The opening session pairs Nejla Yatkin’s embodied workshop drawing upon patterns in nature and Middle Eastern dance traditions to explore contemporary movement creation alongside Michael Landez’s research into the rehearsal process as a re-viving technology that suggests any dance can be contemporary, including the restaging of historical ballets.

What is Contemporary Dance, and How Might It Guide Us Back to Nature? | Nejla Yatkin – embodied workshop

Rehearsing the contemporary: from history to now and back again | Michael Landez (Northwestern University) – paper presentation

Described by The New York Times as "a magician, telling tales and creating worlds" and "a fierce and supple performer," and a Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch, Chicago-based choreographer Nejla Yatkin travels around the globe inspiring empathic connection between people and their environments. She is the recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants and awards from the Princess Grace Foundation, the Jay Pritzker Foundation, the Turkish Cultural Foundation, the National Performance Network, 3Arts, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, the Illinois Arts Council and most recent 2023 National Dance Project Award among others.

Michael Landez is an artist, dance maker, educator, and scholar working to blur the line between practice, theory, education, and the pursuit of social justice. Originally from San Antonio, TX, he holds a BS in Biology from Texas A&M -San Antonio, an MFA in Dance from the University of Iowa with a performance emphasis, and an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University where he is currently a PhD Candidate. He holds multiple movement certifications including all levels of the American Ballet Theatre National Training Curriculum, Progressing Ballet Technique, and a 200-HR Yoga Teacher Certificate (RYT).

This session explores contemporary modes of embodied research. Timothy Tsang’s participatory approach invites movers of all backgrounds to explore waves, circles, and spirals as both technical pathways and cultural metaphors through his porous, transnational practice shaped by cultural lineage, adaptation, and exchange. At the intersection of lens media and performance, bree gant shares their inquiries and methodology rooted in American Modern Dance pioneer Katherine Dunham technique and pedagogy, to articulate how filmmaking is a uniquely suited methodology for researching embodied knowledge.

Spirals of Cultural Mobility: Contemporary Dance as Cultural Exchange | Timothy Tsang (University of Michigan) – embodied workshop

Negotiation: Theorizing Embodied Knowledge Through a Black Feminist Lens | bree gant – screening and discussion

Timothy Tsang is a queer Chinese American dance artist whose work bridges movement, cultural memory, and embodied research. Raised between Shanghai and Chicago, he approaches contemporary dance as a structure that holds multiple timelines, intersecting identities, and global circulations. Currently pursuing his MFA in Dance at the University of Michigan, Tsang is a recipient of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies Fellowship and Rackham International Research Award. His current research investigates the legacy of Leslie Cheung and the aesthetics of queer Chinese cinema. Through choreography, research, and pedagogy, Tsang investigates how contemporary dance can serve as a site of cultural consciousness and embodied simultaneity.

bree gant is an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. They work across disciplines, rooted in ritual and intimacy and Black feminist performance. bree received a BA in Film from Howard University and an MFA in Art, Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. They spend a significant amount of time binging science fiction and fantasy, waiting for the bus, and elbow-leaning in windows.

Giulia Cristofoli presents her research on how a mentality of accessibility and creative access opens new doors to think of choreography differently through the concept of “crip time.” Asdescribed by scholar Ellen Samuels, crip time “requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world” from “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017).

Contemporary dance aesthetics within crip time framework: a dramaturge’s perspective | Giulia Cristofoli – paper presentation

Giulia Cristofoli holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Theatre, Dance, and Dramaturgy from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Arts, Culture, and Media from the University of Groningen. Her interest in contemporary dance began with amateur practice and gradually developed into a professional career as a dance dramaturge. Her focus on accessible practices emerged during her work as a producer, where she began to question how her own able-bodied biases might influence production decisions. This led her to engage in various accessibility-related projects, including curating and organizing a symposium on relaxed performances and developing a workshop on reimagining the role of language in an inclusive dance studio. In addition to her research on contemporary dance and disability, she writes performance reviews and explores decolonial frameworks and archiving practices in performance studies.

Note: Session 4 and Session 5 are concurrent.

Interdisciplinary artists Maya Odim and Jasmine Hearn’s paired session combines writing with dancing and connecting sensorial experience to memory and imagination. For Odim, dance is a language and the body is the context. For Hearn, dance is a map of the people, places, recipes, and patterns that her multi-year project references.

