artists in residence (2021-2024)
The Artist Residency program supports Native and BIPOC artists locally and nationally.
The local program provides studio space, an artist fee, and some technical support.
The National program provides studio space, an artist fee, technical support, travel, and housing for one artist. A full residency is two weeks. A mini-residency is one week. Artists are selected through a general inquiry and invitation process.
Photo: KaPaul V. Virtuccio
Deborah Jinza Thayer
(2024)
(She/Her)
After spending the first six years in Japan, DJinza Thayer grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received an MFA in Dance at George Mason University. Based in the Twin Cities, she presents her work as Movement Architecture (MA). As MA, Jinza has created over sixty original works and has been a two-time semi-finalist for France’s Rencontres choregraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (Bagnolet) in 1999 and 2001. Jinza has received two McKnight Artist Fellowship for Choreographers (2004, 2019), the SAGE Award for Choreographic Concept and Design (2010), and numerous grants from Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and American Composer’s Forum, among others. Jinza has taught generations of emerging choreographers and dancers during twenty-five years at Zenon Dance Company and School in Minneapolis and as a guest instructor for various universities.
Photo: Richard Schabetsberger
Moira Villiard
(2024)
(She/Her)
Through public art collaborations across Minnesota, Moira Villiard is a multidisciplinary artist who uses art to uplift underrepresented narratives, explore the nuance of society’s historical community intersections, and promote community healing spaces. Her areas of focus include responsive/protest art, community space curation, activism-rooted exhibits and installations, animated projection art, and participatory murals. Moira is an FDLTCC alumna, grew up on the Fond du Lac Reservation in Cloquet, MN, and is a Fond du Lac direct descendent.
Photo: Kay Anja
Yoni Light
(2024)
(She/Her)
Yoni Light is a captivating and multifaceted performing artist known for seamlessly weaving together the realms of dance, film, and music to craft immersive storytelling experiences. With a boundless creative spirit, Yoni's work transcends traditional boundaries, inviting audiences into a world where movement, visuals, and sound converge in harmonious synergy. Through a unique fusion of mediums, Yoni Light illuminates narratives that resonate deeply, leaving an indelible impression on those fortunate enough to witness the magic of this visionary artist.
Photo: Isabel Fajardo
Sarah Abdel-Jelil
(2022, 2021, & 2024)
(She/Her/Hers)
Sarah Abdel-Jelil is a Mauritanian-American filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer. As a dancer/movement artist, her artwork centers the body as a primary way of knowing and experiencing the world. Inspired by her nomadic upbringing, growing up in eight different countries in a multicultural, interfaith household, Sarah explores the relational nature of home, movement, and liminal spaces. Drawn to the ephemerality of dance and performance art, as well as the seemingly permanent nature of film and photography, Sarah’s work questions notions of time and bodily wisdom by investigating the intersection of the artistic process and ‘what remains.’ Her creative practice prioritizes somatic intelligence, trusting the instinct of one’s body in space and time, and inspires reflection on the embodied nature of the lived experience. Her current practice of “dance time-lapse” combines slow movement with time-lapse photography, as an invitation to move in tandem with cycles of the natural world. As a community educator, Sarah holds creative movement workshops across age groups to facilitate dialogue through movement, in order to build community, connection, and a sense of groundedness in one’s body. She holds a BA in Cinema and Media studies from Carleton College and is a recipient of the 2020 Jerome-MCAD Fellowship and the 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. Her work has been screened at numerous venues and festivals including the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, St. Cloud Film Fest, and Altered Aesthetics Film Festival. She has completed residencies in Minnesota, Oregon, and France.
Photo: Mike Levad of Twin Birch Studios
Conie Borchardt
(2022)
(She/They)
Conie Borchardt is a Mixed Asian Public Heart Artist and Cultural Catalyst, a listener and vibration holding space for truth, pain, and delight while inviting expression in sound, movement, and color within themselves and in others. With skills of being a spiritual companion, community song and circle dance leader, ritual co-creator, vocal coach, and self-taught visual artist and interests in embodied, transformative change in individuals and communities, Conie weaves these together to create new culture. A couple of ways they are doing this is developing “Freeing Refrains,” an auto-biographical song circle, to foster conversation around what binds and liberates us, and “Biracial & Rural,” an arts-centered community of care and storytelling space for folks who connect with that experience, currently or in the past. Born to new and old immigrant farmers from Asia and Europe before the internet on the rural plains of Mni’sota, Conie currently lives near B’dote, the Dakota word for "Where Two Rivers Meet", the confluence of the Mni’sota and Misi-ziibi Rivers, in the settler place known as St. Paul, MN.
