Presenters' Bios

Jane Alexandre has been working in the New York City and area dance world for more than 30 years as a performer, writer, choreographer, director, producer and administrator. She is at present an artistic director of Evolve Dance, Inc.; the co-Director of the Y Dance Program at the Family YMCA at Tarrytown; and a doctoral student at Antioch University’s Ph.D. Program in Leadership and Change, investigating the question of how socially engaged dance artists lead from positions of informal authority.


Sima Belmar, B.A. Russian and History, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; M.A. Russian Literature, Stanford University; M.F.A. Dance, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Former dance critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Interests include: gender, gesture (specifically, Neapolitan and Jewish), nation, and local and transnational identities as they relate to the language of dance; alternative training techniques for contemporary dancers and their potential impact on dance criticism.

Jessica Briggs received her B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Minnesota in May 2008. She presented her paper “Conscientious Objection: Female Bodies in Action” at last year’s CORD conference at Hollins University in Roanoke Virginia. Jessica Performs with Time Track Productions (Minneapolis, MN) and is program manager for Ananya Dance Theatre. Jessica has presented her choreography at the Lowry Lab Theater (St. Paul, MN), 9x22 Dance Lab (Minneapolis, MN), and is the current choreographer for the Zenon Scholarship Program (Minneapolis, MN).

Jennifer Buscher is a PhD candidate in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation project, iBody, explores the relationship between the body and technology through Apple’s iPod. She received a B.A. in English, with a minor in Dance, from the University of Kansas (2000) and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University (2001).

Alissa Cardone, interdisciplinary choreographer and performer, co-founder Kinodance Company, selected by Dance Magazine's "25-to-watch" in 2008, received commissions from Bank America Celebrity Series, World Music/CrashARTS at ICA Boston and produced by Monaco Dance Forum, the Berkshire Fringe, HIGH Fest (Armenia), Boston Cyberarts, A.P.E. Northampton, St. Petersburg International Dance Film Festival (Russia) and Festival of Arts & Ideas (New Haven). Cardone trained in Japan with Min Tanaka (Body Weather Farm), has collaborated and performed with Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works, Nora Chipaumire, Ann Carlson, Elaine Summers, Yoshito Ohno and ‘Nijinski of Butoh' Akira Kasai.


Szu-Ching Chang is currently a third-year Ph.D student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research interest focuses on Taiwanese female choreographers in relation to the issues of gender, cultural memory, postcolonialism and nationalism.

Living and working in San Francisco and Berlin, choreographer and director Jess Curtis has created an award-winning body of work ranging from the underground extremes of Mission District warehouses with Contraband and CORE (1985-1998) to the formal refinement of European State Theaters with Cie. Cahin-Caha and Jess Curtis/Gravity (1998-present). He has taught as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley and the University of the Arts in Berlin. He is currently in the MFA program at UC Davis.

Ashley Ferro-Murray is a choreographer who uses interactive performance technologies as a means for exploring dance and new media in our contemporary culture. Ashley is currently a Performance Studies PhD student in the Performance Studies Program at UC Berkeley.

Marcela Fuentes is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cultures in the Transnational Perspective program at UCLA where she also teaches transnational performance courses in the department of Theater, Film and Television. She received her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University in May 2008. Her work explores embodiment as event in online and offline performances in the Americas in response to global capital. Marcela also works in theater, performance art, and independent radio as a director, producer, dramaturg, and performer. As a dramaturg, she has collaborated with dancers Victoria Anderson and Liz Dement in two pieces of her authorship—Still Life and Training a Dramaturg—and in Anderson and Dement’s Debbie’s Debbie.

Doran George, best known for being encased in bricks and mortar in a south London shopping mall, is currently artist-in-residence at the Alzheimer's Association in Northridge. He researches the significance of the body in object based, durational, relational and movement work and is currently investigating cultural constructions of mortality in PhD research. He’s been funded, commissioned and presented in Britain, Continental Europe and the US. He curates cutting edge performance and related symposia and has danced for a diversity of choreographers. He is published in several print, web based journals and art publications and has taught at major Universities, Art Colleges and Dance Centers in the UK, US, the Netherlands and Portugal.

