Our
Network

516 ARTS is a non-collecting contemporary art museum in the center of Downtown Albuquerque that celebrates thought-provoking art in the here and now. Our mission is to connect contemporary artists and diverse audiences. 516 ARTS presents relevant exhibitions and public programs, which feature a mix of local, national, and international artists and inspire curiosity, risk-taking and creative experimentation.

Founded in 2006, 516 ARTS engages with timely themes such as the environment, immigration, and the north/south axis of cultural exchange with a focus on Latin America. Our public programs include collaborations with museums and organizations around the region and beyond, public art projects, guest speakers, public forums, the 516 WORDS literary series, workshops, performances and special events. Education programs include exhibition tours for schools and community groups with curriculum support materials for teachers, youth activities, and hands-on workshops with guest artists.

With over 45 years of producing, presenting, and educating, we continue to offer a home to artists and activists as a global center for the creation of vital conversations through collaborative performance. By creating relationships with and presenting high quality international and national artists, 7Stages offers Atlanta visionary art and innovative ideas through programming they otherwise wouldn’t have access too – all the while supporting the growth of our local community.

Alberto Puerto Music creates new classical and guitar music compositions and collaborates across disciplines in the Miami, FL area. Our latest project is a Latin American songbook recording album that crosses Latin American musical song forms with arrangements centered around the classical guitar.

All My Relations Arts honors and strengthens relationships between contemporary American Indian artists and the living influence of preceding generations, between artists and audiences of all ethnic backgrounds, and between art and the vitality of the American Indian Cultural Corridor.

The Arab American National Museum (AANM) is the first and only museum of its kind in the United States devoted to recording the Arab American experience. Since opening in 2005, AANM’s mission has been to document, preserve and present the history, culture and contributions of Arab Americans. Our exhibitions cover the Arab world and the history of Arab Americans from the first immigrants who arrived in the late 19th century to today. We offer safe spaces for open dialogue and community gatherings and provide educational opportunities for children and students of all ages to expand their knowledge and appreciation of Arab American history and culture. We work with established and emerging artists of all artistic mediums to uplift their work and share it with our regional and national audiences. All of this is intended to build community through the arts by showcasing our nation’s cultural diversity in thoughtful and impacting ways.

Art2Action creates, develops, produces and presents original theatre, interdisciplinary performances, performative acts and progressive cultural organizing. We support women artists, artists of color, queer or trans* artists, and creative allies. We are dedicated to these values, and hold them to be of equal importance: Cultural Equity & Aesthetic Innovation, Artistic Quality & Community Value, Performativity & Impact.

Whether developing new work, touring, or acting as a presenter, community process and meaningful engagement is central to all our work. As a mission-driven, artist-led organization, we increase capacity, extend and deepen our impact through multi-year partnerships with local and national institutions, organizations and networks.

Art2Action is incorporated in the State of New York, and the State of Florida. As a presenter, we work closely with our Tampa partners, from the University of South Florida (USF) to the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, to local community service organizations. Presenting venues vary in size and technical capacity, from 50-500 seats; identifying the appropriate partners for each residency is key to our process.

Artist Corps CONNECTS New Orleans music education initiatives with local and national resources to build strong music programs with:

• EMPOWERED Educators
• EMBEDDED Artists and Culture Bearers
• EQUIPPED School Leaders
• ENGAGED Communities
• EXCELLENT Opportunities for Young People

 
Artist Corps:

AFFIRMS that music is young people’s birthright, innovation is New Orleans’ legacy, and investing in the next generation is our shared responsibility.

COMMITS to establishing pathways to excellent, comprehensive, sequential music education for every young person in New Orleans.

HONORS New Orleans educators, artists, and culture bearers – valuing their expertise and amplifying their voices in developing strategy for advancing music education.

CELEBRATES the many dedicated schools, programs, cultural organizations, families, funders, resource providers and supporters that provide music education in New Orleans – and strives to coordinate efforts and focus resources to increase collaborative impact.

CENTERS equity and justice in our work, cultivating systemic opportunity that enables young people to engage in their cultural legacy and grow as musicians and as individuals.

MODELS a reflective practice that respects tradition, integrates diverse perspectives, fosters growth and embraces change.

ArtPower’s mission is to present performing and media arts that engage, energize, and transform the diverse cultural life of the University and San Diego. Through ArtPower’s curation of artists representing a multitude of diverse ethnicities, cultures, and identities we strive to develop more empathetic students and community members that are better prepared to engage in the world around them. Through their participation in high quality artistic programs the program’s goal is to broaden thinking and awareness, deepen understanding, and encourage new dialogues across UC San Diego and the community.

The Arts and Politics Collective consists of a small group of artists and scholars who ask: What is, or ought to be, the relationship between aesthetics and politics? To explore this question, we are creating a cycle of performance works that challenges normative ways of viewing the arts.

The three experimental plays explore music, dance, and the visual art. Each piece engages a canonical work of art: Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” (1825), Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” (1891), and Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937). Each illuminates our own time. The works demonstrate how racial and cultural differences affect the arts. Our aim, in the words of Toni Morrison, is to make the work “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful.”

To learn more: artsandpoliticsplays.com

We maintain 10,000 square feet of gallery space and 20,000 square feet of performance space to create and preserve opportunities for the curation, exhibition, and commission of fine, folk, and fine-folk art.

Producing over 350 music, theater, dance, spoken word, drum circles, and multi-disciplinary events a year, Ashé believes in art as a paradigm-shifting call to action.

As ecosystem builders, we deliver programming and direct services that support, leverage, and celebrate the people, places, and philosophies of the African Diaspora. Ashé maintains a high value, high profile real estate portfolio in Central City, a neighborhood where historic residents are being aggressively displaced.

In understanding the impact and importance of Ashé’s ability to guide equitable development in our surroundings, we have engaged in strategic planning that allowed us to create a vision for leveraging and expanding our own real estate portfolio in order to increase our capacity to make place and to keep place on behalf of a community facing growing displacement, working on asserting our collective Right to Stay!

Connecting cultural expression and social change, Asian Arts Initiative uses art as a vehicle to explore the diverse experiences of all communities which include Asian Americans. Located in Philadelphia’s Chinatown North, Asian Arts Initiative is a multidisciplinary arts center offering exhibitions, performances, artist residencies, youth workshops, and a community gathering space. Here, all of us can view and create art that reflects our lives, and think critically, creatively about the future we want to build for our communities.

The Bates Dance Festival is an international destination for dance located in Lewiston, Maine. BDF provides rigorous training for dancers, offers residencies for practicing dance artists, and presents performances by a renown roster of local, national, and international dancemakers. Serving Maine, as well as a diverse community of dance audiences and arts lovers, BDF offers unprecedented access to and fosters deep appreciation for contemporary dance. BDF supports approximately 100 artists each summer and 300 students, ages 6-74. Curatorial priorities include contemporary practice, transparent process, diverse dancing bodies, collaboration, and community-designed and engaged work.

The award-winning Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective is a grassroots theatre incubator that operates as a collective of individuals invested in preserving a culture of Black theatre in the city of Birmingham. Our goal is to showcase and introduce Black theatrical work to the city of Birmingham through staged readings, live performance, educational programming for student & professional theatre practitioners through an Afro-Centric lens. BBRTC has a continued laser focus on telling stories of people across the African diaspora who live in the margins and is committed to hiring within those groups as well including; Black women, Black queer people, and Black disabled people. Learn more at theBBRTC.com.