Photo: Scott Tsuchitani
NAKA Dance Theater
(2023)
Founded in 2001 by co-directors Debby Kajiyama & José Ome Mazatl, NAKA Dance Theater creates experimental performance works using dance, storytelling, multimedia installations, and site-specific environments. NAKA builds partnerships with communities, engages people's histories and folklore, and expresses experiences through accessible performances that challenge the viewer to think critically about social justice issues. NAKA brings together and creates rapport among diverse populations, encouraging dialogue and civic participation.
Over the years, they have collaborated with Eastside Arts Alliance. An organization of artists and community organizers of color in East Oakland and Skywatchers, an ensemble of residents from San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
They became fans of the Twin Cities when they toured to Minneapolis in 2008 and 2014, as San Francisco representatives in the SCUBA Touring Network. José Ome and Debby have been artists in residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Woodside, CA) and the Lucas Artist Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center.
NAKA developed Y Basta Ya! with Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), a San Francisco Bay Area grassroots organization that promotes individual healing and community power. Y Basta Ya! engages in an intimate and personal exploration of issues of race, gender violence, and invisibility, and their individual and collective effects on survivors.
The June 10th presentation at Rosy Simas Danse of Y Basta Ya! was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Photo: Demian DinéYahzi’
Demian DinéYahzi’
(2023)
(They/Them)
Demian DinéYazhi ́is born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the overaccumulative and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero cisgender communities. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous peoples whose land it occupies and refuses to give back. @heterogeneoushomosexual
Photo: Canaan Mattson
Sam Aros-Mitchell
(2022 & 2023)
(He/Him/His)
Sam Aros-Mitchell is an enrolled member with the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. As an art-maker, dancer, and scholar, his work spans the disciplines of performance, sound/light/scenic design, choreography, and embodied writing.
In May of 2023, Sam presented his work for Red Eye Theater's New Works 4 Weeks Festival 2023, along with cohorts Rebecca Nichloson, Margaret Ogas and Atim Opoka. In that work, titled Ania Bwia Bwia Toochia, Aros-Mitchell reflected on the connection between the Southwest, his body, and his ancestors. Invoking sound and movement, the piece explored the human relationship to the natural worlds, or aniam.
Aros-Mitchell holds a Ph.D. in Drama and Theater from the joint doctoral program at UC San Diego/UC Irvine, an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego, and a BFA in Dance from UC Santa Barbara. Aros-Mitchell is a 2023 McKnight Dance Fellow.
Lela Pierce
(2023)
(She/They)
Lela Pierce is a Black multiracial artist, born and raised in rural MniSota Makoce - the ancestral and current homeland of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. She has lived in the Twin Cities for nearly 2 decades -maintaining artistic practices in painting, performance and installation work. Lela has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016) as well as Rosy Simas Danse and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (both 2015-present). In 2018 she was awarded a Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship for visual art through MCAD. Her work has been presented internationally in India and Sweden (including a solo show at Kalmar Konstmuseum) as well as several Twin Cities venues - notably Bockley Gallery and SooVAC.
Lela holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College, and an MFA in interdisciplinary art and social practice from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is currently a Jerome Hill Fellow and teaches Sculpture at Macalester College.
Photo: Stan Waldhauser
Arneshia Williams
(2023&2021)
(She/Hers)
Arneshia Williams was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma. She is a weaver and mover who co-builds to create cultures of belonging from community to community. She views her artwork as snapshots into the social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of life. She is interested in dance, vocality, sound, and media, and is particularly invested in Black American and African Diasporic forms of expression. Her areas of practice and research are influenced by wellness, embodiment, and community.
Arneshia gives thanks to the persons and communities who have encouraged her to view her art as a valuable part of the arts ecosystem. She has been awarded residencies and scholarships to support her choreography and danced works by communal and nationally known artists. She is a member of the 2020 Momentum: New Dance Works cohort, supported by the Cowles Center, and her short film, morsel, was in the 2021 Black Lives Rising Film Festival. Her written research has been published in the Journal of Dance and the Journal of Dance, Movement, and Spirituality. Recent residencies and support include three thirty one space - Rosy Simas Danse, Red Eye Theater, Dea Studios, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.
Arneshia offers body and sensory-based workshops to encourage spaces of connection and healing. In these intentionally created spaces, people offer and develop ways to connect, embody, and respect their personhood and the personhoods of other people. During the week-long residency at three thirty one space, generously offered by Rosy Simas Danse, Arneshia will work with collaborators to further develop a workshop that will be offered at the end of May 2023 for Black Women to take part in. During the residency, workshop development will be shared with an invited audience for feedback. Residency time will also be used to work on a forum taking place in June 2023 for Communities of Color.
