Nia-Amina Minor is a movement artist, choreographer, curator, and educator originally from Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the body and what it carries using physical and archival research  to converse with memory. She approaches her practice as an imaginative space grounded in rhythm where improvisation, Black vernacular movement, and choreography meet. Nia-Amina has received regional and national commissions for her choreographic and film work and has a working background as a performer and dramaturg. She is co-founder of Black Collectivity, a collaborative project that celebrates embodied research through performance and curation.

As a performer, Nia-Amina has worked with artists such as dani tirrell, Zoe Juniper, Will Rawls, Alice Gosti, Keyes Wiley, and Amy O’Neal. From 2016-2021 she was a Company Artist at Spectrum Dance Theater under the direction of Donald Byrd. Nia-Amina has also provided dramaturgical assistance to choreographers Jade Solomon-Curtis and Donald Byrd. In her work as a curator, she has developed programming at On the Boards, Wa Na Wari, Velocity, and Base, and Friends of the Waterfront Park. From 2014-2016, she was a co-founder and curator of Los Angeles based collective, No)one Art House. As an educator, she has taught, guest lectured, and been a visiting artist at Cornish College, University of Minnesota, CalArts, University of Washington, Western Washington University, Saddleback College, Cypress College, and UC Irvine. Nia-Amina received her MFA in Dance from UC Irvine and a BA from Stanford University.  She was Dance Magazine’s 25 Artists to Watch in 2021, and one of Seattle Magazine’s Most Influential People in 2025. Nia-Amina is currently on faculty at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University.

Cameo is a choreographer and performer from Kaneohe, HI. She has been based in Seattle since 2015. Her work has been shown at On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, Erickson Theater, 12th Ave Arts, Kirkland Performance Center, Base: Experimental Arts + Space, Yaw Theater, Electric Lodge, and more. She’s performed for choreographers Alice Gosti, Kate Wallich, and others. As a selected artist for Ellenore Scott’s The Breaking Glass Project, she received mentorships from Sidra Bell and Nia-Amina Minor. Cameo was also a recipient of SeattleDances’ 2017 DanceCrush award and 2019’s James Ray Residency.

Joseph Hernandez is a choreographer and writer based in Seattle, Washington. His work as a choreographer has been presented by The Joyce NYC, Festspielhaus Hellerau, The Semperoper Dresden, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, Theatre St. Gallen, and Whim W’Him Contemporary Dance Seattle, Staatstheater Nürnberg among others. His work The Lavender Follies was filmed for European Television by ZDF Deutschland and has now been disseminated worldwide. He has taught at SUNY Purchase College, Dance Arts Faculty (Rome), and Cornish College of the Arts, well as the Royal Danish Ballet, and Artof (Zurich) summer courses. He served as a founder and jury member for Tanznetz Dresden’s STUDIO ROUND, curating showings and performances/discussions by creators from all over Europe. His installation series Nielsson Conversations was hosted by S T O R E Contemporary in Dresden, Germany. In addition to his freelance work, he was appointed Associate Choreographer at the Northwest Dance Project from 2022-2024.  He left Portland in 2024 to work at Velocity Dance Center full time and to advocate for off-the-wall performance in the PNW.

www.bluescreencontemporary.com 

*Photo By Alice Blangero

Shane Donohue is a Seattle based dance artist currently working as co-top with Drama Tops. He works closely with zoe | juniper as a dancer and rehearsal director. He has set work with, and for, Zoe Scofield at the University of Washington, Strictly Seattle, Whim W’him, Bard Summerscape’s production of “Le Roi Arthus” in 2021. His work has been seen in Next Fest Northwest. He also works as an artistic collaborator and performer with Kim Lusk, Kinesis Project, Scott Shoemaker’s “:PROBED”, and BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon’s Holiday Special in the live, national tour and on Hulu. Shane graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point with a BA in Dance.

www.dramatops.com

SUPPORT THE PROJECT | About the work:

