Born in the South and raised in the mountains and DIY music scenes of the Pacific Northwest, shannon stewart | screaming traps explores the intersection of dance with embodied identities and social choreographies. Shannon’s creative practice is body centered–working with sensation, perception, and orientation to time and space, understanding that these things are shaped by context and social constructions, including the context of “the field of contemporary dance.” Her/Their work traverses through disciplines often crossing into essay, poetry, and film, and relies on comedy, pop culture, drag, and self-reflection to create intimate and honest works described as “mesmerizing” and “brutally poetic.”

A 2023 USA Artist Fellowship nominee, Shannon’s choreography has been presented by DOCK 11 (Berlin, Germany), CONARTE (Monterrey, Mexico), Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia) Movement Research at the Judson Church, Future Oceans Festival (NYC), Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards (Seattle), RISK/REWARD, Performance Works Northwest (Portland), Philadelphia Dance Projects, the Hinterlands/Playhouse, Wasserman Project (Detroit), Definitive Figures Festival, Marigny Opera House, Tulane University (New Orleans), Bryant Lake Bowl, Cowles Center (MPLS), the Work Room (ATL), Pivot Arts Incubator (Chicago), Good Children Gallery, the Front Gallery, invited to the V&A Late in London, and John F. Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.). Her collaborative dance films have screened at festivals around the world. The development of Shannon’s work has been supported by the National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Foundation for Contemporary Art, UCROSS Foundation, Art Omi, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, among others. Planet Detroit published their first submitted poem in July 2023.

As a performer and collaborator, Shannon has worked with Cherdonna Shinatra, Matty Davis Williams, Aurora Nealand, Deborah Hay, Christopher Matthews, tEEth performance/Angelle Hebert, zoe | juniper, Dayna Hanson, Pat Graney and has also performed the work of visual artists Tino Sehgal and Joan Jonas. She has co-founded two youth arts nonprofits on the west coast focused on underground culture and released a book distributed by AK Press documenting these efforts nationwide.

Shannon has a Masters of Fine Arts from Tulane University in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance and a BA in Urban Design from the University of Washington. She has been a core mentor for ROAR Berlin and a member of the Front Gallery in New Orleans. She is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Dance at the University of Kansas and lives part- time in Detroit, Michigan (Waawiyatanong) with her partner and dog.

Photo by Jingzi Zhao

Jody Kuehner aka Cherdonna Shinatra uses dance, drag, theater, camp, feminist traditions, absurdity and subversive commentary to make art. Eighteen years ago, she landed in Seattle and fell in love with its rowdy, postmodern dance culture. She fell in love with my own queerness. In doing so, Jody created Cherdonna Shinatra as a persona and character to question herself and explore the world from a uniquely queer perspective. Over the last 10 years Jody has created and performed a wide array of evening-length works and performance installations described as “uncategorizable spectacles” (The Stranger) for theaters, museums, clubs, parking lots, and abandoned buildings. She is a 2020 NEFA’s National Dance Project finalist, 2017 Artist Trust Fellowship recipient, 2016 NEFA’s National Dance Project awardee, and 2015 Stranger Genius Award winner. She has been presented locally at On the Boards, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Seattle Theatre Group, and the Henry Art Gallery. She has been presented nationally at the USF in Tampa FL, Go Drag! Festival, Berlin, Germany; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Centro de las Artes, Monterrey, Mexico; The Yard at Martha’s Vineyard; American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; and FringeArts in Philadelphia, PA. Her exhibition DITCH was presented at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Sarasota Art Museum, FL; and Akron Art Museum, OH. DITCH was featured in ARTnews, i-D Magazine and NBC’s 12 must-see LGBTQ art shows around the world.

Photo Credit Dylan Ward

Physical Education (PE) is keyon gaskin, Allie Hankins, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Co-created in 2013, PE organizes and hosts performances, reading groups, workshops, artist talks, and dance parties. Originally started in 2013 as a private reading group and discussion date over dinner and drinks, PE has curated and facilitated public programming since 2014. PE’s vision is to offer contemporary artists and audiences, as well as curious individuals, immersive modes through which to engage with artworks that center around performance and performativity. PE acknowledges and scrutinizes the perceived illegibility and messiness of the performing body, and seeks to collaboratively confront and embrace questions about it with a community.

