2023 Cohort

Saira Barbaric is a Black disabled trans artist who’s been self-producing performances, events and short films since 2017. Saira’s work has been shown in galleries, nightclubs, theaters and public parks all over North America and Europe. Saira creates in mediums considered both high and low art with the goal of weakening the barriers between the two.

Image description: Saira in fishnets, knee pads and small green afro buns twists on a stage with their cane hand toward the camera. Photo by Snacks the Photographer

Dr Suzanne Cowan is an artistic director with Touch Compass Dance Company in New Zealand (touchcompass.org.nz). She is actively engaged as a professional in the field of disability dance. As well as graduating with a PhD in Dance from the University of Auckland in 2018 she has won numerous awards for her academic research and choreography including the Tup Lang Choreography Award in 2011, the June Opie Fellowship in 2014 and an AMP national scholarship in 2014. Internationally she is the only disabled artistic director of a professional, nationally funded dance company who holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Dance and teaches at a national and international level both academically and in the dance studio. Last year she taught a pioneering course ‘The History and Theory of Integrated Dance’ at Rutgers Arts Online, based in New Jersey.

Image description: Black and white photo of a pale skinned woman with shoulder length brown hair leaning towards the camera. Her shoulder strap on her right shoulder has wooden beads.

Kayla Hamilton is a Texas born, Bronx based performance maker, dancer, educator, cultural consultant, and the artistic director of K. Hamilton projects. Kayla is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Her past performance work has been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space New York, New York Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD). Kayla has developed ‘Crip Movement Lab’- a pedagogical framework centering cross-Disability accessible movement practices that are open to every-body. She has taught dance at Sarah Lawrence College, Amherst College, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Utah, and University of Iowa. As a consultant,  Kayla has developed and designed programming for Disabled artist for the Mellon Foundation, ArtSpeak, Dance USA, Movement Research and The Shed. As a dancer, Kayla was part of the Bessie award winning skeleton architecture, she has also danced for Maria Bauman, Sydnie L. Mosley and Gesel Mason. Kayla is currently in the process of creating a future organization centering the work of BIPOC Disabled creatives, while co-leading the 10th anniversary season of Angela’s Pulse/Dancing While Black, and developing a new evening length performance set to premier in NY in 2024 (TBA).

Image description: This is a headshot of Kayla Hamilton, who is a dark brown-skinned Black woman. She is posing in front of a blurred brick wall. She is wearing a long sleeve black & white striped shirt. She has light makeup and her gaze is towards us. Her black & golden highlighted dreads are down.

Maya Quetzali Gonzalez is an artist, arts worker, and organizer. Her recent assistant directing and movement work includes YOU WILL GET SICK (Roundabout), MACBETH (Broadway), and OUR TOWN/NUESTRO PUEBLO (DTC). She is a member of WOCA, an Associate Member of SDC, and serves on the board of IndieSpace. She also works with Jane’s Due Process, a Texas-based reproductive justice organization. Maya is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar.

Image description: Maya, a Mexican American young woman with short wavy black hair, smiles softly at the camera. She wears a black turtleneck. Behind her is a painted canvas tapestry with an abstract yellow design.

Shireen Hamza likes to sing and dance in the sun. She is an historian and artist living in Chicago, where she teaches with a prison education project (PNAP). Her historical research focuses on the history of science beyond the modern West. Specifically, she works on the history of medicine, bodies, and sexuality in the medieval Islamic world, especially the regions connected by the Indian Ocean. In recent work, Shireen draws on premodern medical texts to create poetic scores for dance and movement. She facilitates intimate workshops for dancers and non-dancers to explore experiences of illness and therapeutics through the scores.

Image description: shireen, a brown person wearing glasses, a kurti and blazer, and covering her hair with a hijab in the style of a turban, looks into the camera and smiles. she is sitting in the sun with water behind her.

