Choreography Selection Committee
Janis Brenner is an award-winning dancer/choreographer/singer/teacher and is Artistic Director of Janis Brenner & Dancers in N.Y. She has toured in 36 countries and is recognized as a “singular performer” (Eye On Dance) with a multifaceted artistic range. Ms. Brenner received the “Best Production” Award at the 2018 United Solo Theatre Festival for Inheritance: A Litany. The one-woman show also received “Best Composer” (Jerome Begin) and “Best Lighting Designer” (Mitchell Bogard) Awards. Other awards include a 2017 “Best Choreography” Award from the United Solo Theatre Festival for Eva Petric’s eden, transplanted, a 1997 NY Dance and Performance Award (a “Bessie”) for “Outstanding Creative Achievement” in Meredith Monk’s work The Politics of Quiet, a 1999 “Bessie” nomination for her performance in Solo for Janischoreographed by Richard Siegal, a 1996 Lester Horton Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Choreography” in L.A., the 2010 Copperfoot Award for Lost, Found, Lost at Wayne State University, a 1993 Leach Fellowship for “Outstanding Achievement in the Performing Arts” from Empire State College and a NY Dance On Camera Festival award (1986).
Renee Chatelain is the President/CEO of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. Her career as a dancer includes performing with the Eglevsky Ballet, Delta Festival Ballet of New Orleans, Tampa Ballet, and American Dance Machine. Renee has been a guest teacher for Iceland Dance Theater in Reykjavik, Iceland, at Cornell University, Southeastern Louisiana University, among others. She serves on the Advisory Board of the American Mural Project, and was selected to participate in South Arts Dance Touring Initiative. She is a co-founder of Mid City Dance Project, Inc., served as Executive Director at the Manship Theatre at Shaw Center for the Arts, and founded the dance programs for two independent schools in Baton Rouge. Most recently, she has been on faculty at the Ballet Festival in India, in Mumbai. Renee has served as a panelist at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters in New York, and at the inaugural Women in Dance Leadership Conference in 2015.
Elba Hevia y Vaca, Artistic/Executive Director and Founder of Pasión y Arte
Born in La Paz, Bolivia, Elba Hevia y Vaca is a creative artist and visionary bringing the Flamenco art form to Philadelphia for over 20 years. She began her study of classical Spanish dance at the age of five. She later studied and danced professionally with the Ana Martinez Flamenco Dance Company in D.C., and danced with Washington’s Raquel Peña Spanish Dance Company, appearing as a soloist at various venues throughout the U.S. In Philadelphia she continued her study of modern dance, jazz, and contact improvisation from various Philadelphia artists. She continues her dance studies and research yearly in Sevilla, submerging herself with master dancers, musicians and singers of the art form. In 2000, Hevia y Vaca founded Pasión y Arte (PyA) and has developed it into Philadelphia’s premier contemporary Flamenco dance company. She founded it out of a strong and intensely personal conviction that highly-stylized traditional Spanish flamenco dance is a perfect vessel to empower women. These values have been reflected in her nine original, critically acclaimed evening length works she has created for PyA and in the numerous grants, fellowships and accolades awarded to Hevia y Vaca and PyA under her direction. These works push the boundaries of the Flamenco art form through experimentation with site-specific choreography, and many are the product of collaborations with international flamenco stars and renowned post-modern dancers. She also founded a conservatory, launched two citywide Flamenco festivals and is a Senior Adjunct at Franklyn and Marshal, Adjunct. In 2018 she was nominated for the prestigious Pew Fellowship by Pew Center for the Arts and Heritage.
Taryn Kaschock Russell directed Hubbard Street 2 between 2008 and the spring of 2013. Prior to that, Russell held the position of Rehearsal Director for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. In her twelve-year performing career with both Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Joffrey Ballet, she traveled extensively, performing works by George Balanchine, John Cranko, Agnes de Mille, Martha Graham, Lar Lubovitch, Jiří Kylián, Nacho Duato, Ohad Naharin, and William Forsythe. During her tenure as director of HS2, she was responsible for programming and staffing the HSDC summer intensives and curating HSDC’s National Choreographic Competition each season. In this capacity, Russell realized her passion for teaching and mentoring young and emerging artists. She has guest taught the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, the Trey McIntyre Project, Ballet Hispanico, Ballet BC, and is a regular company teacher for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She has been commissioned to choreograph work for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago as part of their Danc(e)volve Series at the Museum of Contemporary Art and has staged existing repertoire on the Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Russell has composed a number of site-specific installations, most notably in collaborative partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Kaschock Russell has served on the faculty of the Conservatory of Dance, SUNY Purchase and at the Dance Division of The Juilliard School over the past five years. In July of 2018, Russell resumed her position as the Associate Director of the Juilliard Dance Division, which she has held since 2016, after additionally serving a year in the role of Acting Artistic Director for the Division during the 2017/2018 academic year.