Tania Hammidi is a doctorate candidate in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside who works on drag king cabaret, durational performance, and LGBTQ dance. Tania is currently in the completion stages of her entitled, Dress, Dance Desire: Costume and a Sartorial History of the State.

Arianne Hoffman is a German born choreographer, currently in my second year of the M.F.A. program at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. I create scored improvisations and make work about gender and power. My work has been shown around Los Angeles and Berlin, Germany, where I used to be part of the performance art collective Rent-a-friend. Other projects include the video Lincoln in the Hood, which screened at VideoDance 2004 (Athens) and AN EARFUL OF DANCE, a series of podcast conversations on dance, partially funded by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA).

Melissa Hudson is a 2nd year MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her work as a professional choreographer and dance scholar has been devoted to investigating themes and images that examine the overlap between ‘food culture’ and ‘performance culture’, particularly as this takes place within the genre of postmodern contemporary dance performance. Melissa is also a certified pilates instructor and the artistic director of HudsonDance, a small San Francisco based dance company.

Adanna Jones is a 2nd year PhD student in Critical Dance Studies at UCR. At the moment, her pursuits include hip hop/rumba scene in Cuba and the winin’ scene in Trinidad. Ultimately, her goal is to lay bare the under-noticed/naturalized bodily labors and politics that continue to foster ideas of heteronormativity, gender, class, and race with in these contexts.

Elizabeth Kurien is a 3rd Year PhD candidate at the Department of Critical Dance Studies, UCR. A performer of experimental and Indian classical (Mohiniyattom and Bharatanatyam) Dance, Elizabeth’s research interest focuses on the politics of cultural capital - how traditional South Asian art forms, specifically Kudiyattom declared in 2001 by UNESCO as one of the “Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Human Heritage” gains currency as cultural capital in globalization.

Ann Mazzocca received her MA in Dance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures in 2001. For the past seven years she has been performing and teaching Haitian folkloric dance based out of NYC. She recently relocated to Riverside, CA to attend UCR’s MFA program in Experimental Choreography.

Paloma McGregor’s choreography has been presented in New York at such venues as Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, SolarOne Arts Festival and New Dance Group, as well as The Dance Place in Washington, D.C., and Cleveland Public Theatre. She is associate artistic director of INSPIRIT dance company, co-founder of Angela’s Pulse Performance Projects with lifelong collaborator and sister, Patricia, and is in her fourth season as a dancer with Urban Bush Women.

Elliot Gordon Mercer is a graduate of the Idyllwild Arts Academy and a student in Saint Mary’s College of California’s Liberal Education for Arts Professionals (LEAP) program. Elliot has performed professionally with several San Francisco-based companies, dancing works by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Antony Tudor, and Paul Taylor, among others.

Betsy Miller is a graduate fellow at the Ohio State University, where she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Dance. She is a co-founder of Propel-her Dance Collective (www.propelherdance.com). Propel-her is a choreographic collective based in New York City which provides administrative infrastructure to foster the careers of emerging female choreographers through a collaborative structure. Betsy has worked administratively with the José Limón Dance Foundation, WHITE WAVE Dance, Bates Dance Festival, Doug Varone and Dancers, and the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance, and on the youth advisory panel of Dance/NYC, marking a passion for supporting the work of both established and emerging artists in the field. Her choreography has been presented at the d.u.m.b.o. dance festival, The Chocolate Factory, Merce Cunningham Studio, Spoke the Hub, the Cool New York Dance Festival, Williamsburg Art Nexus, and other venues. She is on the faculty of Powell Dance Academy in Powell, Ohio and holds a B.A. in Dance from Connecticut College.


Taisha Paggett is a Los Angeles based dance artist and co-editor of the dance journal project, itch. Her work and collaborations for the stage, gallery, and public sphere have been presented and supported by several venues throughout California as well as in Chicago, New York City and Utrecht, The Netherlands. She has worked extensively in the projects of Victoria Marks and David Rousseve, and is a member of the audio action collective, Ultra-Red. She holds an MFA from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures.