Body Language | Maya Odim - workshop

Memory Fleet: All of them | Jasmine Hearn – lecture/demonstration

Maya Odim is rooted where writing and dance meet, anchoring an artistic approach in the space of overlap where arranging lines in a stanza becomes like arranging phrases of movement, and vice versa. What I make, and do, explores how words move and what bodies they are a part of. My practice is rooted in recitation, writing, and movement. In community with others and alone I find space for these/this. Words are bodies too: with speed, and levels, and shape and size, (making images), and how language is communicated with the body. A turn and a turn of phrase mean the same thing but in different forms. I explore rhythms, patterns and qualities of speech through both the written word and a choreographic praxis.

Jasmine Hearn, born and raised on occupied Akokisa lands (Houston, TX), is an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, doula, performer, and organizer. Jasmine, recently named one of Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch (2025), is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2023), Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize in Design with collaborator Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency (2023), a Creative Capital Award (2022) for current project, Memory Fleet, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019), NY Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for Outstanding Performer (2021, 2017* with the skeleton architecture).

Note: Session 5 is concurrent with Session 4.

This session centers dance and movement experiences that are rooted in one’s own unique environment. Elizabeth Shea’s approach readies the bodymind to receive information, awaken feeling and kinetic empathy, to explore the wide range of movement possibilities available to 21st Century movers. Maggie Bridger and Deborah Goodman’s research on 20th Century American Modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, reframes Humphrey’s experiences of pain as essential to the development of her technique.

Centering Lived Experiences: A Somatic Approach to Contemporary Dance and Movement Practice | Elizabeth Shea (University of Indiana) – embodied workshop

Recovering Doris Humphrey: Disability as Method in Dance History & Technique | Maggie Bridger (University of Illinois-Chicago) + Deborah Goodman (Loyola University) – paper presentation

Reviewed as “a remarkable contemporary dance display,” Elizabeth Shea’s choreography has been produced by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and presented at numerous festivals and major cities across the USA, as well as in Australia, Israel, and China. Liz also creates extensively in new media and film, screening her award-winning work at film festivals internationally. Liz specializes in somatic theory and practice, teaching her self-developed system, SomaLab®, a framework for inclusive movement practice, yogic practices, and choreographic methods at workshops in the USA and abroad. Liz is the author of Dynamic Bodies: A Framework for Somatic Engagement in Dance and Movement. A 500-hour Registered Yoga Teacher, Liz is Professor and Director of Contemporary Dance at Indiana University, where she teaches dance practices, dance-making, repertory, somatics, and yoga for dancers.

Maggie Bridger is a sick and disabled dance artist, fiber artist, access worker, and scholar interested in reimagining pain through the creative process. She is a PhD Candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and Membership and Conference Manager at the Dance Studies Association. Maggie is a 2022 & 2025 City of Chicago Individual Artist Program grantee. She is a co-founder, along with collaborator Sydney Erlikh, of the community-run Inclusive Dance Workshop Series and a founding member of Unfolding Disability Futures, a local collective of disabled performing artists. Her writing has been published in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Le Sociographe, The HowlRound, and the Journal of Cultural and Literary Disability Studies.

Deborah Goodman is a Lecturer in Dance at Loyola University Chicago. Her expertise in American modern dance features extensive experience performing and teaching Humphrey/Weidman technique and repertory. Deborah performed in the reconstruction of Martha Graham’s Panorama, and took part in the reconstruction of Ms. Graham’s original work, Prelude to Action from Sketches from Chronicle. Deborah has served on the dance faculty of the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, New York University, Long Island University, The Connecticut Conservatory of the Performing Arts and Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts in New York. Deborah has been teaching inclusive dance classes for over ten years and is the Founder of the Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival. She is a certified Gyrokinesis instructor.

Dr. Ayo Walker’s paper delves into common misconceptions about contemporary dance styles that loosely imitate street dance and the mindful necessity of properly crediting contemporary dance. Oftentimes acting as a “catch all” category, contemporary dance assumes ownership of any/all styles of dance rather than as an approach to making something new by repurposing what already exists. Marquita De Jesus investigates how movement practices outside of codified technique function as vital spaces of resistance, cultural transmission, and choreographic innovation within contemporary dance. Her embodied inquiry invites us to reconsider contemporary dance not as a fixed genre, but as an evolving space where difference, vulnerability, and disruption can generate new movement languages and possibilities for the future.