The Black Cherry Tree Project (BCTP) is committed to challenging racial violence and white supremacy through art, dialogue, education, and nature. Focused on honoring the 33 documented lynching victims of Jefferson County, Alabama, BCTP collaborates with local artists to create commemorative artworks and plant Black Cherry trees as living memorials across Birmingham public parks. Each tree is accompanied by a custom-designed marker with a QR code linking to the victims’ stories and an online archive of artworks created in their honor, which are also publicly exhibited to engage and educate the community. As BCTP grows, we are building a reproducible framework to expand “seeds” nationwide—planting trees across states to memorialize lynching victims and support community healing. Through these efforts, public dialogue, and youth education, BCTP aims to inspire policy change and continue the work of dismantling white supremacy for lasting social justice.

BOOM Concepts is a creative hub dedicated to the advancement of Black, Brown, Queer and Femme artists. BOOM Concepts serves as a space for field building, knowledge sharing, mentorship, storytelling and work with creatives to find innovative strategies around entrepreneurship and artistic practice.

Our programming includes our in-house residency programming, presenting and hosting live performance events, curating original exhibitions, a temporary public art program called BOOM AP3: Activist Print, and we also run a professional and business development program called Artists Taking Care of Artists.

Bunnell Street Arts Center is situated on Nichiłt’ana, lands of Ninilchik Village Tribe, stewarded for thousands of years, since time immemorial by Indigenous people of this region. We are committed to resisting colonialism by supporting Indigenous-led programs and artistic practices. Bunnell sparks artistic inquiry, innovation, and equity to strengthen the physical, social and economic fabric of Alaska and beyond. Through exhibits, talks, Bunnell workshops, residencies, artist-in-schools, performances and creative placemaking actions Bunnell increases opportunities, benefits, and resources for a widespread geographic area of diverse rural communities, from Indigenous and Russian Old Believer villages to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, youth at risk, and low-income Alaskans. Bunnell amplifies the voices of disparate, isolated, and historically marginalized communities in educational youth outreach activities, training for community leaders, artists’ projects, and leadership on our Board of Directors. Bunnell seeks diverse participation in programs that challenge systemic White supremacy and elevate Indigenous life ways, build artists’ power and interweave a constellation of support for artists across the circumpolar north and beyond.

Bvlbancha Public Access is a media channel based in Bulbancha, Louisiana. We collect stories, facilitate art, and produce events on Indigenous identity in the Gulf South.

A multinational learning community of Spanish and English–speaking popular theater artists, researchers, students, teachers, and enthusiasts of Caribbean culture and performance. We meet online and face-to-face to share work, ideas, and resources.

The mission of CARPA San Diego is to create a space where Latino artists can showcase their talent through theater, dance, music, and other artistic expressions, reaching out to the community in a non-traditional setting.

Founded in 1969, The Carpetbag Theatre is a Knoxville-based professional, multi-generational ensemble company dedicated to the production of new works. We work in partnership with community artists, activists, cultural workers, storytellers, and leaders to create original, theatrical works. Our mission is to give artistic voice to the issues and dreams of people who have been silenced by racism, classism, sexism, ageism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. Our artistic vision is rooted in the practice of revealing, reframing, and reclaiming the hidden stories of our communities; believing that this process is what reveals the beauty of our collective experiences.We also believe that this process has the power to reframe our experiences and provide the kinds of healing it takes to release us from strongholds that have held us hostage over time.

The Carver Community Cultural Center is a multicultural, multidisciplinary performing and visual arts center who celebrates the diverse cultures of our global community, with an emphasis on its African American heritage by presenting challenging artistic presentations, arts education programs and community outreach activities. The Carver Development Board raises funds to support the arts education and community engagement programs of the Carver Community Cultural Center. The Carver is located on the near East Side of San Antonio, historically home to the majority of San Antonio’s Black community and currently still one of the most under-resourced communities in the City, predominately populated by people of color.

Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas is a nonprofit organization solely dedicated to presenting emerging Black arts, artists, and ideas in the Seattle area. We believe in the value of community, creativity, identity and passion. These values serve as our strategic frame and guide day-to-day operations and program decisions. We work out of the historic Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, an ADA-compliant facility rich with culture and history.

The Coleman Center for the Arts is a 36-year old arts organization located in rural west Alabama. Our work is done through five main programmatic arms: arts education for area youth and adults; a community-based artists’ residency that produces socially engaged public art projects and events; exhibitions that feature the work of regional artists; a free, public community garden that promotes small-scale food production; and Pop Start, a storefront space for artists-community experimentation.

Creating New Futures is an arts worker-driven effort speaking to the dance and performance field in what is currently called the United States.

In Phase 1, a group of arts workers came together to create the “living document” Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance, which attempts to frame principles and guidelines for conversations within the dance and performance field to shape our futures in light of the extraordinary chaos and disruption caused by COVID-19. The document addresses concerns regarding cancellations and what future work, funding, survival might look like. More pressingly, it looks beyond the present moment to address longstanding inequities, deficiencies, and power imbalances in the field.

Phase 2 is now emerging and is formed by working groups that include: Black and Indigenous Survivors group, Disability+ group, Intersectional Riders group, and Contracts/Force Majeure group with potential groups in discussion like the Natureculture Watershed group.

The Creative Response Network (CRN) is an emergent and collaborative effort led by a consortium of local arts leaders representing diverse, critical, and justice-focused arts-organizing efforts in New Orleans. Meeting monthly since the start of the pandemic, CRN serves as a resource and advocacy hub. CRN’s approach seeks to reimagine the region’s arts landscape to one that centers on equity, justice, accountability, and sustainable livelihoods through the production, presentation, preservation, advocacy, and cultivation of art. The Network works to address immediate and long-standing forms of inequality and exploitation within the arts through working groups. CRN work focuses on the complicated relationships between place, race, gender, disciplinary practices, and leadership inequality that continues to plague New Orleans’ cultural economy.

Creative Response Network is a New Orleans-based initiative for art, movement building, and radical possibilities. Initiated by Antenna at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020 and led initially by Antenna, Ashe Cultural Arts Center, and Junebug Projection, CRN provides direct support to artists while engaging a network of 70+ arts and cultural organizations, projects, collectives, and individuals to advance a more just and transformative ecology of equity and sustainability within the arts and cultural sectors of New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana.

D’Vorah Dance Arts’ mission is to create dance works that shift perspectives inspired by the depths of our human experience. I am seeking support to fund the creative efforts in the development and presentation of The Day You Painted The Stars (a work that was created in response to processing grief with the use of meditation and traveling through the sub-conscious), The Witch of Wellington (a whimsical work inspired by growing up in the suburbs finding that your imagination has turned around and upside down from a unique encounter with a perceived witch), and investigating new ideas during a creative retreat in the spring of 2024. Throughout this process, I will also offer master classes that share my choreographic process and workshops that inspire non-dancers to utilize movement as a healing tool.

Dance Place fundamentally focuses on creating a sense of home, of connection and belonging, for our community. This season’s artists are pioneers of movement expression, whose work opens portals to worlds that reveal the multiplicity of the human experience.

In acknowledgment of all we have faced as a country, this season’s curatorial vision is “Between Living & Dreaming.”

Moving through these experiences requires honoring the realities of living today in the present, while supporting us imagining our own possibility. Each artist, performance, residency, community event, and educational engagement reminds us that we have many more dreams to dream.

Dreaming is about demanding the world we would like to live in, a world with rigorous compassion, generative conflict, coalition building and the continued search for life’s meaning. Together we embrace Maya Angelou’s declaration that “We must confess that we are the possible.”

As we navigate the space “Between Living & Dreaming,” we create a world where dreams are not just aspirations but realities in the making. Together, we will explore, challenge, and celebrate the boundless possibilities of our collective imagination. Home is the experience of connection and belonging, and through our shared journey we will build a community where everyone feels they belong.

DVCAI is attuned to a regional understanding of Caribbeanness, quite different from different parts of the country. Miami Caribbean space is a heavy presence of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, the English speaking Caribbean, Latinx communities from Latin America and Central America, the French Caribbean and Dutch Caribbean. These communities engage the Black Communities and white, suburban communities.