Mara Penrose is a dancer, mother, and student based in Columbus, OH. Her research interests include dance reconstruction, analysis of movement and choreography, somatics, and the historical uses of mass dance for social and political agenda. She plans to reconstruct a 1920’s movement choir from the Labanotation score in partial fulfillment of a Master in Fine Arts Degree at Ohio State University.

Crisina Rosa, visual artist, dance practitioner, researcher. Born in Brasilia, Brazil, Rosa crossed the US border in 1996 and, after a series of performative actions, she received a Master degree in Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rosa's visual artwork, primarily drawing and photography, has been exhibited both in Brazil and US. As a dance researcher, her interest leans towards the transatlantic black presence in the Americas pertaining embodied practices. Rosa is currently a PhD candidate at the department of World Arts and Cultures, at UCLA. The title of her dissertation is ““Moving Scripts: Ginga, Choreography, and the Formation of Gendered and National Identities in Brazil.”

Tim Rubel is a dance and theatre artist. His choreography has been presented in and around Providence, Boston, Cape Cod and Los Angeles. He is a second year MFA student at UC Riverside pursuing a degree in Experimental Choreography.

Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist active in dance, theater, performance, media, and installation art. He has performed nationally and internationally in Asia, Europe, and throughout the USA and received numerous grants, including awards from Arts International, Meet the Composer, Asian Cultural Council, Japan Foundation, and others. Michael has also been a guest lecturer and guest artist teaching butoh and improvisational dance and interdisciplinary performance at California Institute of the Arts, UC Irvine, UCLA, University of Redlands, and ASU, among others.

Carolina San Juan is a Doctoral Candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. While her dissertation focuses on American Vaudeville in the Philippines, her research interests include the intersection of imperialism with popular culture, visual arts, and performance.

Hannah Schwadron is pursuing an MFA in Experimental Choreography at the University of California, Riverside, and is currently researching the contemporary implications of Jewish family history as it relates to politics of historical writing and aesthetics of religiosity. After graduating from Brown University with a BA in American
Civilization, Hannah taught high school theater and history in Oakland, CA, where she wrote and directed dramatic and musical plays for high school students. She has studied dance and Qi Gong primarily under NY based choreographer, Yin Mei and has taught dance at Queens College and the University of California at Riverside.

Anna B. Scott is a scholar artist who rides the edge of the logical into the heart of chaos, seeking the eye of the storm, where all is calm amidst the turbulence. She is a professor of dance history and theory at the University of California, Riverside. Her work seeks to elucidate the ways that our everyday is a series of grand, minute and interlocking choreographies; choreographies that often have no tangible presence, yet are ever-present in the ways in which we go about our daily lives, or don't. She has presented her performance work at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, MIT, Williams and Brown University as part of the RISD/Brown Performance Art Series. Lately, she has been caught in the act in Los Angeles at the Anatomy Riot and Highways Performance Space.

Shelley Senter has been involved with experimental and post-modern dance for 20 years, touring throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Russia as a performer, choreographer, director and teacher. She has worked independently and with many artists in NYC, West Coast and international dance communities, including Bebe Miller, Yvonne Rainer, Nina Martin, Susan Rethorst, Wally Cardona, Linda K. Johnson and AXIS Dance company, among many others. She danced with the Trisha Brown Company from ‘86-‘91 and has continued to work with the company as a guest artist, directing special projects and staging Brown’s choreography throughout the US and abroad. Senter has been critically recognized for her distinct approach to movement and is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique™, which she teaches worldwide. She was recently awarded a San Francisco Bay Area Isadora Duncan (“Izzy”) award.

Asheley B. Smith is a first year doctoral candidate in Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside. Her research interests include the relationship between funding and aesthetics and the National Performance Network. Asheley holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in Dance and History from Oberlin College.

Kate Speer’s work ranges from performance, choreography, and research scholarship. Her most recent research investigated the presence of African contemporary dance in France and the current trends in Francophone Africa, which is compiled in a paper titled, “The Globalization of Contemporary Dance in Francophone Africa: Embodying Cultural Identity While Discovering the New.” Speer holds a BA in dance and biology from Swarthmore College

Tamara Spira is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments at UC Santa Cruz, where she studies the sensual logics and erotic economies of globalization’s regimes of violence, as well as the poetics and aesthetics of survival, hope, and political transformation. Mari has published and presented works individually and collectively in the fields of feminism, cultural studies, politics, and security studies. She has also worked as a labor and community organizer and is currently involved in collective struggles against mass incarceration in California and its surrounding economies of war, transnationally.

