Leticia Alvarado: Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, Alvarado received her doctorate from New York University in American Studies, and her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in Visual Art and Latin American Studies. She is a past recipient of a Smithsonian Latino Studies Predoctoral Fellowship, Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and American Association of University Women American Fellowship. Alvarado is the author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2018), recipient of honorable mentions from the 2019 Latin American Studies Association Latino/a Studies Section Outstanding Book Award and the Modern Language Association Book Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Her essays and articles appear in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Cultural Criticism; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture; Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Thought; ASAP/J and the award winning art museum catalogue Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. Her current book project, Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation, is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Jonathan Berger: Jonathan Berger’s work centers around the practice of exhibition making, encompassing a spectrum of activity concerned with a rigorous investigation of the many ways in which the exhibition site can be repurposed, and the subsequent potential for that site to allow for an expansion and reconsideration of what art can be and how it can be made. While his projects
vary significantly, the exhibitions themselves are always the “work,” with the discrete parts contributing to a greater whole. His 2019 exhibition An Introduction to Nameless Love, was co-commissioned and presented by the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University and Participant Inc NYC, and later included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. He is currently preparing
for a MoMA Studio Residency, which will take place in August 2025. Berger has presented solo installations at the Busan Biennial, Busan; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Maccarone, New York; Karma, New York; Grimm-Rosenfeld Gallery, New York; Frieze Projects, London; Adams and Ollman, Portland; and VEDA, Florence, . His collaborative and curatorial projects have been
presented at venues including The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; MOCA, Los Angeles; The Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; and The Queens Museum of Art, New York, among others. From 2013–2016, Berger served as Director of 80WSE Gallery at NYU, where he mounted a wide range of collaboratively produced exhibition projects presenting the work of Ellen Cantor, Bob Mizer, Printed Matter, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Michael Stipe, Vaginal Davis, Susanne Sachsse, and Xiu Xiu, among others.

Jayna Brown: Professor Jayna Brown is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of two books, both published by Duke University Press: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008) and Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021). She has also published numerous essays in publications including Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Women and Performance. Brown is co-editor of the journal Social Text and has also been a contributing journalist for NPR’s music programming. Her areas of research and specialization include speculative fictions, music, queer studies, black feminism, black diasporan intellectual history, and our changing media landscape. Her current work is located at the intersections of speculative fiction, ecology, and black expressive cultures.

J Dellecave is a Brooklyn and Providence-based interdisciplinary performance-maker, scholar, and educator concerned with how bodily experience intersects with external fields of social, cultural, and political knowledge.They were awarded a PhD in Critical Dance Studies (UC Riverside) and MA in Performance Studies (NYU). As an artist, their evening length and endurance format performance straddles the genres of dance, performance art, movement-based theater, installation, video, and sound. Recent projects include Connect Four, Land/escapes, and collaborations with the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective. As a scholar J’s work focuses on protest, activism, and what art offers society as world-making practice and political critique. J’s scholarly writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Performance Matters, Dance Chronicle, Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, Women & Performance and itch Dance Jour­nal. Current projects include their book-in-progress Activating the Insides: How Embodied Arts Expose Imperial Violence in the 21st Century. J is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Brown University in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. 

Adrienne Edwards: Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she most recently curated Edges of Ailey, which opened in September 2024. Edwards has been working as a curator at the Whitney since 2018. She co-curated Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept and enhanced the strength and vitality of the Museum's performance program. Since 2021, she has also served as the Whitney’s Director of Curatorial Affairs. In 2022, she was the President of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a jury member for the 40th anniversary edition of Videobrasil in 2023. Prior to the Whitney, Edwards served as curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator at Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Edwards’s curatorial projects have also included the thematic intergenerational and interdisciplinary exhibition and catalogue Blackness in Abstraction presented at Pace Gallery (2016); the traveling exhibition and catalogue Jason Moran at the Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise” (2020), a series of performances based on a text co-written by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney; Dave McKenzie's first solo museum exhibition in New York City The Story I Tell Myself and its pendant performance commission “Disturbing the View” (2021) at the Whitney; and the performance collective My Barbarian's twentieth anniversary exhibition and catalogue (2021–22) at the Whitney and ICA LA. She was part of the Whitney's core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. Edwards has taught art history, performance, and visual studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York University, and the New School, and she has contributed essays to academic journals, artist monographs, group exhibition catalogues, and art magazines as well as other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University.