Across the world, people are constantly affected by those in power trying to shape the way we interact with land. This reshaping can be for profit, a scapegoat to maintain power, or for exploitation of resources. It looks like rerouting, damming, and dumping into rivers. It looks like redlining and gentrification. Some of us feel the effects deeply and some of us ignore it. Regardless, we are all changed. This piece is a meditation on the connections between Black experiences in Seattle and the ways the Duwamish River has been changed by outside forces. Both have been rerouted and depleted yet are still around. Ours is a story of resilience. Redlining, gentrification, and the exploitation of the river creates a ripple effect on the culture of the city. This piece will dive into survival, not just the how but the why. How does the need to survive imprint itself onto the body? How does the success of survival take a toll on the spirit? There is cultural memory attached to the river and the Central District that is at risk of erasure. What outlets do we have for that memory to be archived? This piece will reveal some of those outlets through movement, poetry, and visual aids.

Akoiya Harris (she/her) is a movement artist based in Seattle, WA. Her work uses a queer Black gaze to explore ways in which communal and personal stories can be interwoven into dance works. She has collected oral histories on behalf of Wa Na Waris Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute, and Black Collectivity. Akoiya has also participated in the Black Embodiments Studio Arts Writing Incubator. As a choreographer, she has shown work at the Seattle Art Museum, Wa Na Wari, On The Boards, Friends of the Waterfront, Velocity Dance Center, The Moore Theater, and more. Akoiya is a founding member of Black Collectivity, a group that explores memory and culture through embodied responses. Following a matriarchal lineage of teachers, Akoiya is a dance educator working with youth at Ailey Camp and Pacific Northwest Ballet. She has also performed with Spectrum Dance Theater, Will Rawls, zoe | juniper, Third Rail Projects, The Congregation, and SoloMagic.

*Photo by Jazzy Photo

Since 2008, Risk/Reward has been engaging in community curation of pieces that push the boundaries of performance. The Festival of New Performance presents 4 to 6 pieces as part of our Festival Mainstage production, alongside site specific, installation, and other non-traditional pieces. Performances for the festival are under 20 minutes, by creators residing in (or with deep ties to) the Pacific Northwest region, and are pieces in some form of development. 

We pride ourselves on offering a high degree of professionalism and polish in our dealings with artists, and provide robust technical, administrative, and marketing support for artists. We provide photos and video of all mainstage pieces. We are hoping to provide some degree of rehearsal space in Portland for our mainstage artists in 2025.

How is this program curated?

Risk/Reward convenes a panel of approximately 6 regional artists, administrators, and taste-makers with experience in the contemporary art field to select the pieces for the Festival mainstage from among the applications. While the Festival Director and Producing Artistic Director for Risk/Reward serve on the panel, the rest of the panelists change each year.

What is the Application Schedule?

In 2025, applications will be open for the month of January. 

Applications will be selected and all artists notified by the end of March. 

Artists announced at the end of April.

The festival itself is in the second half of June.

www.riskreward.org

SUPPORT THE PROJECT | ABOUT THE WORK:

HARNESS is a performance in development by Jay Carlon that reimagines Filipino Holy Week rituals through a queer, diasporic lens. Rooted in movement and theatricality, the work transforms acts of penance and devotion into gestures of sovereignty, release, and ritual. HARNESS asks how pain might become a portal for transformation—an offering toward collective healing, reclamation, and joy. The piece channels the charged energy of festivals, processionals, and parades that reenact and confront colonial histories.

Jay Carlon is a Los Angeles–based dancer, choreographer, and performance artist whose work facilitates shared healing while exploring post-colonial identity, ancestry, and the complex queer and Filipino experience. The youngest of twelve in a migrant family, Carlon connects a global network of Filipino creatives and communities through embodied storytelling and collective ritual.