Eva L. Stone received a B.F.A in Performance and Choreography from Arizona State University. She studied at SUNY Purchase, The Alvin Ailey School, and Harvard University (as a scholarship recipient awarded by Dance Magazine) and has worked with dance legends such as Daniel Nagrin, David Gordon, Viola Farber, Wendy Perron, and Gus Solomons, Jr. Ms. Stone performed professionally with companies in both Boston and Los Angeles. After completing a Master of Arts Degree in Choreography and Choreological Studies from Trinity Laban in London, England, she formed The Stone Dance Collective. Ms. Stone relocated to Seattle in 1995, re-established her company and began an extensive teaching and lecturing career (in both technique and composition) throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Ms. Stone is currently on faculty at Pacific Northwest Ballet School (Professional Division), and for The School at Spectrum Dance Theater (Academy Division.) She served as dance faculty at Greenhill College (London), Ealing College (London), and Bellevue College (WA). Ms. Stone has created commissioned works for Spectrum Dance Theater, Seattle International Dance Festival, South Bay Ballet, Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre, Mid-Columbia Ballet, Theatre Ballet (BYU), Peninsula Dance Theater, Ballet Folsom, Bellingham Repertory Dance, NewDance Company (NY) and collaboratively with Seattle Dance Project on the critically acclaimed Project Orpheus at ACT Theater. Ms. Stone is also a commissioned choreographer and faculty instructor for Regional Dance America/Pacific. Her work has premiered in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, London, Geneva, Montreal, and St. Petersburg, Russia. Ms. Stone also had the extraordinary opportunity to assist Donald Byrd for the Seattle Opera production of Aida. In 2017, Ms. Stone was a commissioned choreographer for Sculptured Dance, a site-specific event presented by Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Seattle Art Museum, which draws over 4000 attendees. Her other projects include choreographing over 25 musical theatre productions and recently received the 5th Avenue Theater award for Outstanding Choreography for her work in Chicago. Ms. Stone has recently been commissioned to create a main stage world premier for Pacific Northwest Ballet in November of 2019.
Blakeley White-McGuire, MFAIA Performer, choreographer and teacher, Blakeley collaborates with multi-disciplinary artists in performance research through the salon series, Open for Transmission. Critically acclaimed as a Principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company (2002 – 2017) she has been awarded international recognition for her depth of work and artistry including the Premio Positano Leonide Massine Prize for Contemporary Dance Performance, the 2016 Italian Career Achievement Award and Dance Magazine’s listings for “Best Performances”. She has danced on the world’s greatest stages including Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, Beijing Opera House, Theatre du Chatelet, Paris and the Herodion in Athens, Greece. Her original dances have been presented by The Museum of Arts and Design, Downtown Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow’s INSIDE/ OUT, Cape Dance Festival and the Moving Beauty Series and her writing has been published by The Dance Enthusiast, Dance Magazine, Performance Research Journal, and The Huffington Post.
Dance on Film Selection Committee
Terry Fox, Director of Philadelphia Dance Projects (PDP), is a former choreographer/dancer. Concurrently she is on the Faculty in the Theatre & Dance Department at Rowan University and in the Dance Dept of the Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University. Her curatorial activities include among others, guest curator for “Something Happens When Everybody Moves: Dance as ritual, protest, and aspiration” as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Dance at The Barnes, 2018 and co-curating PDP’s Motion Pictures, a dance on film/video series from 2002-2012, and DanceBOOM at the Wilma Theater in 2006 and 2007. For many years she served as an Artist Curator at the Painted Bride Art Center, where she founded the Dance With The Bride series. She was the Managing/Artistic Director of the Danspace Project in New York City 1984-1989. She has served on numerous boards and panels and has taught as adjunct faculty at various colleges and universities.
Jillian Harris, an Associate Professor of Dance at Temple University, she explores the intersections between dance, film, and new technologies. She had a distinguished professional career, touring nationally and internationally with the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers. She appeared in the Metropolitan Opera world premiere of “Benvenuto Cellini” and played the feature role in the PBS broadcast of Della Davidson’s “Night Story”. A youngARTS award winner, Jillian has performed works by noted choreographers such as Doug Varone, Murray Louis, Laura Dean, David Rousseve, and Moses Pendleton. Her choreography has been shown at venues like Joyce SOHO (New York City), Chi Movement Arts Center (Philadelphia), The Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center (Salt Lake City), and Bravo Caffe (Bologna, Italy). Jillian is the producer, featured dancer, and assistant choreographer for Red Earth Calling, a short dance film that won the Best Narrative Short award at the 2015 Maui Film Festival (Maui, Hawaii), Best Experimental Short award at the 2015 Toronto Independent Film Festival, and Best Narrative Short award at the Moondance International Film Festival (Boulder, CO). The film (http://www.redearthcalling.com/) has also been an official selection of the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Citizen Jane Film Festival, Columbia Gorge International Film Festival, Toronto Independent Film Festival, Action on Film International Festival, Movies by Movers Festival, and Pineapple Underground Film Festival (Hong Kong). Recent projects include a commission by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia and INVASION, an interactive movement installation. Her next project, Mud: Bodies of History, is an interactive digital dance experience through memory and mud produced in Colombia.
Scholarly Paper Selection Committee
Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE@Duke:Performance|Culture|Technology; group explores emerging technology in live performance. Received 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award, Dance Studies Association. Believes in our shared capacity to do better, and engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Contributed concept and voice-over for permanent installation on Black Social Dance at Smithsonian Museum of African American Life. Writer and director, Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by Theater Offensive of Boston and Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEWcommissioned by Nasher Museum in response to work of Kara Walker. Recent performances with Netta Yerushalmy and Kathy Westwater. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; Lion’s Jaw Festival; Movement Research MELT; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, Duke, University of Nice. Founding member, Collegium for African Diaspora Dance.
Dr. Kirsten Kaschock is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University and Faculty Director of Writers Room. A poet, a novelist, a critic, and an editor, Kaschock’s creative work consistently addresses intersections between language and body. Of her most recent book of poetry, Confessional Science Fiction: A Primer, Publishers Weekly writes: “As much a noir adventure as it is a sci-fi confessional, Kaschock’s dynamic collection revels in expanding our understanding of genre, and life itself.” She is a founding member of thINKing DANCE, an online journal produced by a consortium of dance writers in the Philadelphia Area.