DVCAI curatorial vision is one that is invested in deconstructing complex contemporary cultural issues and attempts to provide a dialogue within which these issues can be discussed. We face the global south and focus on Caribbean artists in the Caribbean and in Diaspora Miami defined and experienced as a Creole City.

Founded by artists in 1982, DiverseWorks is nationally known for its groundbreaking artistic programming, meaningful engagement with communities, and advancement of progressive art and ideas in Houston and the nation.

Throughout its 40-year history, DW has been committed to equity and diversity in the arts and supported brave projects that cultivate social change. Currently, more than 70% of artists, 50% of staff, and 60% of the Board of Directors are BIPOC and/or identify as LGBTQ+.

DiverseWorks fulfills its mission through a year-round schedule of exhibitions, performances, and community programs presented to the public free of charge. DiverseWorks’ primary audiences are artists and culturally curious audiences who seek experiences outside of the larger, more traditional arts venues. Geographically, the Greater Houston Area is the focus, though the artists and audiences we engage are local, national, and international. Taking an adaptive and artist-centered approach to the use of space, DiverseWorks produces performances and projects in a variety of sites across the city of Houston.

Double Edge Theatre (DE), founded by Stacy Klein in 1982 in Boston, is a cultural cooperative and ensemble collective based, since 1994, on a 100-acre farm in Ashfield, MA. A center for Art, Living Culture, and Art Justice, DE blends creativity, environmental awareness, and immersive performance. Its 11-member Ensemble, with decades of collective experience, guides its artistic and operational vision.

DE is known for its visually poetic, physically rigorous productions, which are performed locally and internationally, and for its unique psycho-physical training methodology developed over 43 years. DE offers training programs, residencies, and retreats for artists. Sustainability is integral to DE’s mission, with initiatives in farming, food production, and renewable energy. Deeply woven into the local economy and community life, DE is Ashfield’s largest employer, attracting thousands of visitors annually and collaborating with town governance on housing, resilience, and revitalization projects. DE’s cooperative partnerships with organizations like Ohketeau Cultural Center and The Theater Offensive support land access, restorative justice, and social cohesion.

More than a theatre, DE is a dynamic commons model which offers a vibrant sanctuary for creativity and community-building in response to the challenges of extractive capitalism.

Fusebox is a non-profit arts organization in Austin, TX. At the center of our work is an ongoing exploration of live performance. Our programs bring unique artistic projects to thousands of people in Central Texas; provide support and resources to artists; and address civic issues at the center of contemporary life and culture. Fusebox serves the artist community in Austin, in strong support of BIPOC arts.

FUSEBOX CORE VALUES
We believe in the boundless possibilities of live performance.
We believe in the potential of imagination to shape the world.
We believe in shaking things up.
We believe in access.
We believe in, and are committed to, cultural equity, anti-racism, and diversity.
We believe in supporting arts workers.
We believe in the act of gathering, and the power of presence.
We believe in leading with joy, care, and generosity.
We believe in long-term collaborations.
We believe in a plurality of perspectives.
We believe in the exchange of ideas across artistic disciplines, sectors, neighborhoods, and countries.
We believe exchanges should be relational and reciprocal rather than transactional.
We believe our festival should be free, but that artists’ work should be valued.
We believe that art is central to a healthy society

GALA Hispanic Theatre’s mission is to develop, produce, and present works that explore the breadth of Latinx performing arts, making this work accessible to the broadest possible audience and using theater as a vehicle for social change. In doing so, GALA provides opportunities for Latinx artists, educates and trains youth, and engages the entire community in an exchange of ideas and perspectives.

Global Nola, is an artist-run organization that promotes and preserves world music and performing arts culture in New Orleans and throughout the world.

As global cultural ambassadors, we produce the Global Groove, bringing New Orleans performing artists together with musicians, dancers, etc. across the globe. With roots in Africa, the Caribbean, North America, South America, and Europe, performing artists share their immense talents with our global audience on both a virtual and live stage. These events shine a bright light on the plight of performing artists globally during, and post pandemic. Community and educational events are also essential, and we often partner with organizations that share common goals.

United in supporting justice and equality for all, the performing artists of the Global Groove bring the world closer together in love, harmony, and expanded cultural worldview.

The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, founded in 1980, is located in the heart of San Antonio’s Westside. It is one of the largest community-based, multi-disciplinary organizations in the U.S. The GCAC provides programming across six disciplines (dance, theatre, visual arts, music, film and literature), offers year- round educational programming through its Guadalupe Academy and free community events, and also produces the annual Tejano Conjunto festival and Cinefestival.

The Hammonds House Museum is a 501(c)3 arts organization founded in 1988, whose mission is to celebrate and share the cultural diversity and important legacy of artists of African descent. Programming is designed to engage audiences of all ages.

We lift up Durham’s Black community and the broader community around us through programs that preserve the heritage of historic Hayti and promote the African American experience through arts programs, operating as a cultural hub and as a space for engagement. In addition to core programs, we provide space for facility rentals. Our programming includes visual artist exhibitions, a poetry slam/spoken word team, summer/year round youth programming, African dance classes, a music series that celebrates noted black jazz, blues, gospel and other artists performed by local talent, an annual film festival that promotes southern black film, an annual Kwanzaa celebration, and a Juneteenth event among others. “We regularly feature and promote local visual artists by showcasing their works in our gallery space, inviting the public to meet artists and see the work during receptions and talks back, and we promote the sale of our artists’ works. We support performing artists through social media and our website, with focus on local talented vocalists, musicians and deejays. Presenting the arts in our sacred space makes our programming even more memorable and helps preserve the community’s heritage.”

HBC430 aims to help grow an ecosystem of individuals and organizations dedicated to using art, performance, and creative advocacy to co-create a more just and equitable society for Black and other marginalized people. HBC430 is home of Solid Ground Theatre Company, a growing collective of citizen artists and Instinctive Theatre practitioners. Instinctive theater is an art for social justice technique designed by HBC430 founder, Maryam Foye, inspired by African and Black diasporic ritual, psychodrama, and Theater of the Oppressed.

Highways is Southern California’s boldest center for new performance. In our 33rd year, Highways continues to be an important alternative cultural center in Los Angeles that encourages radical artists from diverse communities to develop and present innovative new works. Described by the Los Angeles Times as “a hub of experimental theater, dance, solo drama and other multimedia performance,” Highways promotes the development of contemporary socially involved artists and art forms.

Our mission is to develop and present innovative performance and visual artists, promote interaction among people of diverse cultural backgrounds and engage artists and the communities they serve in cross-cultural dialogues about social, cultural and artistic issues.

House of Lux (2023) is a mutual aid play reminiscent of the care practices of the Black & Brown folk who raised us while weathering violent spatial conditions of american state globalization and urbanization events termed “Vietnam war… the crack era…. war on drugs…. war on crime…. AIDS epidemic…” The play is devised with community story bearers and translated by muthi reed in their avatar, wildin. We are reminiscing about past events for folx who survived it. We are weaving together the wisdoms of our survival.

Sankofarration

• it is for us to remember and tell stories of survival and be cared for in the telling.
• the play is a spatial oral archive that makes resonant the complex divinity and dignity of our lives.

Shaped in community with kinfolk and neighbors’ archives, over the course of three years, we will roll out mutual aid còuture — quarterly goodie bags, play script, art; simulating the parables, dreams and stories of the community.

Reassembling Spaces

• exhibition galleries, storefronts, kitchens, theaters, bookstores, radio airwaves, internet platforms, living rooms, outdoor walls, and open fields will become our portals for dreaming.
• looking at archives within our family and kinfolk communities as the thing Toni Morrison named the source of self regard. The thing James Brown called attitude. And what Andaiye named neighborliness.
• we are experimenting with growing strength through building cultural knowledge within the village.