Photo: Valerie Oliveiro
Valerie Oliveiro
(2023)
(She/He/They/Flex)
Valerie Oliveiro is a dance and performance maker based in the Twin Cities and from Singapore. While they currently engage movement as their primary motor for expression, they also engage in other expressions, such as design, writing, drawing, and photography, as generative, complexly relational proposals. Their choreographic work has been presented at Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Hair+Nails Gallery, and Bryant Lake Bowl and Cowles Center and has been supported by Minnesota State Arts Board, MRAC, Jerome Foundation, and MAP Fund. Currently, they are a Co-Artistic Director at Red Eye Theater, ensemble member at Lighting Rod (QTBIPOC-led performance organism), and co-run a small performance incubator MOVO SPACE. They have performed in the work of Morgan Thorson, Rosy Simas, Pramila Vasudevan, Jennifer Monson, Chitra Vairavan, and Emily Gastineau.
Oliveiro is an RSD performer and has performed in Weave, WEave:HERE, and she who lives on the road to war. They are a recipient of the 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Dance.
Photo: McKnight '22 by Canaan Mattson
Leila Awadallah ليلى عوض الله
(2023)
(She/her/her)
Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker based in Minneapolis and partly in Beirut, Lebanon. Dancing with a body of Palestinian, Arab-American, Sicilian and diasporic Mediterranean ways and waves. Born near the Tehankasandata / Thick Wooded River (Sioux Falls, SD) she moved to Minneapolis, Mni Sota (2012) to pursue a BFA in Dance at the University of Minnesota, and found home in the Twin Cities.
Leila is the Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance (body-as-homeland) project/practice in collaboration with Noelle Awadallah. She has received fellowships celebrating her performance, research in Arab-rooted contemporary dance, and choreographies: McKnight Dancer (2022), Jerome Hill (2021-2023), Daring Dances (2019) and Springboard 20/20 (2018). Her newest work, TERRANEA received support from National Performance Network, MSAB, Arab American National Museum, Links Hall, and Goethe Institute. Leila was a member of Ananya Dance Theatre (2014 - 2019) and the Kelvin Wailey trio (2015-2019). She lives and works part time in Beirut where she collaborates with the Theater of Women of the Camp based in the Borj El Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp. In her free time, she prefers not to sit still and instead practices Tai Chi, Qi Gong, and Aikido. Free Palestine!
Taja Will
(2023&2022)
(they/them) Taja Will is a non-binary, chronically ill, queer, Latinx (Chilean) adoptee. They are a performer, choreographer, somatic therapist, consultant, and Healing Justice practitioner based in Mni Sota Makoce, on the ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe. Taja’s approach integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance. Their aesthetic is one of spontaneity, bold choice making, sonic and kinetic partnership, and the ability to move in relationship to risk and intimacy. Will’s artistic work explores visceral connections to current socio-cultural realities through a blend of ritual, dense multi-layered worldbuilding, and everyday magic.
Taja initiates solo projects and teaching ventures and is a recent recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, in the dance field, awarded in 2021. Their work has been presented throughout the Twin Cities and across the United States. Including local performances at the Walker Art Center Choreographer’s Evening, the Red Eye Theater’s New Works 4 Weeks, the Radical Recess series, Right Here Showcase, and the Candy Box Dance Festival. They were the recipient of a 2018-’19 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, administered by the Cowles Center and funded by The McKnight Foundation. Will has recently received support from the National Association of Latinx Arts & Culture, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.
TAJA WILL ENSEMBLE - a contemporary dance collective
In 2015 Will instigated the Taja Will Ensemble, a project-based, contemporary performance-making collective of artists. The culture of this ensemble exists as a collective of artists working with modular hierarchies, collaborative authorship, and cultural equity practices in the artist workplace. TWE enthusiastically adopted the We Have Voice code of conduct in 2018, and even through shifting collaborators and new projects, we find a foundation in space and abundance listening for each other's access needs; physical, emotional, and spiritual.
