Holly Bass, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jennifer Harge, Ursula Payne, Crystal Michelle Perkins, and Vershawn Sanders-Ward

Holly Bass is a multidisciplinary performance artist and educator who—whether creating a durational solo performance, a community-led dance, or a devised theater piece—is always working to "make the revolution irresistible," to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambara. Her work explores the effects of gender, class, and race in American culture. Her visual artwork includes photography, installation, video, and performance. A Cave Canem Fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies. She was a 2020–22 Live Feed resident artist at New York Live Arts and a 2021–22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. She studied modern dance (under Viola Farber) and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning her master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has been presented at the National Portrait Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel Miami, and the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of Simone Leigh's Loophole of Retreat: Venice. She is currently the National Director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program that uses the arts strategically to transform historically under-resourced public elementary schools.

Marjani Forté-Saunders envisions her work as vibrating on the same frequency of love. She finds love to be a tangible and transformative thing, especially via performance art. A 2023 United States Artists Fellow, she recently celebrated her debut as choreographer for the New York Metropolitan Opera production of El Niño. Forté-Saunders is a three-time Bessie Award–winning choreographer, performer, teaching artist, and mother. She is an awardee of the prestigious Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award (2020) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2020). She has received multiple fellowships in dance, including the Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2017), the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2018), and the Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists (2019). Forté-Saunders is a founding member of the collective 7NMS|Art x Power, alongside composer/sound designer Everett Saunders. 7NMS received the New Music USA Award (2021), the MAP Fund (2020) and the National Dance Project Production grant to tour their latest work, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist.

Jennifer Harge is an artist and educator based in Detroit, Michigan, whose work is rooted in the legacies and futures of Black spiritual traditions and experimental performance. Using movement as an organizing principle, she spills across choreography, installation, film, and language—collapsing form and gifting herself the freedom to play, wander, and be with multiplicity. Her creative research conjures and theorizes Black pleasures and longings through intimate collaborations with her ancestral lineages and direct arts community. She is currently developing a composition book drawing from choreographic strategies she’s crafted and been gifted over the last decade as an independent artist in Detroit. She is the 2024–25 inaugural Salt Roads Artist Fellow in the Department of Black Study at University of California-Riverside, a Modern Ancient Brown Foundation Visiting Fellow, and a Bogliasco Fellow. She was the 2023 Alma Hawkins Visiting Memorial Chair in Dance at UCLA and a visiting scholar at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Commissioned to present work at the Saint Louis Black Repertory Company, Wexner Center for Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Cranbrook Museum of Art.

Ursula Payne’s work is deeply introspective and collaborative, weaving together historical influences and contemporary insights to create performances that challenge, enlighten, and inspire viewers. Based in New Castle, Pennsylvania, her career was notably shaped by her time as Dr. Pearl Primus’s personal assistant at the American Dance Festival in 1991 and as a graduate student at Ohio State University. Associate Provost of Academic Administration and Professor of Dance at Slippery Rock University, Payne's work is noted for its deep choreographic engagements with personal experiences and historical and contemporary social issues. Described by dance critics as a spectacular dancer who offers intriguing, rigorous, and powerful performances, Payne’s contributions to dance are marked by numerous choreographic commissions. Part of the Rainbow Serpent Collective, a team of diverse artist, scientist, traditional African cosmologists, scholars, and innovators, Payne was commissioned by the acclaimed Nigerian American multimedia artist and engineer Mikael Owunna and traditional African cosmologist scholar Marques Redd to provide movement direction for the 2021 Rainbow Serpent 30-minute experimental dance film, Obi Mbu (The Primordial House) and for the Myth-Science of the Gatekeepers exhibition at the Pittsburgh Glass Center in May 2024. A recipient of four choreography fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Payne holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and Certified Movement Analyst certification from LIMS based in NYC and is a PhD candidate at Texas Woman's University.

Crystal Michelle Perkins’s works explore identity through African American movement dialects and Black feminist practices in contemporary dance. She is a choreographer and performer from Augusta, Georgia, who lives and creates in Ohio. Perkins is a Princess Grace Choreography Honoraria recipient, Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award winner, and a Ballet Memphis New American Dance Residency awardee. Her choreographic research interests include the transmission and preservation of Black voices in dance, the African diaspora in the American south, Black female identity, and autoethnographic performance. Perkins’s work has been seen on stages in Kazakhstan, Russia, Brazil, and across the United States. Recent commissions include Ballet Memphis, South Chicago Dance Theatre, Dublin Arts Council, and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC). Perkins continues her choreographic work as an associate professor of dance at The Ohio State University and as a resident choreographer and thought partner at DCDC. She holds an MFA in dance from Ohio State and a BFA in dance performance from Southern Methodist University.

Vershawn Sanders-Ward explores the transformative power of returning dance to its roots as a shared communal experience rather than a mere performative act. She is not just a director, choreographer, and educator, she is an artivist—a visionary force reshaping the landscape of contemporary dance while driving social change. As the founding artistic director and CEO of Red Clay Dance Company, Sanders-Ward blends elements of African diasporic dance forms with modern techniques, crafting performances that are both visually stunning and intellectually stimulating. Through Red Clay Dance Company, she provides a platform for artists of diverse backgrounds to explore issues of identity, race, and social justice through dance. She received the inaugural Walder Foundation Platform Award, as well as a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists, Dance/USA Leadership Fellowship, Chicago Dancemakers Forum Award. She serves on the board of trustees for Dance/USA, is vice president of the board of directors for the Black Arts & Culture Alliance of Chicago, and is a faculty member at Loyola University of Chicago. Recipient of residencies and commissions at Uganda National Cultural Center, Ecole des Sables, New York University, Columbia College Chicago, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Chicago, The Ohio State University, and Knox College. She is a community impact fellow for the Harvard Business School Club of Chicago and a member of the inaugural Obama Foundation Summit for Emerging Global Leaders. She holds an MFA in dance from New York University and a BFA in dance from Columbia College Chicago.