The play and the making of it will channel a mix of legends, lies, lamentations, travel routes, recipes, remedies, libations, provisions, and conjures for getting free staying free. House of Lux intervention architects time through black ritual in the company of kinfolk.

The International Sonoran Desert Alliance is committed to fostering communication, understanding and cooperation among the diverse peoples and cultures residing at the tri-national intersection of the Tohono O’odham Nation, Mexico, and the United States.

Our vision is to establish the region as a showcase for environmental excellence and an international hub for arts and culture, with a prosperous and sustainable economy that offers opportunities for all its residents.

The Sonoran Desert represents a unique intersection of nations, peoples and rich cultural heritage. We are committed to holding space for the complex, layered and sometimes challenging stories that constitute the character of place in the Sonoran Desert. We recognize and honor the Tohono O’odham, Hia C-ed O’odham and Akimel O’odham as the stewards of this land and the critically important role that songs, stories and ceremonies play in maintaining connections among the people, the land, the flora and the fauna.

We celebrate the music, dance and visual art that make this region unique while acknowledging the outsized role that colonial influences play in so many of these art forms.

Mind Over Mirrors is the ever-evolving project of composer, harmoniumist, and synthesist Jaime Fennelly, who buttresses his modest instrumental foundation of Indian pedal harmonium with an array of tape delays, effect processors, and synthesizers that belong to the world of classic analog electronic composition. Both as a solo artist and with various collaborators, he creates immersive interdisciplinary work that NPR has described as “an out-of-body experience.” His explorations of the natural world’s sensory dimensions and the dialogues between cultural traditions—vernacular and avant-garde—have led him down a path of creating work that deliberately situates itself in a questing, edge-of-earth spirit. After five solo albums on several labels, Paradise of Bachelors released Fennelly’s first work for an ensemble, Undying Color (2017), followed by Bellowing Sun (2018), which was commissioned for its world premiere live performance by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Pitchfork called Bellowing Sun, “one of the decade’s true experimental wonders.” Bellowing Sun received funding from the NPN Creation & Forth Fund.

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s mission is to generate a creative exchange between artists and the public. The Arts Center serves as a laboratory for the creation of new works, nurturer of interdisciplinary initiatives, originator of exhibitions, presenter of performing arts, educator, community builder and advocate for arts issues, functioning as a catalyst for ideas that will impact the lives of artists and the public. The Arts Center works with community partners to develop goals and priorities as we reach the local Sheboygan, WI community, Midwest region, and nationally. We envision a world in which communities collaborate and explore the arts to nourish and enrich the lives of all. We believe that art in all its forms is vital to the health of our communities, our nation, and our world; we believe that art enriches the human spirit. We activate creative exchanges through equitable, intentional, and creative opportunities inclusive of artist collaborations, participatory experiences, community partnerships, and accessible resources that foster lifelong learning through the arts.

Junebug Productions, the proud successor to the Free Southern Theater (FST), has been a trailblazer in the arts since 1980. Our mission is to create and champion artistic works that challenge and address the deep-seated inequities historically faced by the Black community.

Over the past four decades, Junebug has established itself as a leader in the progressive arts movement, engaging with over 500 communities across the United States and making impactful appearances at numerous national and international festivals.

Mission: Kelly Strayhorn Theater (KST) is a home for creative experimentation, community dialogue, and collective action rooted in the liberation of Black and queer people.

Focusing on the performing and media arts of our time, KST takes a multidisciplinary and inclusive approach to presenting contemporary performing arts. KST programs examine the questions that define and inspire us as individuals and communities. Our mission supports a vision in three parts: A leading presenter of innovative works in dance, theater, music, and live art; a community resource for youth education, emerging artist support and community partnership; and a neighborhood anchor institution accelerating the transformation of East Liberty as a destination for cultural entertainment and business opportunity.

KST is a leading interdisciplinary producer and presenter of contemporary art and performance committed to the liberation of Black Life and the empowerment of historically marginalized communities. Through performances, artist residencies, and community partnerships KST is where artists and audiences test new ideas and shape public conversation. KST programs examine the questions that define and inspire us as individuals and communities.

Krewe da Bhan Gras represents the South Asian diaspora in South Louisiana. We seek to explore cultural representations of the expansive South Asian community through various artistic endeavors, ensuring all community members feel welcome regardless of religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, or gender.

Last Call is a multiracial collective of queer artists, activists, and archivists. Drawn together by the closing of the last remaining dyke bar, Last Call creates innovative, multi-platform performances, events, and digital media that document and interpret neglected queer history, creating connections between those who lived this history and those who have much at stake if it is forgotten. We conjure up intergenerational gathering places where the movement for queer liberation is carried forward.

There are four interwoven components to Last Call: (1) a digital archive of full-length interviews; (2) a podcast series to cull these interviews into curated stories; (3) live performance that honors these stories; and (4) community events that bring together queer people across lines of race, class, gender-identity and generational difference. Last Call was founded by Rachel Lee, Sara Pic and Lyam Gabel.

Leah Glenn Dance Theatre is a modern dance company dedicated to cultivating a greater understanding of the world in which we live through thought-provoking works of art that entertain, inspire and challenge its audiences.

Current project: A Wonder Wander

Go on a date with someone from the future, take a stroll with your great great grandparent, or meet a vibrant version of yourself in a parallel universe in a Wonder Wander play. This innovative theater walk-and-talk questions embedded inequities in our societal systems while engaging you in a unique live experience.

Wonder Wander Future Date is now available to be produced in your location as part of a season, in a fundraiser or festival setting or as devising project with your ensemble or students.

From March 2023 produced by Mondo Bizarro Productions:

Experience a one-of-a-kind time travel date in the Marigny/Bywater with our immersive walk and talk audio play! Single and ready to mingle? Or just time travel curious? Bring your phone, your headphones and an extra sock. You’ll be transported to New Orleans in the year 2299, where you’ll meet locals from the future, share flirting humor, gravity footwear tips and ponder how the choices we make affect generations beyond us. Just don’t say anything that will change the future.

Responses from the audience:

The self-reflection I did after listening to the tree and thinking about my contributions to the earth was sweet and unexpected.

Smelling the landscape, being asked to pay attention and notice things around us. It was all carried by the wit and humor throughout. It was really funny!

I loved walking around the neighborhood and having what I see be connected with the experience.

I really enjoyed being observed by the public, all walking around in a group and laughing with headphones in…loved being involved with a consensual act with a tree.

The idea that concrete sidewalks etc. were there to protect one from the soil which was harmful, and that sometimes plants break through. (I had been weeding my driveway the day before). Hearing a mushroom and tree talk shifted my thinking about environmental impacts and made me think of the book “Should Trees Have Standing”. While the whole premise is inter temporal dating, it’s the little nuances, (Carbon Dioxide release) that I remember. So, I found it a very gentle way to make a very strong statement about environmental policy.

What: A short immersive audio play for an audience. Rather than a traditional play in a theater, this play takes place as the audience takes a physical walk outside “with” the virtual characters. The experience lasts an hour.

Why now: To take an action in response to the earth’s temperatures rising and remaining elevated for many centuries. To be invigorated by an innovative art form and connect during general apocalyptic malaise.

Where: After a brief time travel orientation, the play takes place outside as the audience takes a walk as a group.

Who: People who have a smartphone and can travel on an accessible walking path.

How: Using wireless internet and developments in communication and haptic technology, the audience members hear the characters speak through headphones and respond through their microphone. The characters are not seen but manifest through speaking and listening to the audience member live and “holding hands” through the audience member’s smartphone. Each script is written with improvisational space to accommodate the audience’s responses engaging the audience member whether they are talkative or reserved. A pre-show survey, research, and strategically placed props along the walk customizes the experience.

