BEBE MILLER

Bebe Miller’s vision of dance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. She formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985 to pursue her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition. Since then, she has created more than 50 dance works for BMC that have been performed worldwide. BMC has been presented by leading venues including 651 ARTS, BAM Next Wave, DTW, Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, Walker Art Center and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her choreography has been performed by A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Repertory Dance Theater, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company, PACT Dance Company of Johannesburg, South Africa, and others. BMC’s archival projects, aimed to share its creative practice, include two ebooks: Dance Fort: A History and How Dancing is Built: The Making of In A Rhythm. Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center, Bebe is an inaugural Doris Duke Artist Award recipient and is a Gala honoree of Danspace Project and Movement Research. She has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, New York Live Arts’ David R. White Award, and honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College. Bebe is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance and lives on Vashon Island, WA.

KAYLA FARRISH

Kayla Farrish is a Black American Director merging dance-theater, filmmaking, narrative, and sound score. She captures ranging identity, the mythical dualities of history and present survival, and powerful dreaming lending to liberation.

Her commissions include Limon Dance Company, Whim’ Whim, Ririe Woodbury, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Danspace, Little Island, Harlem Stage and beyond. Some works formed: Black Bodies Sonata, The New Frontier: My dear America, Sunny Side/Inside the Laughing Barrel, December 8th, Martyr’s Fiction, and others. She creates live works, films, site-specific/immersive, and collaborations. She recently shared Choir (Carrie Mae Weems Exhibition), To Dream A Lifetime (BlackLight), Roster with Melanie Charles, MIXTAPES with Alex MacKinnon and site-specific Broken Record (Little Island) with Brandon Coleman, and Rinsing and Harbor films. Presenting spaces include Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, Symphony Space, and National Sawdust, among receiving support from Watermill Center for the Arts, Armstrong Now, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Baryshnikov Arts Center, La Mama Experimental Theater, and others.

She received the Sundance Uprise Grant for Emerging BIPOC Directors, Bessie Awards for NYLA’s Motherboard Suite and December 8th-Gibney, NY Times Top 2021 Dance Performances- Roster and Breakout Star. She is a recipient of the Harkness Promise Award for 2022. During 2022, she was a Rehearsal Director for Punchdrunk Sleep No More, and adjunct faculty for NYU Tisch Dance. She’s worked with many university programs and workshops. She has been commissioned to create a reimagined archival work for Limon Dance Company, and to collaborate with musician Trixie Whitley, for her new music tour. Put Away the Fire, dear, her most recent work is a touring group narrative piece of radical imagination and liberation, supported by NEFA NDP Touring Dance Production Grant. She is also the 2023 recipient of Watermill Center Nina Von Maltzahn Fellowship and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Contemporary Dance Award. She is a 2025 CUNY Dance Initiative Artist, NYFA/NYSCA Choreography Fellow, and 2026 NY Support for Artists Grantee. And she is working with Kaneza Schaal as a choreographer for the productions of Omar at Chicago Lyric Opera and AIDA at Houston Grand Opera.

AMY O’NEAL

Amy O’Neal (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator based in Seattle. A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography, she has created and toured nine critically acclaimed evening-length works nationally and internationally and countless shorter works for concert dance, dance films, and experimental performance. From 2000 to 2010, O’Neal co-directed locust, a dance/music/video performance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she creates dance experiences merging practices and values of hip hop and house dance culture, contemporary dance, and experimental performance. She was on faculty at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in Los Angeles from 2018-2025 and has been in relationship with Velocity Dance Center since 1996. She is the Executive/Artistic director of Hybrid Dance Lab, an organization that supports experimental theater performance work of street dance artists who merge different dance forms, while nurturing cultural literacy.

CAMEO LETHEM

Cameo is a dance artist based in Seattle. Her work has been shown at Lee Center for the Arts, On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, Erickson Theater, 12th Ave Arts, Kirkland Performance Center, Base: Experimental Arts + Space, Electric Lodge, and more. She has performed works by Alice Gosti, Annie Franklin, Bebe Miller, Beth Twigs, Chartreuse Coleman, Doug Varone, Kate Wallich, Robert Moses, and others. Her mentors from Ellenore Scott’s The Breaking Glass Project were Nia-Amina Minor and Sidra Bell. Cameo is a recipient of SeattleDances’ DanceCrush award. She is currently on faculty at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University.

JEN SALK

Jennifer Salk is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher. She is a professor at the University of Washington where she has been teaching, among many other subjects, dance-making for undergraduates and graduate students since 2002. Jennifer has taught master classes in contemporary dance and choreography, and choreographed for companies and schools around the country, as well as in Istanbul, Turkey, Asuncion, Paraguay. She was on faculty at the Staibdance Summer Dance Intensive in Sorrento, Italy for seven years where she taught contemporary technique, dance making, experiential anatomy, and site responsive dance making. She has taught at American Dance Festival and Florida Dance Festival. She was a frequent guest teacher at the National High School Dance Festival for many years.

Jennifer is currently working improvisationally with percussionist Bonnie Whiting. Jennifer collaborates often with digital artists. Her collaboration with media artist Martin Jarmick, composer Paul Moore, and dance artists Natalie Fernandi, Imana Gunawan, Sean O’Bryan, and Majinn O’Neal, anfractuous, exhibited most recently in Brisbane, Australia at The Cube, as part of the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA). She had the good fortune to perform in Mark Haim’s This Land is Your Land, in Paris at the ArtDanThe Festival, American Dance Festival, the Joyce Theater in NYC, and On the Boards. She has presented her research in Experiential Anatomy in Dance Technique, and Embodied Writing Practices (with her collaborator Stephanie Liapis) at national and international conferences, most recently at the Dance Studies Conference in Los Angeles, in 2026.

Jennifer is a Fulbright Specialist, and has been the recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, a Donald R. Petersen Endowed Fellowship and Professorship, a Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair in the Arts, and Mellon Foundation Faculty Fellowship, at the UW. Jennifer received her MFA from Ohio State University and her BFA from the University of Utah. She spent seven years in NYC touring and dancing with various choreographers including David Dorfman and Chris Burnside, and was also the artistic director of her own company. Salk was an assistant professor in the dance department at the University of South Florida prior to coming to the UW in 2002.