Waewdao Sirisook (Choreographer/Dancer) is from the area of Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand. She first studied dance within her village community. In 2005, Waewdao came to UCLA to earn an MFA in Dance/Choreography. She was a 2006 APPEX Fellow and a recipient of a major fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council. In America, she has come face to face with the Western idea of the “Authentic Asian” and its implications for dance movement. She has realized that dance means something different in Los Angeles than it does in Chiang Rai.

Melissa Templeton is a second year PhD student at the University of California Riverside. Her current research examines the relationship between Québec language policies and dance in Montreal.

Rosie Trump is a dance choreographer, filmmaker, performer, and educator. With a hybrid artistic practice, Trump’s work navigates the creative fusion between dance and media. Embedded with ironic wit and nostalgic sensibility, her work examines subject matter such as iconic representations of femininity, domesticity, identity and intimacy. Originally from Pittsburgh, Trump graduated from Slippery Rock University Summa Cum Laude with a BA in Dance. Trump received a MFA in Experimental Dance Choreography from UC Riverside in 2007 where she was a three-time recipient of the Gluck Fellowship of the Arts and a recipient of the Humanities Graduate Student Research Grant. Currently, she is an associate dance faculty member at Mt. San Jacinto College.

Ally Voye began her dance training in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Life Arts Center. She graduated from the World Arts and Cultures department at UCLA in 2005 where she studied extensively and performed with Maria Gillespie and Victoria Marks, among others. Her choreography and film work has been presented at the Freud Playhouse, American College Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, Highways Performance Space, Anatomy Riot, UCLA’s Fowler Museum, UCLA’s Hothouse Choreography Residency, Victoria Reel Dance Film Festival and Kinetic Cinema NYC. Ally is co-artistic director of IN/EX Dance Project, a certified Pilates trainer and teaches dance at several schools in Los Angeles.

Laura Vriend is a 3rd year PhD Student in Critical Dance studies at UCR. With occasional forays into the cultural politics of Canadian identity formation, Laura’s major research focuses on intersections between experimental dance, architecture and spirituality in Philadelphia. This research will take its form as ethnographic studies of churches and spaces of mourning that double as rehearsal and performance spaces.

Sara Wolf is a PhD candidate, teaching fellow, and Javitz Fellow in UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures; a freelance dance critic for the Los Angeles Time; and co-editor of the dance journal itch. Her dissertation examines twenty-first-century postmodern dance, performance, and activist interventions as citizen choreographies of political bodies that re-imagine the body politic and formulate critical alternatives to national identifications in an era of global capital, media, and war.

Meg Wolfe is a Los Angeles-based choreographer, whose work has been presented nationally and internationally since 1990. On the west coast, she has presented work at Highways Performance Space, California Institute for the Arts, REDCAT/Studio, The Unknown Theater, Anatomy Riot, Sea and Space Explorations, The East/West Coast Performance Festival (San Diego); Performance Works NorthWest (Portland, OR), and other venues. She is the founder and curator of the monthly performance series, Anatomy Riot, running since October 2005; co-editor of the L.A. dance journal, itch; and the founder/director of DANCEbank.

Allison Wyper is a movement based performance artist and artistic director of San Francisco’s Black Stone Ensemble. She has performed with Black Stone Ensemble, Guillermo Gomez-Pena/La Pocha Nostra, Violeta Luna, Sara Shelton Mann, Scrap and Salvage, paige starling sorvillo/blindsight, Pilgrim Theatre, Culture Clash, and her former company The Circus, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston. She earned a BA in Theatre Studies at Emerson College and is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures.

Hentyle Yapp is finishing his last year at UCLA School of law, focusing in Critical Race Theory and Public Interest Law. He used to dance professionally with companies in New York City and Taipei, Taiwan. He received a BA from Brown University, majoring in French Literature.