Oakland native, Antoine Hunter aka Purple Fire Crow is an award-winning internationally known Black, Indigenous, Deaf, Disabled, choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, producer and Deaf advocate. He creates opportunities for Disabled, Deaf and hearing artists, produces Deaf-friendly events, and founded the Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2007 and Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in 2013. Awards include the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship, 2021 Dance Teacher Award, 2019 National Dance/USA fellowship recognized by the Mayor of Oakland, 2018 inaugural Jeanette Lomujo Bremond Humanity Arts Award and 2017 Isadora Duncan (Izzie) for BAIDDF. In response to Covid-19 in July 2020, Hunter founded #DeafWoke, an online talk show that amplifies BIPOC Deaf and Disabled stories as a force for cultural change. Www.realurbanjazzdance.com

Image description: Artist portrait of an Indigenous Black person with dark chocolate skin from his mother. He has almond shaped eyes with long lashes. a single dreadlock visible across his cheek and the rest of his hair in a low braid. Antoine has a full beard and is bare chested with his left hand raised artistically near his face. His right hand is gently supporting his left forearm. Photo credit: RJ Muna

Willyum LaBeija, William McLeod, North Carolina native who served in the US Army. During his time of service, he completed the MWR Soldier Show for two years as a dance captain. Training includes classical and urban genres of dance with an emphasis in vogue performance. Current member of the Royal House Of LaBeija since 2011 Recipient of the following awards include National Veterans Art Summit 2019 residency, Movement Residency Brazil/Panama 2019/2020, Links Hall Co-Missions Winter Residency 2019, Physical Theatre Residency in Austria 2019/2020, New International Performing Arts Institute Residency 2020, Neighborhood Arts Entrepreneurship Project-Task force member, Ways Residency 2020, Global Water Dances Choreographer/Site Lead2019/2020, Breaking Grounds Performance Series 2018.

Image description:  Photo of WillYum LaBeija

A San Francisco native and Deaf from birth, Zahna is a professional dancer, chemist, avid health nutritionist, researcher and Deaf advocate.  Zahna is the Assistant Director for Urban Jazz Dance Company and the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival and a full time office manager at a Professional Fiduciary Office. She has been featured in KPBS TV, CBS Bay Sunday, Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher Magazine and Ikouii Creative’s Book, IN THE STUDIO, published on Stance on Dance and was a Deaf Editor for Sins Invalid Disability Justice Primer. She has also performed with Kim Epifano, San Francisco Trolley Dances, Alameda Island City Waterways, Man Dance Company and Abilities Dance Boston.

Image description: Zahna is a white female with long blonde hair. She is wearing a black sportsbra and shorts striking a movement pose. Photo credit: RJ Muna

Dr. Akhila Vimal C. is a dancer, and a performance, and disability studies scholar.  As a trained dancer, who identifies as disabled, owing to partial and recurrent vision loss, Akhila’s research is located at the intersection of performance and disability and disabled dance pedagogy. Methodologically, she is committed to Practice as Research. As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral fellow at UCLA (2022-24), her project is to develop a practice-led dance pedagogy for blind and low-vision performers. The pedagogical model aims to collectively initiate collaborative learning, through somatic engagement with blind and low-vision performers, including the cultural unlearning of the expectations that come with dance training and sensibility.

Image description: Image of Akhila standing on a rock with a brick-orange pair of trousers, an ivory T-shirt, a black and red scarf, and glasses. Hills and lush meadows are behind her.

Alx Velozo is a trans and disabled sculptress, educator, and performance artist raised in North Florida: occupied Timucua land, currently residing in Baltimore, Maryland: occupied Pascataway land. Their installations and performances combine cultural imaginations of illness, touch, kink, the medical industrial complex, and kinesthetic learning models. They explore this research through mold-making processes, movement and object-based performances, and facilitation. They most recently received their M.F.A. in Sculpture and Extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and previously received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Velozo has exhibited, taught, and facilitated in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Richmond, Miami, and Chilchota, MX,  Montreal, QC.

Image description: A white performer in a white mesh shirt dances with a lavender cane across a floor covered with cornstarch. A large black speaker looms in the corner of the room and the cornstarch holds the trace of the dancer’s movement and floor contact with their cane and feet.

India Harville (she/her), MA, is the founder of Embraced Body. She is a Disability Justice activist/DEI consultant, politicized healer and performance artist. She identifies as African-American, femme, queer, and disabled; these identities deeply inform her work. The unifying theme in India’s work is centering body-based healing as a vehicle for personal/collective growth and transformation. Her work prioritizes reclaiming the body as an often underestimated pathway to decolonizing ourselves in order to deepen our embodiment of social justice, equity, and inclusion principles. India earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the New College of Florida and her Master of Arts in Integrative Health Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. You can learn more about her work at www.embracedbody.com.