Live Arts Miami is a trailblazing performing arts organization dedicated to presenting cutting-edge works that inspire and connect the South Florida community. Rooted in Miami’s vibrant culture for over 35 years, they bring diverse voices and perspectives to the forefront, enriching the city’s cultural landscape. As an initiative of Miami Dade College, Live Arts Miami works at the intersection of art and impact – curating boundary-breaking events, nurturing emerging talent, and expanding access to culture for all.

Created in 1990 by Arts impresario Olga Garay, Live Arts Miami is proud to be a part of Miami Dade College’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Its programs strive to empower historically underserved cultural producers and audiences, including the MDC student body, the largest, most diverse and one of the most economically underprivileged in the nation.

LAM envisions a democratic creative culture which celebrates the rich complexity of its multicultural city. It embraces practices that restore balance and connection to its communities and the planet we inhabit. A culture not just unfettered and free, but one that frees and empowers people to actively participate in the (re)creation of our collective future.

LACE is the longest-running incubator for artists, curators, and cultural workers in Los Angeles. For 45 years, LACE has served multiple communities across Los Angeles County, many of whom contribute to the racial and ethnic diversity of our city’s cultural landscape.

In a typical year, LACE presents four exhibitions and 30-40 public programs supporting a broad range of artists – both locally and nationally – through artwork commissions, artist fees, production support, marketing, and mentorship. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and access are at the root of the organization’s mission by platforming Black, Indigenous, artists of color, and queer artists and curators across our programming. Signature programs include the Emerging Curator Program, the Lightning Fund artist awards, and Apprenticeship Program.

The Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame is committed to supporting and maintaining New Orleans grassroots indigenous cultural expressions, particularly the Mardi Gras Indian tradition which has been carried on exclusively in the African American neighborhoods of New Orleans since the 1880s. The Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame works year-round to create community among those who mask; honor the individuals and group who create and uphold the masking traditions; and educate the public.

Dr. Roslyn J. Smith and Cherice Harrison-Nelson co-founded the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame in 1998 through the spirit of Big Chief Donald Harrison Senior (1933-1998), founder of the Guardians of the Flame and a past Big Chief of the White Eagles.

The MACC is the most comprehensive multi-disciplinary arts facility in Hawai’i, and a gathering place where people can celebrate creativity through personal and shared experiences of the arts. It is a world-class facility where popular and innovative performing artists can be enjoyed, connecting our community to the world. Looking forward to our next 25 years, we continue to strive for the enrichment of life on Maui through personal and shared experiences of the arts: to engage, to inspire, to educate, and to broaden all of our horizons.

Founded in 1989, Miami Light Project is a not-for-profit cultural organization, which commissions and presents artists from all over the world and throughout Miami. We support the vanguard in contemporary performance – dance, music, theater and multimedia artists who are internationally recognized for risk-taking innovation, technical virtuosity and thought-provoking content.

Our programmatic vision has led the way in establishing Miami as an internationally recognized center for art and culture, with a vibrant locally based artistic community. Given the wide array of artistic experience produced, across often intersecting mediums of the performing arts, we have found that our ability to attract and promote artists who collectively represent all forms of diversity is the most significant way of developing and engaging audiences, which are representative, inclusive.

We build our programs in a way that ensures a meaningful dialogue and a deeper relationship between artists, the neighborhood community we serve, and the diverse multi-layered audiences that we continue to develop.

Founded in 1989 as the result of a broad community mobilization in the City of San Jose and nationwide on behalf of multicultural arts, MACLA promotes a vision of arts programming as a vehicle social equity.

Each year we offer four arts exhibitions (including one that features new work commissioned by MACLA) showcasing artists whose work is rooted in a Latinx aesthetic and history. Our exhibitions include artist talks and public programs that expand upon the themes and issues addressed. Our performance and literary arts tract offers perspectives on contemporary Latinx culture. Our 100-seat Castellano Playhouse provides space for diverse artists and performing arts groups.

As part of the NPN, we offer two artist residencies annually and present national touring professionals. MACLA’s Teen Tech Center (TTC) provides a free, comprehensive arts education dedicated to mentoring Latinx youth, ages 11-19, in 21st-century skill development through multimedia production. These skills, along with college and career readiness, close the inequitable wage and representation gaps in the workforce.

A Latino-based multidisciplinary arts and multicultural arts organization, MECA provides arts education, support services, and multicultural artistic programming to underserved, underrepresented families that help build community, discipline, self-esteem, and cultural pride.

MECA predominantly serves BIPOC communities in Houston and its surrounding areas. However, its doors are open to all communities regardless of color, sex, race, or religious beliefs.

The MECA Presents Performing Arts Series is a platform that convenes community through the arts and encourages dialogue about issues ranging from social justice and equity to diversity and community transformation. From incubating works in progress to presenting local and touring artists, MECA seeks to work with innovative and socially engaged artists whose work expands the boundaries of tradition and practice. MECA is especially interested in projects that bring to light the experiences of life on the margins of societies, economies, and cultures.

The MCA Chicago is a contemporary art museum that presents exhibitions, performances, and programs. We serve greater Chicago and an international contemporary art audience.

Music Inside Out with Gwen Thompkins is a weekly public radio broadcast that showcases musicians who have made profound contributions to the musical landscape of Louisiana and the wider world. Host Gwen Thompkins and her guests talk extensively about the fire and sweat of the creative process and parse songs that reflect Louisiana’s unusually varied cultural heritage. Each week, Music Inside Out explores unexpected layers of curiosity and inventiveness in the work of modern-day musicians. Just as Louis Armstrong loved Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and played an aria from that opera every day, contemporary Louisiana artists live with their ears wide open. Music Inside Out airs on WWNO 89.9 FM- New Orleans Thursday evenings at 7:00 p.m. and Saturdays at noon. In addition, web users can access any program at musicinsideout.org.

Mutual Dance Theatre and Arts Centers was formerly known as Contemporary Dance Theater (est. 1972) and MamLuft&Co. Dance (est. 2007). The two small organizations recently merged to become the single organization in Cincinnati to self-identify as Modern Dance-dedicated.

Mutual Dance Theatre’s mission is to enrich and improve lives by bringing palpable Modern Dance to people in Cincinnati, reducing barriers to experiencing the art form. Mutual seeks to engage diverse populations by providing opportunities for both children and adults to experience hands-on participation, to get closer to the art form, and to gain more and deeper understanding of dance in theaters, schools, and community hubs. The organization prioritizes dance that speaks to non-eurocentric experiences and works with community partners to raise the reach of marginalized populations. Our collaborative and creative models emphasize discovery, as well as a value for process, pluralism of voices, and individualism. Mutual highly values racial representation and works to change longstanding biases and embedded exclusion in dance, which begins with a goal for at least 50% BIPOC representation at all levels.

The Myrna Loy is an outstanding rural arts center in Helena, Montana that presents live performances, arts education experiences, community-building events of all kinds, plus two movies daily, to our community in the Northern Rockies. We serve as a gateway to multiple cultural expressions, bringing performers from many cultures into our rural landscape. We are small yet mighty. We instigate happenings. We support new works. We are rural, hard to get to, with expensive travel costs, and all our wealth is in relationships. The Myrna Loy lives in a transformed 100-year-old granite jailhouse. Our motto is “Art transforms everything.”

New Orleans International Muralists, LLC (NOIM) create murals that provide artistic looks into the past, present, or future within communities. Our murals are educational tools for the community, as points of interest(s) for tourism, or simply appreciated for their aesthetic beauty. NOIM’s current project is Tchoupitoulas St. Floodwall Mural: 300 Years of New Orleans History depicting the city’s vibrant 300-year history through imagery created by lead artist Jamar Pierre. Our murals are created to enable the community to gain a better understanding of why cultural preservation is important.

