Bri Blakey is a Twin Cities-based interdisciplinary artist and dance/movement therapist whose work is rooted in dance, somatic practices, and philosophies of care. Drawing on a variety of other mediums—including fiber art, poetry, set design, and collage—her work acts as a form of world-building and archiving, particularly through the lens of Black and queer identity. Deeply invested in the relational aspects of creating and living, her work also seeks to foster restorative and connective experiences between people, other creatures, places, and times. Her work has been supported by and presented at Arts On Site, Remy Theater (NY), and Minnesota Fringe Festival. She studied Dance at St. Olaf College, and earned an MS Dance/Movement Therapy from Sarah Lawrence College.

Taylor West (she/her) is a Black dancer, choreographer, and teacher born on Chitinacha land (New Orleans). She graduated with a BFA in dance from Florida State University in 2023 and has had the opportunity to perform works by Tim Glenn, Ananya Chatterjea, Millicent Johnnie, Christopher Huggins, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. She has also worked artistically and administratively with Brownbody. Taylor’s own work is rooted in explorations of identities and embodied cultural and familial histories, with Blackness forever at the core. She relies heavily on improvisation, writing/text, and constant collaboration/conversation. She has presented her work at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, New York, and at MODArts Dance Collective’s Collective Thread Festival. 

Photo: Elyse Mertz

D Hunter (they/them) is a Minneapolis-based performance artist from Tempe, Arizona. In Arizona they performed with several local dance and dance theater collectives including SM2 Dance, Cruz Control Collective, JAMovement, and Grey Box Collective. Since moving to Minneapolis, D has had the opportunity to perform for Shane Larson in Arena Dance’s Candy Box Dance Festival, Morgan Thorson in the Great Northern Festival and the Dark Sky Festival, and for Taja Will and Mathew Janczewski in the Cowles Center Merge in March. D’s work is interested in how surveillance and voyeurism affect the queer body. They are excited to be involved in the Works-in-Progress program. 

Photo: Sarah Ashley Dovolos

snem DeSellier is a wiggly idea raised by the long tidal river and ghosts of western massachusetts. they are stubborn, they are slow, they are blowing a million seasons through their body at any given moment. they want softer places to land. “their work is more sweater than knife” and that makes them mad and keeps them sure. here along these rivers they have created/designed/performed work in various rhythms with Lightning Rod, 20% Theatre Company, Body Watani Dance, Red Eye Theater, 9x22 Dance/Lab, Playwrights’ Center, MOVO, International Association for Creative Dance, Pillsbury House + Theatre (2023 Naked Stages Fellow), and Wonderlust Productions (asst. directed the Caregiver Play Project). they build for a future of transdisciplinary stretching and translational medicine that has capacity for the wide and complex bodies of those they love, those they are, and those they don’t yet know. they are here for the misaligned misattuned immeasurable ones.

Jess Kiel-Wornson is a Minneapolis-based multimedia artist. Jess writes: “Drawing on various forms of fiction and rooted in feminist and performance theories, I consider the everyday waste of our lives together with familiar imagery to reimagine a deeply oppressive systemic world. In painting, collage, sculpture, performance, installation, or writing, I am asking the viewer to reimagine the utility, value, and possibility of our affective, sociopolitical, and experiential surroundings. When building sets that combine industrial detritus with nostalgia, I am asking myself to reframe conversations that focus on the failings of individual psyche and instead hold accountable the structural failings of a society that dehumanizes, isolates, and paralyzes people and then blames them for the great failures of our world. My work asks for criticality and sentimentality in enormous and equal measure—as a form of essential resistance to a culture that works to subjugate, delegitimize, and deny these forms of deep collective power. Recent collaborations include It's Physical (Southern Theater, Jagged Moves, 2024) and Mariology (Mixed Blood Theater, Nancy Keystone and Critical Mass Performance Group, 2023). After so many years of being told by the dominant paradigm, with a sinister and saccharine edge, that my heartbreak will make me stronger, I am inclined to join my strength along with the rest of the heartbroken to burn down the paradigm.”

J.H. Shuǐ Xiān is a choreographer, improviser, and sound artist based in Minneapolis. She is a 2017/2022 Q-Stage: New Works and 2019 Momentum: New Dance Works recipient and was part of the 2022 Red Eye Works-In-Progress cohort. She is currently focused on researching ritual and meditation through experimental performance.

Charles Campbell has been making original works since 1998 and he is a founder of both Skewed Visions and Fresh Oysters Performance Research.

aegor ray is a writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His writing interests span queer and trans desire and terror, empire and its long-arching shadows, and the experiences of consuming and being consumed. aegor is writing his first novel. He is a Sagittarius.

Margaret Ogas is a dance artist based in the Twin Cities. Working at the confluence of dance, storytelling, and experimental performance, her work tells surreal, everyday narratives through a collage of movement, text, sound, and object. Drawing from Chicana sensibilities, queer theory, and diasporic futurisms, her dances weave personal narrative with thoughtful design to foster connections with audiences. Ogas is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and was a 2021 Naked Stages Fellow at Pillsbury House + Theatre. Her work has been presented by the Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Candy Box Dance Festival, Minnesota International Dance Festival, Center for Performing Arts, Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio, and others. Her projects have received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Margaret is an associate company director and teaching artist at Young Dance. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.