Recipient of the 2024 Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Choreographer Award, Carlon has presented work at the Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, REDCAT, and the Filipino American National Historical Society. He has performed with The Industry Opera, Oguri, Bill T. Jones, the Metropolitan Opera, and most recently as a featured dancer in Miguel Gutierrez’s Super Nothing. Commercial work includes collaborations with Mndsgn, Kanye West, Solange Knowles, and Rodrigo y Gabriela. Carlon currently serves as associate director at Sway, where he has helped create custom works for the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

“If you want to be utterly transported, look to choreographer Jay Carlon.” — Dance Magazine

*Photo by Kenny Laubbacher

SUPPORT THE PROJECT | ABOUT THE WORK:

Baby planula. Budding polyps. Emergent ephyrae. Voracious, sexually mature medusae.

Medusa is a multidisciplinary dance performance that dives into the life cycle of jellyfish featuring all trans performers. Submerged in an immersive seascape of projection and original sound by Fox Whitney, six trans performers move through a coming-of-age story of growing up, sex, survival, and global migration. Performed by Vlada Kremenović, Will Courtney, Lío Sainz-Jones, and Tayler Tucker. 

ARTIST BIO:

Vlada Kremenović (she/her) is a trans immigrant artist working in dance, video, performance, and arts administration. Originally from Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vlada has been making works in Seattle since 2017.

Vlada founded CommonForm in 2019 to present works that are highly engaging, but not entertaining; rigorous, but not technical; political, but not contrived; approachable, but not simplified. Her work draws upon themes from queerness, immigration, nature, architecture, natural sciences, and history, using improvisational structures anchored in time and space to pursue the collective emergence of truth between performers and audiences.

She was a 2023 Seattle City Artist and has received funding from 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Her work has been presented locally in Seattle as well as inter/nationally in Oregon, California, British Columbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.

Vlada has collaborated with Fox Whitney since 2020 as a performer, video artist, director of photography, and vocalist, including for his upcoming Made in Seattle 2027 project, LOOK/OUT. She has also worked with Alice Gosti, Heather Kravas, Jordan Macintosh-Hougham, Noelle Price, Melissa Riker, Karin Stevens, Petra Zanki, and others.

Descending from a long lineage of Bosnian peasants, Vlada’s art rejects the elitism of postmodernism while embracing its capacity for performer/audience autonomy, freedom from colonial and classicist ideals, and the creation of containers for radical empathy.

IG: @commonfom_ | @sasha_sobbing | @vlada_kremenovic

Venmo: @commonform 

*Photo by Fox Whitney

SUPPORT THE PROJECT | ABOUT THE WORK:

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What are you dreaming?

Extending a 10 year collaboration between Sara Shelton Mann and Jesse Zaritt, this work moves language, drawing and movement into increasingly urgent choreographic formations. We wonder how to dance into and out of the conditions conditioning us, how to source from the images arising from the eye of the heart. What possibilities of being with each other might we not yet be able to recognize, but be able to approach in our dancing, our dreaming together?

ARTIST BIOS:

Sara Shelton Mann has been a choreographer, performer, teacher since 1967. She was a protégé of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis in NYC before moving to Canada where she fell in love with contact improvisation. In 1979 she moved to San Francisco and started the performance group Contraband, combining the principles of contact, systems of the body, and spiritual practice into a unified system of research. Her Movement Alchemy training is an ongoing teaching project and is influenced by certifications and studies in the metaphysical and healing traditions over many years.

Jesse Zaritt’s work engages drawing as dancing – a visual and physical practice linked to dreaming, drafting, and materializing futures. His choreographic, performance and teaching practices research the ways in which excessive, contemplative and resistive dance practices change how movement arises in the world and how dancing participates in processes of social transformation. Jesse has performed his solo work in Taiwan, Uruguay, Korea, Germany, Japan, Mexico and throughout the United States. He has performed with Shen Wei Dance Arts and in the work of Netta Yerushalmy and Faye Driscoll. Jesse is a faculty member of the newly formed Bennington College BFA Dance Lab. He currently works in creative dialogue with Sara Shelton Mann.