Lu Yim is an artist who works in experimental performance and dance. They have received support through Pageant (NY), Center for Performance Research (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and recently through Queer | Art’s mentorship program with Julie Tolentino.

Takahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer. His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He co-directs the performance company madhause with Ben Evans, and is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.

keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize with their credentials

Allie Hankins is a dancer, performer, and choreographer. She is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK  Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt. In 2013 Allie co-initiated Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative/support group comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently she has performed with Linda Austin (PDX), Milka Djordjevich (LA), and Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis). When she’s not working on performances, she is doing step aerobics and learning American Sign Language. Her website is alliehankins.com. 

Photo by Mario Gallucci

Tere O’Connor is the Artistic Director of Tere O’Connor Dance in NYC. and a Center for Advanced Studies Professor in Dance at the University of Illinois. He has been making dances since 1983 and has created over 50 works for his company. He lived and worked between New York and Rome for the first nine years of his career. His company has performed throughout the US, and in Europe, South America, and Canada. O’Connor has created numerous commissioned works for dance companies around the world, among these have been works for the Lyon Opera Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, Rotterdamse Dansgroep and many more. In addition to his 1996 work “Greta in a Ditch” for the White Oak Dance Project, he created a solo work for Mikhail Baryshnikov entitled “Indoor Man” and one for Riverdance alum Jean Butler, entitled “Day” produced by the Abbey theater in Dublin.

Tere O’Connor is a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow. He is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Award, Arts International’s DNA Project Award, and a Creative Capital Award. He has received three New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards – One for “Heaven Up North” in 1988, another in 1999 for Sustained Achievement, and most recently for his work “Frozen Mommy” (2005). O’Connor is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow. He is also a recipient of repeated grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, NEFA/National Dance Project, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., The Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Mid Atlantic US Artists International.

A much sought after teacher, O’Connor has taught at the Bates Dance Festival,
American Dance Festival, Colorado Dance Festival, Ohio State University, University
of Minnesota, Arizona State University, at the School for New Dance Development
(The Netherlands), and ImpulseTanz (Austria), among many others. He is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he resides for the spring semester, spending the rest of his time in NY or on tour.

Photo property of Tere O’Connor Dance

Lu Yim is an artist who works in experimental performance and dance. They have received support through Pageant (NY), Center for Performance Research (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and recently through Queer | Art’s mentorship program with Julie Tolentino.

Photo by Christa Holka

keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize with their credentials

Photo by mario gallucci

Takahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer. His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He co-directs the performance company madhause with Ben Evans, and is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.

Photo by DJ Schaller

Allie Hankins is a dancer, performer, and choreographer. She is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK  Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt. In 2013 Allie co-initiated Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative/support group comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently she has performed with Linda Austin (PDX), Milka Djordjevich (LA), and Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis). When she’s not working on performances, she is doing step aerobics and learning American Sign Language. Her website is alliehankins.com. 

Photo courtesy of the Lumber Room

Black Collectivity (BC) is a way of being, a mode of survival, and a dream space. Since 2021, Black Collectivity organizes with the intention of bringing together diasporic people involved in creating and supporting movement based experiences. Under the guiding notion ‘we build collectivity out of necessity,’ BC finds its roots in the collective movement and contribution of Black communities in the PNW and beyond. Together the Black Collectivity team aims to make and support work that explores and celebrates memory and culture through embodied responses.

Black Collectivity Artists: Nia-Amina Minor, Akoiya Harris, marco farroni, David Rue

Photo by Chloe Collyer

Hannah Simmons is a multi-disciplinary performer, creator, and educator living and working in Seattle. She holds a B.A. from Bennington College in dance and mathematics. As a performer, she has oscillated between highly experimental contemporary works, performance art, classical ballet, opera, and burlesque, most recently dancing in Seattle Opera’s La Traviata and back-up dancing for electro-pop diva YellaCatt.

Her choreographies and installations are centered around queering forms and hybridizing reality and fiction, in service of giving viewers a dynamic and unusual perspective on their own bodies. Her recent work has been supported by Velocity Dance Center, NWFF’s Collective Power Fund, MAP Fund’s inaugural microgrant initiative, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the Freeway Park Association.

Recent projects include: Ballet Rituals, an ongoing class series built alongside Alethea Alexander and Maya Tacon; Field Guides, place-based audio pieces that help you to think differently about body and environment, in collaboration with Leah Crosby; and Futurememory, a collection of zines that ask if something can live indefinitely in the realm of possibility, in collaboration with Maria Manness.

