Facilitators
mayfield brooks
mayfield brooks improvises while black, and is currently based in brooklyn, new york on lenapehoking land, the homeland of the lenape people. mayfield is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. they are currently an artist in residence at the center for performance research (cpr) and abrons arts center in new york city/lenapehoking. mayfield teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, improvising while black (iwb).
Improvising While Black Article in CQ: https://contactquarterly.com/cq/article-gallery/view/iwbimprovising-while-black#$
Current work from Viewing Hours Zine: https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/56364/
Donations to mayfield can be made at:
Venmo: @mayfieldbrooks
Paypal: paypal.me/mayfieldIWB
Photo by Paula Court
Bebe Miller
Bebe Miller first performed her choreography at Dance Theater Workshop NYC in 1978. She formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985 to pursue her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition. She has collaborated with artists, composers, writers and designers along with the dancers who share her studio practice and from whom she has learned what dancing can reveal. Her work has been performed in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa and nationally at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, REDCAT in Los Angeles and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH. Her choreography has been performed by Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M. (Abraham In Motion), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Salt Lake City’s Repertory Dance Theater, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company and a host of colleges and universities. Over the last decade Bebe Miller Company has been involved in a variety of digital archive projects referencing the company’s creative practice in order to share the choreographic process with audiences and artists. Her latest ebook, How Dancing Is Built: The Making of In A Rhythm, is available online. Bebe is one of the 2012 inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients, as well as a 2010 United States Artists Ford Fellow. She has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, was a 2015 Movement Research Gala honoree and a 2020 Danspace Project Gala honoree, to be celebrated in 2021. Bebe was a Professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance from 2000 through 2016, and has received honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Website: bebemillercompany.org
Photo courtesy of Bebe Miller
Jessica Rajko
Jessica Rajko is an interdisciplinary scholar/practitioner working at the intersection of somatically informed dance and human-computer interaction design. Her current work investigates the ethical and corporeal implications of big data and quantification practices on everyday life and within the dance community. Considering issues such as digital civil rights and equity in digital culture, her research aspires to disrupt normative narratives of how we perform digital technology and how digital technology performs us.
Jessica is an assistant professor at Wayne State University. She joined WSU in 2019 as part of a multidisciplinary university hiring initiative in Big Data and analytics. She has presented and performed in various collaborative artworks nationally and internationally, including Amsterdam’s OT301, Toronto’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche festival and New York City’s Gotham Festival at The Joyce Theatre. She was named one of Phoenix New Times’s “100 Creatives of 2016” and has been commissioned by the Currents New Media Festival, Breaking Ground Dance Festival, Mesa Arts Center, Heard Museum, and Phoenix Art Museum. In her former position at Arizona State University, she was a founding co-Director of the ASU Human Security Collaboratory and was the mentor for the dance MFA concentration in Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance.
Jessica received her MFA in Dance and Interdisciplinary Digital Media at Arizona State University in 2009 (outstanding graduate of the year) and her BA in Dance and Psychology at Hope College in 2005.
Website: jessicarajko.com
Photo by Tim Trumble
Jennifer Harge
Jennifer Harge is a movement artist and educator based in Detroit, MI. Her performance works have always prioritized the sacredness of Black fellowship, queer relationality, rituals from her experiences in both Black penetacostal and united methodist sanctuaries, and “Black and going on women” -- language learned from Lucille Clifton’s “for deLawd” where Clifton illustrates how Black women have had to withhold, exercise faith, grieve, and continue life inside of anti-Black, anti-femme worlds. The stories Harge shares through performance are part of her blood memory.
Harge’s latest project, FLY | DROWN, is a performance installation platforming how Black women use their homes to reclaim and assert autonomy over their bodies, histories, and communities. She is currently developing a movement syllabus that extends the performative elements of the work into a series of learning modalities committed to being with Black spiritual fugitivity and Black feminist thought.
Website: hargedancestories.com
Facilitator biographies coming soon!