Niall Jones is an artist, performer and teacher based in New York City. Niall constructs immersive, liminal sites that attend to sensual, collective registers of fiction, dis/order, dis/placement and in/completeness; & he dances through a constellation of curiosities, obsessions and practices destabilized by performance, sound, text, photography and video.

All Over The Map is a mini outdoor dance festival taking place at the Picnic Pavilion on Granville Island, Vancouver BC each summer. Building on New Works and CMHC Granville Island’s 20+ year partnership, All Over The Map is a fun, family-friendly performance series that features a mixed program of 10 – 12min works from a diversity of dance and movement artists. It is a great opportunity for emerging artists who are looking for new opportunities to share their work, and has a long history of supporting cultural practitioners who are exploring the bounds between cultural and contemporary forms.  WEBSITE *application now closed

This statement guides how we make choices and how we invite artists into collaborations with us. It’s a living commitment—evolving as we do.

At Velocity, we support dance driven by experimentation—not defined by a specific style or aesthetic, but by a commitment to research, risk, and inquiry. Our curatorial approach is rooted in our values: artist leadership, equity and inclusivity, leading with relationship, curiosity and rigor, and liberation for all. We support artists that work to shift harmful or outdated norms. We prioritize depth, clarity, and process over product. To us, excellence means thoughtfulness, innovation, and resilience. 

We are drawn to artists who experiment with how dance is made, shared, and experienced. We want to know how you’re working not only with movement, but with process, collaboration, and engagement with intended communities. We seek artists researching deeply within their movement form, considering the social and political realities shaping their work, and the many ways performance can communicate and have impact—before, during, and after the show. We’re also interested in artists reimagining how work gets made: experimenting with new strategies, challenging models of authorship and power, and reshaping how we plan, fund, and talk about dance. 

At Velocity, we curate to cultivate. We see artist development as a relationship that grows over time. Our programs are designed to support this ongoing process, allowing us to build trust and understanding, deepen our collaboration, and expand the scope of our shared work. We believe meaningful partnerships require mutual investment, shared risk, and shared reward. When we curate, we’re not only thinking about what’s ready now—we’re also thinking about how we can grow with an artist so we’re ready to take on larger, more ambitious projects together when the time is right. 

Our decision-making is collaborative and led by artists. Curation at Velocity is led by the Executive Director and the programming staff, and often includes the wider Velocity staff and invited community artists, who serve either as project-based panelists or more long-term advisors. We prioritize hiring administrators who are artists themselves, so that our processes remain artist-led.  

The FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival is one of FACT/SF’s Fieldwork programs. The Festival spans two weekends in mid-August in San Francisco, and brings together an array of contemporary dance works by choreographers from the Bay Area and beyond. The purpose of the Festival is to juxtapose a variety of works to spur dialogue, support artists and artistic growth, and present to audiences a range of perspectives.

In a typical year, FACT/SF invites six choreographers/groups to share work. One choreographer/group is often invited to share a longer work (in the 30-45 minute range) in the Festival’s first weekend, and five choreographers/groups are invited to share shorter works (in the 10-20 minute range) in the Festival’s second weekend. FACT/SF shares its own work on both weekends alongside the curated artists. All choreographers/groups are paid to participate, and FACT/SF provides a small travel stipend for choreographers/groups traveling from outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. Of the six curated choreographers/groups, 2-3 are typically from the Bay Area and 3-4 are typically from other regions.

How is this program curated?

The FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival is curated by an 8-person panel via an open application process. All applying artists are paid $30 to apply for approximately one hour of work. The application process is a simple Google form + a 30-minute conversation with two of the panel members.

What is the Application Schedule?

Applications typically open in September for the upcoming festival. The 30-minute conversations between the artist and the panel happens the first two weeks of October, the curatorial meeting happens right after the conversations have concluded, and notifications are sent out during the third week of October.

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