Lia Gangitano: Lia Gangitano founded PARTICIPANT INC in 2001, a not-for-profit art space, presenting exhibitions by Virgil Marti, Charles Atlas, Kathe Burkhart, Michel Auder, and Renée Green, among others. As former curator of Thread Waxing Space, NY, her exhibitions, screenings, and performances include Spectacular Optical (1998), Luther Price: Imitation of Life (1999), Børre Sæthre: Module for Mood (2000) and Sigalit Landau (2001). She is editor of Dead Flowers (2010) and the forthcoming anthology, The Alternative to What? Thread Waxing Space and the '90s. As an associate curator, she co-curated Dress Codes (1993) and Boston School (1995) for The ICA, Boston, and edited New Histories (with Steven Nelson, 1997) and Boston School (1995). She has contributed to publications including Renée Green, Endless Dreams and Time-based Streams, Lovett/Codagnone, Whitney Biennial 2006-Day for Night, and 2012 Whitney Biennial on Charles Atlas. She served as a Curatorial Advisor for MoMA PS1, with exhibitions including Lutz Bacher, My Secret Life (2009).

Shoghig Halajian: Shoghig Halajian is a curator and scholar based in Brooklyn, NY. Her curatorial work and writings focus on queer and feminist histories, contemporary performance practices, and place-making through the lens of diaspora and dispersion. She is co-editor of Georgia, an online journal in collaboration with Anthony Carfello and Suzy Halajian (georgiageorgia.org), and serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA (h-r.la). From 2013-2016, Halajian was Assistant Director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Recent curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (co-curated with Suzy Halajian) at Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and Redcat, 2018; At night the states (co-curated with Suzy Halajian) at Hammer Museum, 2017; DISSENT: what they fear is the light (co-curated with Thomas Lawson), LACE, 2016; rafa esparza: I have never been here before, LACE, 2015; and The Whole World is Watching, Le Magasin (co-curated with Corrado Salzano and Sarah Sandler) at Centre National d'Art Contemporain, 2012, among others. She is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism (Critical Gender Studies specialization) at UC San Diego, holds a MA from CalArts Critical Studies: Aesthetics and Politics and a BA in English Literature with minors in Women's Studies and Philosophy from UCLA. She was a curatorial fellow at Ecole du Magasin in 2011, and a 2021 Ocean Space Fellow with TBA21-Academy in Venice, Italy. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at Williams College and at the School of Art and Design History and Theory at New School.

Sharon Hayes: Sharon Hayes is an artist who uses video, performance, sound and public sculpture to expose specific intersections between history, politics and speech, to unspool reductive historical narratives and to re-ignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. In her work, she lingers in the grammars–linguistic, affective and sonic–through which political resistance appears. Hayes’ practice is in conversation and acts in collective force and resonance with the heterogeneous field of actions, voices and practices that resist normative behaviors, complicit and unjust social agreements and proscriptive temporalities to open up new ways of being together in the world. Her work sustains a distinct and vital commitment to perfor­mance and to collaboration and is devoted to the radical possibilities of non-normative occupation of public space and in holding public space as a site for unpredictable and unregulated encounters. Hayes has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2014), the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Pew Fellowship (2016), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2013), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). She currently teaches in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Leon J. Hilton is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and a faculty affiliate with the Gender and Sexuality Studies and Science and Technology Studies programs at Brown University. He is also the co-convener of Brown's Disability Studies Working Group, launched in 2022 with the support of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. His academic research focuses on modern and contemporary theatre and performance, with particular attention to the way these fields overlap with disability studies and neurodiversity, feminist and queer theory, and psychoanalysis. His first book,Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press), examines how cultural attitudes towards neurological disability and difference have been represented, negotiated, and contested in performance across a range of genres—including theatre, documentary film, and media and performance art—from the mid-20th century through the present. Before joining the faculty at Brown, Leon was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Melissa Kievman (Producer, IGNITE Series) Blurring the lines between theater and performance and the places we live and work, Melissa generates projects that are site responsive and center community conversation. She has produced festivals, creative convenings, artistic partnerships, pop-up theater events, and site-specific disruptions while also directing new plays at major theaters across the country and internationally. For St. Ann's Warehouse with Yazmany Arboleda, Kievman generated 50 activations across the five boroughs of NYC for Little Amal Walks NYC. Kievman was a National Endowment for The Arts/TCG Directing Fellow, a Drama League Fellow, formerly Associate Artistic Director of New Dramatists, and served for a decade on the faculties of the MFA playwriting and directing programs at Brown University and Brown/Trinity Rep. She is a founding board member of artEquity, an organization devoted to creating and sustaining a culture of equity and inclusion across the arts and culture sector. Her Chekhov project film, I Am A Seagull, was screened at MassMoCa, The Noorderzon and Spoleto Festivals and the Under The Radar Festival. 