New York Live Arts is a center devoted to the creation of live art that elevates the human spirit and brings people together in shared humanity. At the core of our programming is our certainty that art has the ability to create communities and platforms for the exchange of ideas.

We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio.

New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. When identifying artists to receive support, Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong seek out a diverse group of artists with unique voices that often come at personal or political risk. Our organization looks for rigor in the questions the artists raise and in the language through which each artist’s ideas are realized. Work that asks difficult questions is emblematic of our approach at Live Arts, and we embrace the idea that artists play a unique role in bringing about justice and change-making.

The Oglala Lakota Artspace (OLA) is an arts facility on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Kyle, South Dakota. Completed in 2021, the Native-run program is administered by Oglala Lakota Artspace LLC, a partnership between Artspace, Lakota Funds, and First Peoples Fund.

The facility provides a collaborative and intergenerational environment for artists to learn, share, and grow their businesses. Oglala Lakota Artspace LLC partners with local artists and Rolling Rez Arts to offer artistic, business, and financial services to Native artists across the Pine Ridge Reservation, including work with the Wicahpi Olowan Music Program, made in partnership with Playing For Change Foundation.

For four decades and counting, On the Boards (OtB) has moved the needle on culture in Seattle. We continue to occupy a unique corner of this region’s cultural arena – presenting challenging, provoking, surprising, and inspiring dance, theater, and performance works.

We influence the contemporary art field on a global scale, investing and supporting in local artists who go on to develop careers and performances that are shared with thousands of audience members across the world.

OtB fulfills its mission by supporting artists from the Northwest and beyond, through new commissions and existing work presented online and in person.

OtB offers a range of resources and events that provide in-depth information and complimentary social experiences to frame the art on its stages and create dynamic access for its audiences.

On the Boards is located on the unceded ancestral home of the Duwamish and many other Coast Salish peoples, recorded and unrecorded, who have stewarded this land since time immemorial. As settlers on this land, we extend our gratitude and respect.

Onye Ozuzu is a performing artist, choreographer, administrator, educator, and researcher currently serving as the Dean of the College of the Arts at the University of Florida. Ozuzu has dedicated much of her work as a dance artist to cultivating space for diverse dance forms to exist in a pluralist relationship to one another. The deep juxtapositions in her birth and upbringing (biracial, intercultural, with American-Nigerian parents), her orientation towards physical training, and her professional practices have all resulted in understanding the body as technology and an archive that has the capacity to thread meaning through and across diverse languages. Physically, Ozuzu has negotiated the intersectionality in her body between many movement forms from tennis to ballet, West African dance to hatha yoga, freestyle house to salsa, contemporary dance to aikido. Rather than just “collecting” these dance styles, she has cultivated the ability to make choices among these techniques, like the relationship of a maker to their tools.

Artistically, Ozuzu has focused on the body as technology. Space Carcasses is the convergence of her interests in technology and the body and in trans+space+time Africanness. This interdisciplinary performance juxtaposes, superimposes, and amplifies the contested African diaspora relationship between the vaults on Factors Row in Savannah, Georgia; the architecture of La Rochelle, France; and the history of similarly complex sites (in terms of their connection to histories of humans traded as commodities) in Northern Nigeria. Developed in collaboration with visual and graffiti artist Native Maqari and video and projection designer Simon Rouby, the project will use 3D audio and visual technologies to record, recontextualize, and re-remember these spaces that echo with the impact of the events and experiences they have contained, particularly regarding African diasporic migrations. Interfacing the ephemeral residue of the body’s presence with these geographically disparate sites, Space Carcasses will reveal how space, place, history, and lineage are linked together.

The Painted Bride Art Center – known to many Philadelphians simply as the Bride – is a nonprofit producing and presenting arts organization with over five decades of radical imagination and cultural stewardship.

Founded in 1969 in a former bridal shop on South Street, the Bride emerged as part of the national Alternative Space movement, offering a vital platform for artists traditionally excluded from museums and commercial venues.

From its earliest days, the Bride has served as a cultural trailhead for underrepresented voices – women, people of color, LGBTQ+ creatives, disabled artists – and continues to ask: What do artists and communities need now?

The Bride has always been more than a venue. It’s a living, evolving platform for interdisciplinary creation, civic dialogue, and collective transformation. From legendary performances to neighborhood-based rituals, from early hip-hop showcases to community-based healing rituals, the Bride creates the conditions for honest exchange, joyful disruption, and cultural reimagining.

Pangea World Theater operates from the fundamental paradigm of diversity and equity. Pangea World Theater illuminates the human condition, celebrates cultural differences, and promotes human rights by creating and presenting international, multidisciplinary theater.

Founded in 1995 and led by Dipankar Mukherjee and Meena Natarajan, Pangea produces work written by people of color, Indigenous and immigrant playwrights and artists from LGBTQ communities with more than 75% of our work written by women of color.

To set our works in their historical and cultural contexts we present in conjunction with workshops, discussions, and outreach to schools and local organizations. Through our programming and community alliances, we have developed a committed and highly diverse audience in the Twin Cities.

La Peña Cultural Center originated in the diaspora of Chilean exiles after the 1973 coup, and was inspired by the “peñas” then popular in South America, which served as gathering places for artists and thinkers – offering food, music, intellectual exchange, and popular education to revolutionary artistic and political movements.

It was with this ethos that La Peña Cultural Center was founded in 1975. Since that time, LP has presented intentional public programming that centers and celebrates BIPOC culture bearers and audiences, with deep connections across the pan-Latinx, Afro-Caribbean, and Indigenous diasporic communities.

Today, La Peña continues to be a center of transformative gathering. All of our programs engage our mission to preserve and celebrate cultural traditions, and to empower individuals and communities through access to arts education and professional development. Each event model is a crucial piece of our programming vision, which is divided into the following eight pillars: roots arts preservation, community celebration and solidarity, support for emerging artists, social justice movements, memory and historical grounding, popular education, cultural strategy, and digital documentation.

When the Lower East Side was struggling with poverty, high crime, and the AIDS epidemic, a group of art and social service organizations – among them Performance Space – transformed a historic public-school building into a thriving community center that is still in use today.

Our early acts engaged in radical experimentation, challenging form, and defining contemporary performance for a generation. By 1980, we were officially founded as Performance Space 122 – which is now Performance Space New York.

Today’s Performance Space is a Queer and BIPOC-led arts organization that partners with its communities to present emergent multidisciplinary works with a focus on contemporary performance. Programming reflects the needs of our communities and is led by culture bearers from within our communities.

Each year, 7-12 major commissions appear alongside free artist-led workshops, readings, talks, and other works of sociality and joy. In our programming, we center QTBIPOC and disabled experience, which reflects our own communities. Programs arise from a fervent belief that art is an expression of a community’s unique cultural perspective and ideas therein. With 44 years as a home for radical artists, our enduring legacy reflects the effectiveness of our efforts in creating a home for art and culture.

PICA is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center supporting artists through residencies, commissions, exhibitions, performances, publications, and the annual TBA (Time-Based Art Festival.)

PICA’s offices and core program spaces are in 10,000 sq ft flexible warehouse space in NE Portland. PICA’s programs are curated and produced by a team of two artistic directors, Erin Boberg Doughton, and Kristan Kennedy along with guest curated projects and partnerships.

Our curatorial practice is collaborative and artist-centered, with a focus on supporting experimental, multidisciplinary, and evolving work, with a priority on LGBTQ and global majority artists. We redistribute resources through the Precipice Fund which offers funding to artist-driven projects and groups, the SPACE program which provides access to space, equipment and production support for self-produced work and community-led initiatives, and as fiscal sponsor for BAEP (Black Art Ecology of Portland.)