She is passionate about communal care, collaboration, and building sustainable and reciprocal systems of support for artists.

Photo by AJ Ragasa

Peggy Piacenza is a Seattle choreographer, video artist, and performer who has toured both nationally and internationally. She is the co-founder of Base, a non-profit organization dedicated to elevating risk and invention in dance, performance, and multidisciplinary art. Peggy’s work draws from her explorations in improvisation/performance techniques, religion and gender studies, and inter-disciplinary collaborations. In recent years her stage-based work has expanded to include installation and video. Her choreography has been commissioned and presented by Bonfire Gallery, Bratislava Movement Festival in Slovakia, Dance Theater Workshop in NYC, and in Seattle as part of Velocity Dance Center’s Guest Artist Series, On the Boards, Composer/Choreographer, D-9 Dance Collective, Northwest Film Forum, and 4Culture. In 1992, she co-founded Seattle’s repertory dance company, The D-9 Dance Collective.

Piacenza’s contemporary dance career began in Seattle in 1991 when she first performed with Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney, touring signature works throughout the US, Europe and South America. From 1996–2004 she worked in collaboration with co-directors Dayna Hanson and Gaelen Hanson of the Seattle-based dance-theater company 33 Fainting Spells. Since then, she has performed in the work of many choreographers, such as Bebe Miller, Stephanie Skura, Deborah Hay, Lionel Popkin, Beth Graczyk, and others. She also performed in two evening-length works conceived by Dayna Hanson, Gloria’s Cause (2010) and The Clay Duke (2014). She can also be seen acting in Hanson’s feature-length film Improvement Club (2013). She is currently performing with NYC/Toronto-based performance collective, Same As Sister (S.A.S.).

Piacenza is a 2010 graduate of Smith College’s Ada Comstock Scholars Program where she majored in Religion and Gender Studies. In Spring 2011 she became the inaugural recipient of the Helen Gurley Brown Magic Grant, underwriting her creative project to bring Cambodian and American artists together in Cambodia for a month of cross-cultural dialogue and dancing associated with classical and contemporary dance forms. In December 2012, a documentary film based on her time in Cambodia was completed, and subsequently hosted by Velocity Dance Center’s Speakeasy Series.

Photo by Doug Arney

Leslie Seiters is a teacher, performer and dancemaker. She studied visual art at Kenyon College, received an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, and is a certified Feldenkrais practitioner. Since 2002 she has directed Leslie Seiters/little known dance theater, has co-directed and performed with long-time collaborator Rachael Lincoln and she dances weekly with LIVEpractice, a group she co-founded in 2007. Leslie has primarily lived/worked on the west coast and has performed with Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Bebe Miller, Scott Wells, Knee Jerk Project, Body Cartographers, and Deborah Hay. She has been faculty at San Diego State University since 2005. Leslie seeks and participates in projects that provide regular opportunities to rethink, reconsider, and reinvent what she is doing as a dance artist and moves toward what dance does, rather than what it means.

Photo by Crystal Birns

Leslie Seiters is a teacher, performer and dancemaker. She studied visual art at Kenyon College, received an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, and is a certified Feldenkrais practitioner. Since 2002 she has directed Leslie Seiters/little known dance theater, has co-directed and performed with long-time collaborator Rachael Lincoln and she dances weekly with LIVEpractice, a group she co-founded in 2007. Leslie has primarily lived/worked on the west coast and has performed with Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Bebe Miller, Scott Wells, Knee Jerk Project, Body Cartographers, and Deborah Hay. She has been faculty at San Diego State University since 2005. Leslie seeks and participates in projects that provide regular opportunities to rethink, reconsider, and reinvent what she is doing as a dance artist and moves toward what dance does, rather than what it means.