Summer Kim Lee: Summer Kim Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA, where she specializes in critical race and ethnic studies, feminist theory, queer theory, performance studies, and Asian American art, literature, and culture. She is completing her first monograph, currently titled, Spoiled: Hostile Forms and the Matter of Asian American Aggression, which traces the significance of hostility for contemporary Asian American artists and writers who challenge the expectation that their work should offer cathartic sites for healing and repair in the face of racist discrimination and violence. She is also co-editor of a special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory titled, “Performances of Contingency: Feminist Relationality and Asian American Studies After the Institution.” She has published work in Social Text, ASAP/Journal, Post45, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, GLQ, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. Prior to joining the UCLA English faculty in 2020, she was a Mellon Faculty Fellow in English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, as well as a Guarini Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Creative Writing and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College.

Simon Leung: Simon Leung is an artist whose work is project-based, spanning several mediums (video, performance, sculpture, drawing, critical theory, fiction, and opera), sometimes inhabiting several forms at once. Some of this project-based work include a reposing of Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre as a discourse in ethics; a rethinking of the psychological, philosophical, and political dimensions of AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; a video essay on Edgar Allan Poe in relationship to the site/non-site dialectic; an expanded opera set in Los Angeles addressing sexuality, ecology, history, and questions of "the public"; and meditations on "the residual space of the Vietnam War," comprised of projects on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing. He is currently a Professor at the UCI School of the Arts.

Heather Love: Heather Love is currently a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her A.B. from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently at work on a new project ("To Be Real"), funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, concerning the uses of the personal in queer writing. 

XSCN (Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu): XSCN is a trans Latina writer, artist, and organizer from New York, by way of Ecuador and Romania. Her work considers the relation of her marked body to many others, through fleshiness, leaks, abjection, and other corporeal stagings beyond the hold of respectability. In her critical writing, she seeks to offer a “trans of color critique” through embodied strategies in performance work by racialized trans women artists from the 1970s to the present. Her works have been featured in Artforum, at Park Ave Armory, MoMA PS1, Performa, BGSQD, Leslie-Lohman, and Visual AIDS. She organized the NYC Trans Oral History Project, archived with the NYPL, is a member of Voluminous Arts’ Community Advisory Committee, and runs the Queens DIY space “XL Studios” with her partner Levi Dasilva.

Tavia Nyong’o: Tavia Nyong’o is the William Lampson Professor of Performance Studies; American Studies; African-American Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University. His books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018). His current research interests include: the performative turn in museum curation; the racial reckoning in theater, dance, and performance; racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture; and the cultural history of the metaverse. Editor-at-large for the journal Social Text, Nyong’o is also on the editorial boards of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies, Theatre, and Contemporary Theatre Review. He co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Nyong’o has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Ford Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and the British Marshall Foundation. Since 2021, Nyong’o has also curated public programs at the Park Avenue Armory.

Brooke O’Harra: Brooke O’Harra joined the UPenn Theatre Arts faculty in July 2016. Brooke has previously taught at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department and the Experimental Theater Wing, Mt. Holyoke College and Bates College. Her fields of interest include Japanese theater, experimental theater, serial drama, LGBTQ theater and performance, performance with live media and contemporary visual art. Brooke is a professional theater director and an artist. She is co-founder of the NYC based company The Theater of a Two-headed Calf and has developed and directed all 14 of Two-headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE Arts Center), It Cannot Be Called Our Mother but Our Graves a.k.a Macbeth (Soho Rep Lab 2008/9), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 at La Mama ETC, 2013 in the River to River Festival). Brooke is currently working on several projects. She recently wrote, directed and produced the 4th part of a nine-part research and performance project titled I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in directing or nine encounters between me and you. Brooke is also the co-creator of a collaborative performance with artist Sharon Hayes called Time Passes. Time Passes is an 8-hour performance that uses the book-on-tape recording of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine.