A Black woman in a wheelchair smiles while embracing a white service dog in front of a green background of foliage.

Guggenheim fellow, and Alpert Award-winning choreographer, filmmaker, scholar, and activist Victoria Marks (she/her) joined the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance in 1995; served as the Associate Dean, Academic Affairs for the School of the Arts and Architecture, 2017-2021; and currently serves as the chair of UCLA’s newly formulated Disability Studies major. Victoria teaches improvisation, choreography and dance studies for Dance majors and mentors graduate students in “Choreographic Inquiry.  Her dances are made for the stage, film, and in community settings. Victoria’s choreography has long considered the politics of citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. These themes are part of her ongoing commitment to locating dance-making within the sphere of political meaning.

Image description: A white woman with short gray hair, sitting against a wall within a window sill. Wearing earrings, a pink long sleeve shirt and dark pants, her hands are in her lap, she is barefoot, and she is half-smiling looking, not at the camera, but softly to her left. 

Kayla Hamilton is a Texas born, Bronx based performance maker, dancer, educator, cultural consultant, and the artistic director of K. Hamilton projects. Kayla is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Her past performance work has been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space New York, New York Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD). Kayla has developed ‘Crip Movement Lab’- a pedagogical framework centering cross-Disability accessible movement practices that are open to every-body. She has taught dance at Sarah Lawrence College, Amherst College, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Utah, and University of Iowa. As a consultant,  Kayla has developed and designed programming for Disabled artist for the Mellon Foundation, ArtSpeak, Dance USA, Movement Research and The Shed. As a dancer, Kayla was part of the Bessie award winning skeleton architecture, she has also danced for Maria Bauman, Sydnie L. Mosley and Gesel Mason. Kayla is currently in the process of creating a future organization centering the work of BIPOC Disabled creatives, while co-leading the 10th anniversary season of Angela’s Pulse/Dancing While Black, and developing a new evening length performance set to premier in NY in 2024 (TBA).

Image description: This is a headshot of Kayla Hamilton, who is a dark brown-skinned Black woman. She is posing in front of a blurred brick wall. She is wearing a long sleeve black & white striped shirt. She has light makeup and her gaze is towards us. Her black & golden highlighted dreads are down.

JJ Omelagah (they/them) is a seasoned Access Doula with over a decade of experience. JJ started as a care provider for individual loved ones in 2011. As they interfaced with disabled communities more frequently, they started to provide access support for many different community members. Eventually, people recognized their capacity to support collective access for small and large group gatherings.  They have been an Access Doula for various community organizations, including Sins Invalid, Dancing Freedom, East Bay Church, Movement Liberation, DJCC, Dancing While Black, Movement Research, 3rd Wave Fund, and Dancing Disability Lab.

In addition to their work as an Access Doula, JJ currently serves as the Executive Manager at Embraced Body, a Disability Justice organization where they support building collective access for the staff and for community events. They are also experienced in customer service, case management, conflict resolution, and volunteer management. JJ is also a transgender vocal artist, trained Reiki practitioner, Ifa initiate, Disability Justice, and LGBTQIA+  activist.

When they aren’t working or singing, JJ enjoys spending quality time with their family, traveling, swimming, and spending time in nature.

Image Description: A circular frame pic of JJ Omelagah(they/them), a light-skinned black transgender person smiling with short faded black hair and small hoop earrings. They are wearing a multicolored sweater vest over a pink collar shirt.

Mihika Banerjee (she/her) is a Ph.D. graduate student at the Department of World of Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA.  Her doctoral project focuses on dance festivals in India and locates memories, identities, and expressions (per)formed through the arts. Mihika’s academic interests stem from her personal proclivity towards dance. She has been trained in the Indian classical dances of Odissi and Bharatnatyam, and continues her active and reflective explorations on the subject.

Image description: Mihika is looking into the frontal camera and smiling. She is wearing
a white dress and her hair is kept open. The picture is taken against
a blue wall.