The focus of POSTCARDS FROM OVER THE EDGE is to raise awareness and engage the community in:

1. the creation and production of a theatrical work that is a truthful-telling of the historically separate and unequal treatment experienced by the LBGTQ community and woman of color as it relates to the illegal sale of sex in Louisiana,
2. the creation and distribution of postcard art works to organizations providing services such as shelters that serve women and children and other organizations that work with women who have been trafficked,
3. the cultivation of allies and fostering of network building by connect those in the general public that want to be more involved with organizations actively working with the homeless, particularly homeless LBGTQ youth.

Pregones/PRTT champions an expansive view of the performing arts by opening its Bronx and Manhattan stages to extraordinary theater, music, dance, film/media and visual artists from the U.S. and around the world.

Our year-round programs – Mainstage, Presenting, Education, Touring – offer attractive and affordable opportunities for arts access and participation in and beyond New York City. Our company serves diverse artists and audiences throughout NYC, with extra care paid to historically under-resourced, densely Latinx neighborhoods of The Bronx, East Harlem/Upper Manhattan, and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen. We also engage communities of the greater Tri-State area and a growing number of national and international visitors.

Pregones/PRTT’s Presenting Program is equal parts kaleidoscope and Spanish accent: We program for a general audience and from a Latinx perspective, always making room for meaningful contrasts and discovery. We feature seasoned and emerging artists in both standalone and multiple performances. Engagements often extend into residencies harboring other activities such as workshops, public dialogues, and master classes.

Rainbow Serpent is a non-profit organization based in Pittsburgh, PA, that seeks to advance Black LGBTQ+ culture through the exploration and integration of multimedia art, emerging technologies, traditional African cosmologies, and innovative healing practices.

We sponsor the creation of artwork in a range of media (including live performance, film, photography, sculpture, music, public installation, literature, and extended reality); offer a range of educational programming and workshops; organize retreats that promote healing through art and indigenous African modalities; and curate events that showcase a diversity of cultural expression.

Rainbow Serpent’s innovative work expands the boundaries of traditional performance, technology, and immersive visual arts. Recent works include: The Four World Ages, which drew on Nigerian-Igbo myth to tell the history of humanity and featured four dancers adorned with body paint and dynamic projections that incorporated spatial augmented reality components; and Opening the Mouth, an immersive audience participatory performance including a cast of 19 performers, 16 life-size glass statues of queer African deities, and a 7 channel virtual reality film.

Rainbow Serpent harnesses the power of emerging technologies and multimedia performance to advance Black LGBTQ culture and revive traditional African knowledge systems.

The Reclaiming Legacy Project (RLP) is centered around preventing the erasure of the hard-earned legacies of African Americans, Indigenous Peoples, Mexican Americans and other people of color who have contributed greatly to the progress of America. RLP seeks to do this by combating revisionist history with historical accuracy by unearthing, reclaiming, and giving visibility to these contributions, one legacy at a time, by any creative means necessary.

We’ve chosen to begin our inaugural project with the legacy of Captain André Cailloux, one of America’s first Black Civil War heroes. RLP is organizing the FIRST Civil War Reenactment for New Orleans proper. The FIRST Civil War Reenactment that honors a BLACK Civil War hero and the FIRST Civil War Reenactment done partially in giant, 10-12ft puppets. These life-like marionettes along with hundreds of human reenactors dressed in period clothing will bring to life the 3 mile HISTORIC funeral procession of André Cailloux. This epic funeral attended by tens of thousands, defied all odds and turned into an organic, racially unifying event.

Located in Denver, Colorado, RedLine Contemporary Art Center fosters education and engagement between artists and communities, ensuring equitable access to the arts for historically marginalized populations and grassroots organizations, and cultivating diverse communities of emerging artists to use socially-engaged art as a tool for positive change.

Founded in 2008, RedLine has engaged more than 12,000 students from under-resourced schools in the Five Points neighborhood of Denver, provided space and resources for dozens of artists who are unhoused or experiencing hardship, has launched more than 125 resident artists, and has provided creative solutions to multiple additional community needs.

Applying a community-responsive model by first listening to our local communities, we co-create innovative solutions to social challenges alongside artists young and old, housed and unhoused, emerging and established, with these strategic program areas: Artists-in-Residence Program, Arts Education, Exhibitions, Community Programming, Regranting, and Creative Place-keeping.

The Spiritual Technologies Project seeks to generate, document, and transmit performative practices that unify and transform individuals and groups of people. The project will manifest through recordings, writing, and live laboratories in which artists, culture bearers, and other creative practitioners explore old and new tools for personal and collective transformation.

We just completed our first digital storytelling project, A Charge to Keep, which explores the contemporary practice of metered hymn singing in African-American churches in Central Georgia and Coastal Georgia and South Carolina. We are excited to share this work with the world!

Collaborators:

• Ron Ragin
• Tamara Roberts
• Michaela Leslie-Rule

REDCAT, CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts, is a multidisciplinary center for innovative visual, performing and media arts founded by CalArts in the Walt Disney concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles.

Through performances, exhibitions, screenings and literary events, REDCAT introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in this region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT continues the tradition of the California Institute of the Arts, its parent organization, by encouraging experimentation, discovery and lively civic discourse.

Sandglass is dedicated to the arts of theater and puppetry as a means of exploring contemporary issues, inspiring dialogue, and sparking wonder.

We create original ensemble performances and collaborations, present diverse theater artists, produce events that serve our communities, and teach our art.

Sandglass is a bridge in our local, national, and international communities for artistic and social development. We inspire new generations of diverse artists and audiences to further embrace puppetry and theater as thriving art forms that seek truth, a broader perspective, generate compassion, and celebrate the human spirit.

The Skirball Cultural Center is a museum and cultural center rooted in Jewish values to welcome the stranger, seek learning, pursue justice, show kindness, honor memory, and build community. The Skirball presents exhibitions and public programs that seek to bring people of all backgrounds together to experience shared humanity. We serve multiple audiences throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including tens of thousands of LA schoolchildren who receive free busses to our campus each year. Public programs encompass music, literary, film, performance, and civic gatherings.

Located on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University, SLIPPAGE: Performance | Culture | Technology has a special imperative to organize cultural events that help us all imagine how creativity and expression operate at the core of artistry, humanity, technology, and social possibilities.

SLIPPAGE produces conferences, symposia, workshops, and artist exchanges in events that mark social progress via research in performance.

Recognized globally, SLIPPAGE remains at the forefront of innovative thinking. SLIPPAGE collaborates with leading artists drawn from a wealth of creative practices: polymedia artists, choreographers, performers, theorists, historians, directors, technologists. Highlights include a ‘Best of the New” award from the Boston Globe (2005); grants for new creation from the National Performance Network for Project Development and Touring; Collaboration with the University of Texas at Dallas to develop wearable technologies for dance theater applications; and commissions from Gibney Dance (2020); fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts (2016); reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker (2018); re-OrientationS (2024).

Founded in 1986, Space One Eleven’s mission is to provide paid opportunities for visual artists, to create a forum for public understanding of contemporary art, and to offer art education to area youth.

Our exhibitions explore issues of human rights and social justice, paired with public programs to encourage dialogue and advocacy. Space One Eleven is dedicated to creating an environment where artists can push boundaries, take creative risks, and contribute meaningfully to the cultural landscape. Located in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, Space One Eleven has been a champion for social justice through the visual arts since its inception.

Su Teatro Cultural & Performing Arts Center’s mission is to promote, produce, develop and preserve the cultural arts, heritage and traditions of the Chicano/Latino community, to advance mutual respect for other cultures, and to establish avenues where all cultures may come together. Su Teatro, the resident theater company born out of the Chicano Civil Rights movement, is the third-oldest Chicano theatre in the U.S. While having a strong theatrical bent, Su Teatro also presents music, poetry, visual and film artists.