TWE has produced works such as Gospels of Oblivion: To the End, Blood Language the performance and digital archive, and dance film LÍNEAS de SANGRE. Amongst these performance we've had several iterations, excerpted performance in collaboration with touring ventures and partnerships with The National Center of Choreography Akron, New Movement Collaborative (Boston), the Lion's Jaw Festival (Boston), The Walker Art Center, Candy Box Dance Festival, the Cowles Center, the McKnight Foundation and more. TWE is currently working on a new performance, Dearest Liberator, DISASTER! DISASTER! DISASTER! with ongoing primary collaborators Marisol Herling and Marggie Ogas. In 2021 TWE contracted over 15 independent artists, majority QT + BIPOC for our project LÍNEAS de SANGRE and aims to continue to work in community centering QT + BIPOC, and diaspora artist voices.
Photo: Nanne Sørvold
Masanari Kawahara 川原正也
(2023)
(He/Him/His)
Masanari Kawahara 川原正也 is a Butoh doer, theatre artist, puppeteer, and teaching artist. Please refer to welovemasa.com for a list of his past and present works. Masanari is a resident teaching artist and Director of the Naked Stages program at Pillsbury House + Theatre.
During this residency, Masanari will be working with his collaborer Sho Nikaido.
Sho Nikaido is a Japanese musician. He has played in various bands for over two decades in the Twin Cities music scene. Also, he composes the soundtrack for film and stage performances.
Photo: Masanari Kawahara
Sequoia Hauck
(2022)
(They/Them)
Sequoia Hauck is a Native (Anishinaabe/Hupa) queer multidisciplinary artist based in the Twin Cities on the stolen and ancestral Dakota lands of the Wahpeton, Mdewakantonwon, Wahpekute, and Sisseton peoples.
Sequoia's focus is on creating theater, film, poetry, and performance art that decolonizes the process of art-making. They make art surrounding the narratives of continuation and resiliency among their communities.
They are a graduate from the University of Minnesota -Twin Cities with a B.A. in American Indian Studies. Sequoia has worked on and offstage with organizations such as Aniccha Arts, Art Shanty Projects, Exposed Brick Theatre, The Jungle Theater, Māoriland, An Opera Theatre (AOT), Pangea World Theater, Patrick's Cabaret, Poetry and Pie, The Southern Theater, and Turtle Theater Collective. Sequoia recently co-directed a documentary, “Never Turn Your Back to the Wave: The Travis Jordan Story'' which was in the 2021 Mpls-St. Paul International Film Festival.
Marcela Michelle
(2022)
(She/Her) Marcela Michelle is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, facilitator, and producer living and working primarily on the occupied and ancestral Dakota land colonially known as the Twin Cities. She is the former Artistic Director of 20% Theatre Company and is currently the Executive Artistic Director of Lightning Rod - a QTPOC-led arts organization focused on legacy, development, and opportunity for QTGNC Artists and Activists.
Marcela's work frequently deals with the simultaneity of being and the malleability of identities, informed in part by her ever-shifting childhood growing up in Texas, her foster care experiences in the midwest, her Afro-indigenous Chicanx heritage, and her queer transgender being. Marcela's work spans genres and disciplines, touching theatre, dance, music, design, cabaret, burlesque, culinary arts, and performance art. Her practice is meditative, repetitive, literary, architectural, and spherical, usually devising work after deep periods of ongoing research. She is a 2019 Mentee of the National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation (Pangea World Theater, Art2Action) and a member of Actor's Equity.
Marcela is grateful to have recently worked with Emily Gastineau (PRRRRRR {Hot Theory}, MOVO Space), Valerie Oliveiro (Soft Freedoms, Cowles Center for Dance), Wanderlust Productions (Lost and Found, Raspberry Island), Walker Art Center (Choreographer’s Evening 2021), Rough Magic Performance Company (Anne Carson’s Norma Jean Baker of Troy, The Train Shed; The Tempest Project Podcast), 20% Theatre Company + Lightning Rod (Brujeria for Beginners by Keila Anali Saucedo, Mixed Blood Theater), and Hope Communities (TRCSTR Cohort 2022, Dreamsland). Upcoming projects include Maddie Granlund’s By the Glimmer of a Half-Extinguished Light in February, and Alexandra Bodnarchuck’s Rock, Paper, Scissors in March, both at the Southern Theater.
Photo: PC Curtis Reaves
Nick Daniels
(National Artist 2021)
(He/They/Them)
Considered to be a Pittsburgh pioneer in exploring race and sexual identity, Nick M. Daniels is the founding Artistic Director of the D.A.N.A. Movement Ensemble (Dancers Against Normal Actions) which he started in 1991. With over 30 years of dance and choreography experience, he has reemerged after a 20+year hiatus. Since returning in 2016 his choreographic style continuously has developed. His style is based on butoh, African, modern and contemporary styles based on pure raw emotion. His creativity often entices the use of self realized soundscapes and video imagery.