Photo: Drew Arrieta

Growing up, Rachel Sadie Lieberman trained, performed, and taught primarily with Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago. She moved to Minnesota to attend Macalester College, and graduated in 2018 with a BA in Geography. Rachel has since performed in works by Contempo Physical, Leila Awadallah, Off-Leash Area, A Cripple’s Dance, ARENA Dances, Javan Mngrezzo, Annika Johansson, Analog Dance Works, Black Label Movement, and Zoë Koenig. Primarily a movement artist, Rachel also plays in textile arts, textual arts, sound, set, and costume design and construction. She has choreographed work presented by Alternative Motion Project, Franconia Sculpture Garden, Candy Box Dance Festival, Black Label Movement, Threads Dance Project,  and the Walker Art Center. Off-stage, Rachel works at Cow Tipping Press, teaching and publishing creative writing by authors with intellectual/developmental disabilities.

Akiko is a multimedia story teller, teaching artist, curator, and activist. She has been creating both visual and performance art since 2016. She uses poetry, music, dance, collage, and puppetry. She creates art to reflect her time, and the narrative of immigrant women of color. She aims to create a shared language within her community to collectively resist the oppressive system.

jess pretty is on a quest for pleasure that transcends time and the spaces she claims to reside in. her practices include moving, writing, teaching, curating, singing, and cooking. and conjuring. pretty received an MFA in Dance and queer studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and currently has a teaching practice at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities where she is an Assistant Professor of Dance. pretty is the steward of a roving performance collective called AUNTS. her current work is titled call and response. pretty’s work has been presented at the Chocolate Factory Theater. La Mama Experimental Theater Club, New York Live Arts, Gibney Dance Center, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, the Center for Performance Research, the CURRENT SESSIONS, Green Street studios, and three ACDA conferences. pretty was a member of the 2020-21 Queer Art Fellowship. she collaborates with artists (Will Rawls, Claudia Rankine, Moriah Evans, Kevin Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peter Born, Catherine Gallasso, David Thomson, Katie Workum, Niall Jones, Jennifer Monson, Cynthia Oliver, and Leslie Cuyjet). jesspretty.com

Photo: Rachel Keane

Lelis Brito is a Venezuelan-American installation artist, theater director, choreographer, educator, performer, writer and director of the Center for Moving Cultures. As director of CMC, Brito advocates for tactile/kinaesthetic knowledge in education and cultural transmission. Brito has created over 80 original works, varying from 6-minute dance solos, to one-hour plays and 3-hour long movement-theatre works. Brito’s work is sourced from the human body’s potential and activation—the work of clarifying choice-making through the knowledge gained within the experience of a moving sensing body. 2022-24 projects include Composer/Choreographer/Designer of A BINDING STRANGENESS, dancer in SHE WHO LIVES ON THE ROAD TO WAR and PROCESSION/CREATIVE; Choreographer for Mushaq Mushtaq Deen’s THE SPEED OF LIFE; creating a Moving set for Movement Architecture Dance; and writing the play LOS PROFANADORES DE LA CALLE ARENAS for Teatro del Pueblo.

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra a.k.a. Lady Xøk (she/her, Maya-Lenca Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist and musician rooted in Indigenous Futurisms who experiments with genre and form. Her unique Future Folk style of visual and sound installation is a fusion of synth-led, folk guitar, pre-Columbian Indigenous instruments, Latin American rhythm & blues, and the cathedral of nature. Recent and ongoing projects include music & short film installation Olonguayu toni mulauna (I Still Have Medicine) new compositions for the 2024 Cedar Cultural Commissions, dance & film-based work La Luz, la Galaxia, y la Sombrisa”(the light, the galaxy, and the sadness) originally created for Red Eye’s NW4W WIP, and children’s puppetry play Star Girl Clan for embodied storytelling. Rebekah has presented or produced with Intermedia Arts, Electric Machete Studios, New Native Theatre, Red Eye, Open Eye Theater, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet & Mask Theater, Rosy Simas Danse, The Ordway, MN Orchestra Hall, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in NYC, community centers, dives bars & street theatre, among others, and is excited to join Red Eye as a 2025 NW4W Festival Producer.

Photo: Drew Arrieta

José A. Luis was born in Veracruz, Mexico and raised in Racine, WI. He has lived in Milwaukee, Chicago, and now Minneapolis as of 2017. Relocation, departure, and arrival are motifs in his personal life, but present themselves in his works by shaping time and space. As a primary solo dance artist, his determination and openness to others continues by inviting collaborators, seeking ways to support emerging artists, and centering BIPOC processes through his “Reflections” series. The intimate, introspective, honest approach of his choreography and person is also present in his dancing, paving the way as a dancer in other artists’ work. José’s tenacity, skill, and acceptance in navigating the imperfectness of being human is at the forefront of who he is—in and outside the dance floor. www.jose.dance/bio

Photo: Nic LaFrance