Understanding the Misinterpretation of Contemporary Dance Styles as Street Dance | Dr. Ayo Walker (Columbia College Chicago + Rennie Harris University) – paper presentation

Non-Technical Movement Vocabularies, Innovation, and Embodied Resistance | Marquita De Jesus (University of Texas at Dallas) – embodied workshop

Dr. Ayo Walker is a Performance Studies Practitioner, Choreographer, Dance and African American Studies Educator currently on faculty at Columbia College Chicago and Rennie Harris University. She positions her work in the field of Dance Studies within three specific interdisciplinary and generative frameworks: Research-to-Performance; Practice-Based; and Practice-Led. Her project-based dance company Ayo & Company has been commissioned by PUSHfest, Sacramento/Black Art of Dance, Rhythmically Speaking Dance, and Modern American Dance Company. “P-I-E-C-E-S” premiered at the 2023 Southeast American College Dance Association Conference 50th Anniversary Festival and was invited to perform at both the GALA and National concerts. Adjudicators Maura Keefe, Daniel Gwirtzman and Juel Lane described the strength of this work as an “unexpected crisscrossing of movement cultures-in conversation with a powerful rhythmic score that keeps revealing new dimensions of movement possibilities.”

Marquita De Jesus is a full-time PhD candidate and teaching associate at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research focuses on dance as a form of embodied activism within marginalized communities, exploring how movement practices function as tools for resistance, resilience, and social change. De Jesus is the author of Dance and Embodied Practice (2024) and is writing a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Dance and Disability (Oxford University Press). De Jesus is the Founder and Artistic Director of Fusion Performance Company, a non profit dance organization established in 2010 and based in Dallas, TX.

The closing session examines evolving and emerging dance ecosystems. Kate Mattingly shares her research on the 20th Century interdependencies of universities and modern and postmodern dance companies and how might the term “contemporary” in university settings today signal a desire to move toward nuanced approaches to dance as a site of knowledge production? Reflecting how many artists choose to work today by creating space to connect across disciplines, share lived experiences, and imagine new possibilities together in real-time, dance artists Marie Casimir and Cristal Sabbagh, in collaboration with musician Joyce Lindsey, invite participants into the embodied, improvisational practices that have fueled their work curating and sustaining community-centered platforms for contemporary improvisation, including the Instigation Festival (Chicago/New Orleans) and Freedom From and Freedom To (Chicago).

Why labels matter: Interdependencies of universities and dance companies | Kate Mattingly (Old Dominion University)

Improvising Community: Building Ecosystems for Contemporary, Multidisciplinary Collaboration | Marie Casimir + Cristal Sabbagh + Joyce Lindsey – embodied workshop and lecture/demonstration

Kate Mattingly is an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts. Her undergraduate degree is from Princeton University, her MFA degree in Dance is from NYU, and her doctoral degree in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media is from University of California, Berkeley. Her monograph, Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity, won the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, awarded by the American Society for Aesthetics. Mattingly analyzes how writing by critics has influenced artists’ careers while also contributing to a racialized dance canon and whitewashed history courses. Her anthology, Antiracism in Ballet Teaching, provides equitable and intentionally inclusive teaching and leadership practices. Since 2023 she has been the executive editor of the academic journal Dance Chronicle.

Marie Casimir is a Haitian-American artist, producer, curator, and educator whose work moves at the crossroads of performance, moving image, improvisation, and community ritual. Rooted in Black diasporic heritage, her practice carries cultural memory, collaboration, and imagination as guiding forces. Through dance films, shared meals, public conversations, and projects like Notes on Survival and the Instigation Festival, she builds spaces for connection and transformation. Her work has appeared at Oklahoma Contemporary, Links Hall, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and the Austin Dance Festival, earning honors including a Ragdale Artist Fellowship and a Regional Emmy nomination. Casimir is founder of Djaspora Productions, cultivating global exchanges for artists of color, and co-founder of the Instigation Festival, uniting improvised music and dance in Chicago and New Orleans. She also serves as Producing Partner for Black Arts Retreat and Juneteenth on the East (OKC).

Cristal Sabbagh’s interdisciplinary practice includes traditional portraiture, ceramics, and performance. Movement is the spine of her work, with intentional spontaneity, reverence, and bliss woven throughout. Rooted in improvisation and Butoh, her performance practice walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. By embodying transformational memories while celebrating pop culture and the experimental, she challenges power structures and awakens the senses. Working solo and with collaborators, she is attuned to both individual perspectives and collective structures. Live improvised music has become vital to her practice, inspiring her most resonant work. She is currently curating and performing in Freedom From and Freedom To, an ensemble of dancers and musicians diverse in approach, instrumentation, and background. Sabbagh is a 2021 3Arts / Make a Wave Artist and 2023 DCASE Individual Artist Program grantee, and in 2025 was named to New City’s “Top 50 Players” in dance.