Kara Beadle (they/them) is a movement artist, dance educator, and massage therapist based in Seattle, WA. As a non-binary, neuro-queer dance maker, Kara values queering dance through humor, improvisation, and object/human relationships to explore their interest in the interplay between neurodivergence, gender-nonconformance, the pressure to fit into society, and performative art. Kara is a lead collaborator of Heap, a Seattle-based performance troupe created with musician and handyman extraordinaire Andy Zacek and several rotating artists. Their experimental theatrics celebrate abundance, while critiquing overconsumption. Inside the fantasy worlds they build, Heap designs absurd scenarios between objects and bodies to subvert objectification and flaunt our lust for inanimate things. 

Since 2019, Heap has performed in NYC’s Estrogenius Festival, On The Boards Spectacle Spectacular, Next Fest Northwest: Rupture/Reverence, Texas Dance Improvisation Festival, Show 5, Georgetown’s Art Attack, The Shed’s Being Mode Residency Showing: Character Arc, Open Flight Studio’s Flight Deck Residency Showing, 18th and Union’s Portable Performance Festival, Velocity Dance Center’s Fall Kick-off: Portals, Launch, TakePause, and The Seattle International Dance Festival. Kara is a 2025/2026 City Artist Grant Recipient which has helped fund their project, Automorphs, which puts audiences on bikes to witness performance along Seattle streets from behind the handlebars.

*Photo by Devin Muñoz

Undercurrent (under the direction of Hilary Grumman + Alethea Alexander) is a teaching and performance entity invested in rigorous and specific technique. Through curated research labs, national creative partnerships, international intensives, immersive performance pop-ups, and weekly community classes, we engage in nuanced floorwork research practiced with seamless continuity and an eye for the thrill of kinesthesia. We believe that communal care precedes the possibility of risk, and that attunement to collectivism is a vital and precious practice.

Hilary Grumman co-founded Undercurrent in 2017 and has since cultivated the company’s development. As Artistic Co-Directors under the umbrella of Undercurrent, Hilary and Alethea Alexander (Undercurrent Artistic Co-Director, Ballet Rituals Co-Founder and independent artist) have been making work together since 2023. Their collaborative works have been supported by On the Boards, Actualize, Pike Street Plaza, University of Washington, Cornish College of the Arts, Velocity Dance Center, CO–, westFEST, 4Culture, Abbey Arts, Walk Don’t Run, Mosswood Hollow Retreat Center, Kitbash Studio, Alia Swersky, Glenn Kawasaki, and Douglas Pearce.

*photo by Stefano Altamura

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. 

*Photo by Devin Muñoz

Mark Haim has been making dances and teaching dance for 35 years.

Born in New York City, he began studying classical piano at age 6, and eventually attended the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division, where, in addition to studying piano with Rosetta Goodkind, he studied theory, composition and chamber music. He was accepted to the Dance Division of The Juilliard School on an honorary scholarship, graduating with a BFA degree. There, he performed in works by Paul Taylor, Antony Tudor, Jose Limon and Anna Sokolow, and began choreographing. He received his MFA in Dance in 2006, in the first graduating class of the Hollins/ADF MFA program.

From 1984 -1987, he directed Mark Haim & Dancers, which performed at the Riverside Dance Festival in NYC, and at various theaters and venues in the US, Luxembourg, and Holland. From 1987-1990, he was Artistic Director of the Companhia de Danca de Lisboa, one of Portugal’s first publicly-funded modern dance companies. There, he created 8 dances for the company, and commissioned 10 premieres, extensively touring Portugal, along with performances in Spain, and Italy.

Mark has been commissioned to create new works for many dance companies in the US, Europe and Asia, among them the Nederlands Dans Theater, Ballet Frankfurt, the Limon Dance Company, the Joffrey II Dancers, the Rotterdamse Dansgroep, the Silesian Dance Theater, the Companhia de Danca de Lisboa, CoDanceCo, the TRANS Dance Co., and Ballet Pacifica. He has restaged his works on companies such as The Joffrey Ballet, the Bat-Dor Dance Company of Israel, Djazzex and the Juilliard Dance Ensemble. He has also created works for numerous university dance departments throughout the US.

His 80-minute solo, “The Goldberg Variations,” created between 1994 and 1997, was co-commissioned by the American Dance Festival and the Danspace Project. With pianist Andre Gribou, The Goldberg Variations has  been presented at the ADF, the Danspace Project in St. Mark’s Church in New York, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, On The Boards in Seattle, the Munye Theater in Seoul, S. Korea, the First Progressive Dance Festival in Prague,  the Theater for the Young Spectator in Ekaterinburg, Russia, and at over 25 theaters around the U.S. It was also on the performance roster of the Lincoln Center Institute from 2000-2002 and has been on the roster of sister educational institutes in Albany, Rochester and Utica, NY.

Since 2002, he has been a guest choreographer at The Wooden Floor, an after-school organization in Santa Ana, CA that has promised hope and opportunity to nearly 400 low-income youth annually. He has created four new works there, from Los Angelitos, a 20-minute work for 25 dancers to What Is Too Strong For Breaking, a 30-minute work for over 80 dancers.

Mark was Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle (2002-2008), Visiting Associate Professor at Reed College, and has been on the faculties of the American Dance Festival and NYU-Tisch School of the Arts He has also guest-taught at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Ohio University, University of Illinois, the New World School of the Arts, Hollins University, Cornell University, the Rotterdamse Dansacademie, Dance Space and Peridance in New York City, and has been guest-teacher at schools and companies in Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Holland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Poland, Russia, and Japan.

He is a recipient of a 1987 NYFA Choreographers Fellowship, a 1988 and 1996 NEA Choreographers  Fellowship and grants from the NPN Suitcase Fund, ArtsLink, Inc., the Harkness Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and The Seattle Office for Arts and Cultural Affairs. He was awarded the Scripps/ADF Humphrey-Weidman-Limon Fellowship for Choreography. Mark is a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

*Photo by Spencer Baker