Karen chuki Nelson (she/her/crone) tunes in community and performance where she lives on unceded Coast Salish land known as Vashon Island near Seattle, and world-wide on-screen in tunezooming, and face to face through international touring. Early on she helped develop Tuning Scores originated by Lisa Nelson in collaboration with Lisa, Scott Smith, and K.J. Holmes in their 1990’s performance group Image Lab and since then with many others. Tuning is a foundation to all chuki’s dancemaking, and crone has joined with margit galanter on many Tuning projects since they began collaborating in the late 90’s. This SFD+I inspired tuning creation project includes a scheduled early morning class, an all day research sideshow, and pop up site tunings with local and visiting guests. www.explomov.weebly.com

Photo by Margit Galanter

margit galanter (ze/zir, they/them) is a dance poet and cultural instigator living on Huichin, unceded Ohlone land. Their syncretic approach is based on decades of practice in movement/art lineages and is shared through long-term projects and writings. margit’s work is offered through the vivid grove — a live art school for moving, learning, creative evolution, and collective liberatory practices. In the end of the last decade, they instigated Tuning Culture/Tuning4Armageddon, a collaborative inquiry that utilizes Tuning practices to decolonize dance, and Cave Forms, an exploration in performance, nourishment, fecundity and the environment. margit’s practice in tuning started in Seattle with Karen as zir teacher in 1996, and through the years, many collaborative adventures. www.vividgrove.org

Solvej Amelia Noa is an impromptu, improvisational, multi-genre performance artist, as well as an educator, Embodiment Coach and non-denominational minister, based in Seattle WA. Amelia’s dance background and formal training are primarily in ballet, modern, jazz, musical theater, hip hop and afro-brazilian dance styles. She danced for numerous Seattle based contemporary dance companies from 1995-2002. At the end of that time, Amelia had incurred multiple dance related injuries, and related complications, and it was then she began what would become a dedicated rehabilitation and rejuvenation practice. This was the seed planted that lead to Amelia creating the Joy of Dance Experience (J.O.D.E.) in 2018: a sustainable, holistic self care sequence, structured to identify and tend the needs of the body, prioritizing safety, joy and freedom. Amelia credits JODE with restoring her to mobility, agility, resilience and vast quantities of JOY. With an essential upgrade in attitude, approach and awareness, Amelia returned to performing contemporary and improvised dance in 2016. She currently collaborates with choreographers from various locations across the country.

Amelia’s improvisational movement work erupted around 2003, when she joined the freestyle cyphers (circles) in local Seattle dance clubs, and began dancing to house music. With break dancers, waackers, voguers, pop-lockers and more as her sources for inspiration, her movement repertoire burst far beyond what had been her previously perceived bounds. She quickly developed an interested in supporting others in the same exhilarating, fulfilling discovery of their own bountiful resources for fresh movements and ideas. This resulted in her teaching house dance in various studios around Seattle, with the most recent location being Cornish College of the Arts, in the college dance department.

About a decade later, around 2013, Amelia discovered a treasure of a music venue in Seattle called the Spite House. This beautiful underground living room music venue revealed Amelia to the impromptu, improvised music aspect of her artistry, and she became a regular contributor, and ultimately, a curator at the Spite House. It was in that space that her freestyle movement vocabulary began to be translated and expressed as improvised and intuited sounds and poetry, with the use of a loop pedal, in concert with organic movement. This laid the groundwork for Amelia’s ministry, Our Love of Life Opera (OLOLO). Through OLOLO, she explores, cultivates and disseminates the potent medicine availed of the arts, which she considers the primary mediums through which inspiration is expressed and healing is experienced.

Amelia is also the founder of M.A.N.G.O. Family Wellness; a trauma-informed source for Embodiment Coaching for children and adults, as well as parent and family coaching for families in mild to extraordinary distress. Through MANGO, Amelia also provides trauma-informed anti-bias training, as well as infant mental health workshops for educators and care-givers. Amelia identifies as FREE and dedicates her life to a Higher Power.

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis

Fox Whitney is a performance maker, choreographer, dancer, musician, filmmaker, actor and writer. He started the psychedelic transfuturist band Light Aloud in 2023 and founded the interdisciplinary performance project Gender Tender in 2012. Both Light Aloud and GT engage a team of artists trained in Fox’s unique methods modeled on visual art practices,

cults, riots and QT history and the surreal nature of transformation. Fox’s ongoing project, MELTED RIOT is the current focus of his interdisciplinary art making. MELTED RIOT uses tactics rooted in text, sound, dance, durational performance, and visual art to investigate the effects peaceful and violent forms of support and sabotage have on the bodies, minds, and spirits of the transgender and queer community. MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer. www.foxwhitney.weebly.com

IG: @fox_whitney_ @lightaloud