His dance career began at a young age, as a student in McKeesport High School where he began developing and perfecting various styles of dance. The now Pittsburgh resident has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Dance from Slippery Rock University and started the DANA Movement Ensemble prior to graduation. Along with his Company he has received many awards, accolades and favorable reviews across the country and internationally.
Photo: Azure Sky Photography
Oogie_Push
(2022 & 2021)
(She/Her/We)
Oogie_Push is from the Meskwaki Nation near Tama Iowa. She started dancing Fancy Shawl as soon as she could walk and grew up competing on the Pow-wow Trail. She and her relatives started doing dance performances and sharing Meskwaki culture with students in schools around Iowa. She performed in these dance presentations from 4th grade all the way through undergrad teaching people about Pow-wow and Meskwaki culture plus some Native history. Oogie found herself in undergrad at Haskell Indian Nations University, studying American Indian Studies with an emphasis in Theatre. From there she then graduated from University of Missouri-Kansas City with a MFA in Theatre Design & Technology. She has alway been on a mission to educate people about Native culture and issues through dance and theatre as well as challenge stereotypes about who Native people could be on stage. Since the pandemic, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, and everything else she has spent 2021 incorporating healing elements into all the work she does. She plans to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. She is currently developing a one woman show with Full Circle Theater that she plans to tour next year, if not sooner. She will include song, dance, storytelling, utilizing Meskwaki spirituality, personal experience, and healing techniques she has learned throughout her adult life. She is also helping to devise a slapstick comedy touring show called Arla Mae's Booyah Wagon with Sod House Theatre which will also include song and dance, with talks of including Fancy Shawl dancing.
Photo: Nic LaFrance
Pedra Pepa (2022 & 2021)
(They/Them)
Pedro Pablo is a Caracas born, Minneapolis based queer performance maker. They are the founder/director of Viva la Pepa, generating collective, unapologetic performances crossing multiple mediums; sourcing from the overlapping values of Latinx and Queer cultures: passion, melodrama, decadence & sensuality. An inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Pedro is a teaching artist with the Pillsbury House Theatre and Upstream Arts. They are on an ongoing transnational collaboration with Argentinian choreographer Celia Argüello. Their most current research in the US, Contained, Alive has taken many shapes over the past year and will be performed next July 2021. During the day, Pedro co-creates children and family theater programming, and at night Pedro entertains adults as their draglesque persona Doña Pepa.
Photo: Ryan Stopera
Chitra Vairavan
(2022)
(She/Her/Hers)
Chitra Vairavan is a seeker, contemporary dancer/choreographer, educator and artist of Thamizh/South Indian-American, non-Brahmin descent. Vairavan is immersed in both Thamizh/Tamil culture and progressive brown politics in the U.S. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, spatial observation, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory. She chooses to gesture towards and embody within the practice of liberation and decolonization in creative choices. The aesthetic of her movement is through both yoga and contemporary Indian dance forms – mainly a mixture of training in Bharatanatyam, Odissi and Yorchha™.
Her dance has been featured throughout the Twin Cities and abroad since 2004, as a co-founding member and former dancer with Ananya Dance Theatre and later in 2007 as a dance collaborator with Aniccha Arts. Vairavan is the recipient of the 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Dance, 2018 Naked Stages Fellowship, and the 2020-2021 Springboard for the Arts’ 20/20 Fellowship among other honors. www.chitravairavan.com
Photo: Futsum Tsegai
Dakota Camacho
(National Artist 2022)
Dakota Camacho is a Matao/Chamoru multi-disciplinary artist / researcher working in spaces of indigenous life ways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education.
Camacho holds a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Gender & Women's Studies as a First Wave Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar.
Camacho is a chanter, adjunct instructor, and core researcher for I Fanlalai'an Oral History Project based at the University of Guåhan.
Camacho co-founded I Moving Lab, an inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-tribal, and inter-disciplinary arts collective that creates community and self-funded arts initiatives to engage and bring together rural & urban communities, Universities, Museums, & performing arts institutions.
Camacho has worked at festivals, universities, and community organizations as a public speaker, facilitator, composer and performer across Turtle Island (USA), Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Sweden, and South Africa. www.dakotacamacho.com
Dakota Camacho’s residency and the presentation of MALI’E’ is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The RSD three thirty one space Artist Residency Program was made possible by the voters of Minnesota through grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
The RSD three thirty one space Artist Residency Program was also supported by the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund Phase 1, an initiative of Arts Midwest and its peer United States Regional Arts Organizations made possible by an anonymous donor.