Some of her pieces have been staged in grain silos and mattress factories, others involved a dancer in a 500-gallon water tank and aerialists. All are based on field recordings made at the site, transformed and fed back into the site. She has worked with many choreographers but had a twenty year collaborating with Joanna Haigood. Their works together include In Steel’s Shadow, ChoMu - butterfly dreams, Open Systems and Picture Red Hook/Picture Powderhorn. Their 1999 piece "Descending Chords" featured harpist Zeena Parkins. Her installations have been heard at the Whitney Museum, The Walker Arts Center, the American Film Institute (all in the US), the Avignon and Arles festivals (France), and the Festival del Centro Historico (Mexico). Her piece "Gargoyle" was included on the compilation of works for dance An Ear for a Leg, released by Zoar in 2000. Silo, a solo album based on her grain silo recordings, came out two years later on ReR Megacorp. Weinger teaches sound design at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Shool of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.