Elliot Reed: Elliot Reed is an artist working in performance, sculpture, and video. Their art starts from the body, making a choreographic language through objects, installation, and sound. Using an intra-media approach, Elliot’s projects aim to capture the idiosyncrasies of live performance through physical means. Reed is the founder, director, and sole employee of Elliot Reed Laboratories, a production office located inside the artist’s body. Established in 2014, Elliot Reed Laboratories holds a copyright with The Library of Congress and a Los Angeles County business license. Elliot is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019–20 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and part of the museum’s permanent collection. Reed was also the recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent performances and exhibitions include Lucerne Festival with JACK Quartet (2022), Kunsthaus Glarus (2021), Metro Pictures (2021), MoMA PS1 (2020/21), OCD Chinatown (2021), The Getty Center (2018), Hammer Museum (2016), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (2018), The Broad (2017), including performances in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Mexico City, Zürich, Vienna, and Hamburg. His text manifesto “Performance Art Is…” was printed in The Drama Review Vol. 64, Issue 4 (248) published by MIT Press. 

JD Stokely (they/he) is a trickster-in-training who creates and curates work around Black queer performance and aesthetics, collectivity, and touch. Stokely is a doctoral student in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University and a co-founding member of Unbound Bodies Collective, a multidisciplinary arts lab for QTBIPOC creatives centered around healing, embodiment, and pleasure. Stokely received an MA from Royal Central School of Speech & Drama.

Thea Quiray Tagle (she/her) is a curator, writer, and transdisciplinary scholar of visual studies, feminist & queer studies, and critical ethnic studies. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and was the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2015-2016. As a practitioner, Thea specializes in curating and writing about socially engaged art and performance by BIPOC and queer artists; visual cultures of state violence; and the politics of place in and across the Pacific. Her research and arts writing have been published in venues including American Quarterly, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, BOMB Magazine, frieze, Hyperallergic, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. She was co-curator of New York Now: Home, the inaugural contemporary photography triennial at the Museum of the City of New York (2023). Thea is the Associate Curator of The Bell + Brown Arts Institute at Brown University.

Julie Tolentino is a Filipina-Salvadorean artist whose practice extends across durational performance, movement, installation, sculpture, video, and sound. Over the past several decades she has created a singular body of work occupying the interstitial spaces of relationality and memory, race and empire, sexuality and the archive. Her work across media is drawn in intimate response to the rich learning spaces of activism, underground nightlife, loss, and caregiving. Most recently, her installation and performance-based projects HOLD TIGHT GENTLY and ECHO POSITION (created in collaboration with Ivy Kwan Arce) were featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Her work has also been exhibited at Commonwealth & Council Gallery Los Angeles, The New Museum, Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Performa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Aspen Art Museum, House of World Cultures/Berlin, Theaterworks Singapore, and the Thessaloniki Biennial, among many other venues. 

Dorian Wood: Dorian Wood (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in the U.S. Her intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies with her artistic practice is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people. Her work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at institutions like The Broad (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Museo Nacional Del Prado (Madrid), the City Hall of Madrid and Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris (Mexico City).  From 2019 to 2020, she completed several successful tours throughout Europe, Mexico and the U.S. with her chamber orchestra tribute to Chavela Vargas, XAVELA LUX AETERNA. Wood is a recipient of a 2023 LA County Performing Arts Recovery Grant, a 2023 NALAC Fund for the Arts grant, a 2020 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Art Matters Foundation grant. In 2023, Wood premiered Canto de Todes, a touring 12-hour chamber music composition and installation that emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a conduit for social change. She has also released over a dozen recordings, most recently the albums You are clearly in perversion (2023, Astral Editions), in collaboration with Thor Harris; and Excesiva (Dragon's Eye Recordings, 2023).

Anh Vo: Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in New York City, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, queer and feminist performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez's unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evan's speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).