Artist collaborators are programmed into Su Teatro’s season that also includes the Chicano music festival and the Neruda Poetry festival. Artist collaborators fit within the Chicano aesthetic and represent an emerging vision of the Latino World experience. Residencies are structured within the curriculum of Su Teatro’s Cultural Arts Education Institute.

Synamin Vixen is a performing artist, community healer, and educator. She has more than 25 years of dance experience locally and internationally, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Black Studies and Dance Composition from Swarthmore College. She has been studying Afro-Diasporic herbal and traditional care practices, reiki, and sex doula work for the past 3 years. With a wide range of experiences, Synamin explores how all of these different artistic interests live in one body and influence each other.

Her choreography sparks conversations on identity and social memory. Much of Synamin’s work explores how individuals relate to and influence groups, and how our narratives on similar events can differ greatly based on our lived experiences. Her work in burlesque (on and off stage) focuses on how the body is a sensual site of transformative healing. In 2021, she released her first book of ancestral poetry entitled Daughter of a Nymph Divine. In 2022, she collaborated with her performance family Haus Contraire in residency at the Contemporary Art Center.

Synamin’s mission is to use movement to create a safe space for dialogue and change.

TeAda began in 1996 with a commitment to highlighting marginalized stories for public discourse. TeAda performances are developed by combining community-based story gathering, social justice practices and devised ensemble techniques.

Annual core programming is free or low cost and consists of: 1) Local Programs that engage immigrant, refugee and asylum seeking adults and youth in workshops and community sharing performances; 2) Diaspora Programs which include residencies, national and international touring shows featuring a community we are in partnership with; 3) Professional development including ensemble building and training opportunities for emerging and mid-career artists of color.

Cross-sector TeAda partners have included: Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement Program Oregon, UCLA Labor Center, Pilipino Workers Center, and Program for Torture Victims. Past TeAda national touring productions include: Refugee Nation, created in 2005. It was the first nationally touring play about Laotian refugees in the U.S. TeAda’s current touring play Nothing Micro About Micronesia, premiered in 2024 at Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and has toured inter-island to Hilo and Maui, and across the Pacific to Saipan and Guam.

The Theater Offensive presents liberating art by, for, and about queer and trans people of color that transcends artistic boundaries, celebrates cultural abundance, and dismantles oppression. This is done through programs informed by Queer Aesthetics.The idea of aesthetics helps us understand the ways we experience beauty, and gives us a framework to talk about how we name and claim beauty and why we choose what we choose. Aesthetics are reflected in the realms of belonging. They communicate a shared set of ideas, values, geographies, and historical defining moments.

The Constant State of Otherness is a multi-layered performance project exploring the feelings of isolation and displacement that come from a sense of not fitting in. A devised “otherness template” will fuel a new taiko and dance performance, and also prompt engagement with artists and communities reflecting these complex and diverse stories of identity and emotional impact. The work is inspiring from co-director Michelle Fujii’s experience as a great-granddaughter and wife of Japanese immigrants, and feelings of isolation, alienation, and displacement that come from not having an easy sense of belonging, both as a physical place and an emotional space. These feelings are heightened during our uncertain political times — of deepening socio-economic disparities, ongoing debates of travel bans, border security, gentrification, and hostility towards immigrants.

Unit Souzou ensemble members will explore otherness in their deeply personal stories: identifying as immigrant, navigating privilege as a biracial person, finding space and place as a female leader in a masculine world, being African-American in a Japanese referenced cultural art form. Root questions to create this work will illuminate the following: How have I been othered? How have I othered myself? How have I othered others?

‘Souzou’ can be written in three ways meaning ‘creation’ (創造), ‘imagination’ (想像), or ‘noisy’ (騒々), alluding to a force by which new ideas are born and take shape in the world. Inspired by these words, the mission of Unit Souzou is to build creative, imaginative works while honoring the history and roots of the taiko art form. The core of Unit Souzou’s artistic voice is personal and authentic, sound shaped and inspired by form and by movement. The essence of Unit Souzou is an expressive blend of taiko and Japanese folk dance, forging new traditions for evolving communities. In addition to creating groundbreaking professional theatrical works, Unit Souzou is deeply committed to share taiko through community performances and collaborations, public classes for adults and youth, and school-based education programs.

An internationally respected contemporary art center, the Walker is a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences. We take a multi-disciplinary approach to the creation, presentation, interpretation, collection, and preservation of art. The Walker houses one of the largest museum-based performing arts departments in the country and annually supports dozens of commissions, developmental residencies, and presentations. The McGuire Theater, opened in 2005, serves not only as a stunning platform for presentations but also as a working laboratory and production center, offering innovators the support, time, and resources to finish technically mounting large-scale work. The Walker commissions and presents new work on local, national, and international levels and continues to present a wide range of global work. We support established and innovative masters, mid-career artists and a range of emerging voices in contemporary dance, dance theater, experimental theater, new music-theater, performance art, new puppetry, avant-jazz, electronic music, contemporary classical music, international/global music and experimental pop/rock. We mainly select artists with whom we have ongoing relationships or those we have researched and sought out, but we remain open to receiving proposals and inquiries from artists who fit our mission and who are forging new directions.

Founded by award-winning Poz playwright and advocate Donja R. Love in 2019, Write It Out! (WIO!) uses art, advocacy, and accessibility to provide a space for people living with HIV and AIDS to tell their stories. Holistically, WIO! uses the power of imagination and healing to help shed the shame of living with HIV and combat stigma. Artistically, through writing initiatives, WIO! strengthens participants’ artistic voices and works to transform society and the theatrical landscape into a more equitable and stigma-free space for people living with HIV and AIDS.

WIO! is sponsored by Viiv Health Care, The Terrance McNally Foundation, GLAAD, The Sero Project, and Broadway Cares / Equity Fight Aids

The Yard is a creation and performance platform for artists around the globe with a focus on dance. We offer exhilarating, wide-ranging, and educational arts experiences through performances, residencies, and community activities. We present international, national, and local artists; provide paid artist residencies; offer inter-generational engagement programs and classes; and bring dance and creativity-centered education programs into schools. Our programs run year-round on The Yard’s campus and in partner locations across Martha’s Vineyard (MV). We serve the island’s year-round population of ~20,000, as well as the significant influx of summer residents/tourists. Commonly perceived as white and affluent, MV’s year-round population is quite racially diverse.

With a legacy of cultivating modern dance, our curatorial process emphasizes artistic excellence and ensures artists reflect year-round and visiting island communities. The Yard hosts artists who engage the MV’s unique cultures and environment, addressing local experiences such as immigration and climate change. We prioritize long-term relationships, highlight diversity within the African diaspora, feature bilingual artists to ensure accessibility for working-class immigrant families, and foster relationships with community partners. Throughout its nearly 51-year history, The Yard has evolved into a premier performing arts organization, fostering artistic exploration, collaboration, and cultural participation across MV’s six rural towns.

For 29 years, Youth Speaks has created safe spaces that challenge young people, especially Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and those from working-class communities, to find, develop and apply their voices as creators of societal change.

Founded in 1996 in San Francisco, Youth Speaks is a leading presenter of Spoken Word performance, education, and creative youth development programs.

Our work lives at the intersection of Arts Education, Public Presentation, Youth-led Cultural Organizing, and Youth Narrative strategy. Trailblazers of local and national youth poetry slams, festivals, and more, Youth Speaks offers a comprehensive slate of arts education programs and provides numerous opportunities for youth to be heard by their peers and by the broader community and to leverage their voices to make an impact on the issues they care about.

As we respond to the challenges and opportunities of this next era, Youth Speaks is committed to activating youth stories to build narrative and cultural power ultimately helping to create a world in which young people are heard, honored, and connected through creative ecosystems of interdependence and care.