New Dialect

dancer, choreographer

Banning is a Nashville native who received her BFA from Juilliard.

She has worked as a dancer with Aszure Barton, Cullberg Ballet, Hubbard Street, Lar Lubovitch, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Alexander Ekman, Jacquelyn Buglisi, Wen Wei Wang, Robert Battle, Camille A. Brown, and others.

As a choreographer, she has been commissioned to create new works for Visceral Dance Chicago, Springboard Danse Montréal, Northwest Dance Project, Whim W'Him , SALT Contemporary Dance Company, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing & Visual Arts, Groundworks Dance Theater, the Fine Arts Center, Perry Mansfield, the Juilliard School, and Gibney Company.

She is the founder of New Dialect, where she also serves as resident choreographer and artistic director.

Mikael has performed as a soloist throughout the Americas, Europe, Russia and the Caribbean.

He also works as a symphonic conductor, DJ and is a founding member of the Warp Trio.

dancer, choreographer

Julia is a graduate of The Juilliard School.

Her work O'de—a collaboration with Los Angeles Dance Project and Lil Buck—premiered at the Palace of Versailles.

She has danced with Camille A. Brown & Dancers and Aszure Barton & Artists and was a founding member of Los Angeles Dance Project.

Eichten premiered It’s my House and I Live Here, with concept and direction by Frances Chiaverini, at TOR Art Space in Frankfurt in collaboration with Whistle While You Work, an organization that promotes conversation around harassment, discrimination, and violence towards women and marginalized groups, particularly while at work in the arts.

She has worked as the associate choreographer for Solange and Gerard & Kelly’s bridge-s at The Getty Museum.

She choreographed and performed in CAGE with pianist Conor Hanick at the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, MA), and made her co-directorial debut in Through Movement with Ensemble Connect at Carnegie Hall.

In March 2020, She performed with Alex Da Corte (choreography by KWW) in a reimagining of Allan Kaprow’s Chicken.

Eichten premiered her film The Body Inside Me as a part of Solid Air's first online festival, and has taught at CalArts, BeMoving, and Pieter Performance Space.

dancer, choreographer

Vinson Fraley hails from Atlanta, Georgia. He attended School of the Arts with a focus in vocal music and drama and began his formal dance training at DanceMakers of Atlanta under the direction of Denise and Lynise Heard.

Vinson was a member of A.I.M (Abraham.in.Motion) from 2015 until joining the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in 2017.

He most recently had the chance to present his own work in France and Germany.

dancer, choreographer

Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1984, Jonathan Fredrickson received a BFA for choreography and dance performance from the California Institute of the Arts.

Jonathan danced with the Limon Dance Company from 2006-2011, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago from 2011-2015, creating works on both companies.

His work has been shown in festivals such as Hong Kong Dance Festival, Reverb Dance Festival, and White Wave, and he has created for programs like California Institute of the Arts, CalState Fullerton, Limon Institute, and Sundance/Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre.

He joined the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in 2015, where he has been performing her work internationally, and creating for the company’s choreographic platform UNDERGROUND.

violinist, writer, musicologist

Keir is a core member of AMOC, and he also co-composes, improvises, and performs music with bassist Kyle Motl as part of their duo, Treesearch.

He has soloed with groups including the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Chinese National Symphony, the Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, the Bowdoin International Music Festival Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Manhattan School of Music Chamber Sinfonia, and the La Jolla Symphony. He works closely with composers Matthew Aucoin, Celeste Oram, and Carolyn Chen, choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, bassist Mark Dresser (as part of the Dresser Quintet/Septet), taonga puoro musician Rob Thorne, and percussionist/conductor Steven Schick.

He studied literature at Harvard University, where he was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts, and is a PhD candidate in Music at UC San Diego. His research looks at performance pedagogies engaging histories of science, aesthetics, and phenomenology.

He teaches a hybrid seminar/performance workshop, "Histories and Philosophies of Performance," which draws from his research and practice.

cellist

Hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for his “flawless technique and keen musicality,” cellist Coleman Itzkoff enjoys a diverse career as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator. A prize winner at the 2019 Houston Symphony’s Ima Hogg Competition, Itzkoff made his professional debut at the age of 15 with Ohio’s Dayton Philharmonic and has since appeared as soloist with orchestras and in chamber music series countrywide.

Recent season highlights include performances with the Houston Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, American Youth Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, Mason Home Concerts, The Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Caramoor, Texas’s Sarafim Music, and Virginia’s Moss Art Center.

dancer, choreographer

Jesse is a New York City based performer and movement director.

He's worked all over the world performing and devising with choreographers such as Hofesh Shechter, Alexander Ekman, Sidi Larbi Cherkoui, Russell Maliphant, Arthur Pita, Bobbi Jene Smith, Ryan Heffington, Punchdrunk, Sonya Tayeh, and Celia Rowlson-Hall.

He has choreographed music videos for Fischerspooner and Hilton Dresdon and was an associate choreographer on the award winning Broadway shows 'The Bands Visit' and 'Sing Street".

dancer, choreographer

Yiannis is based in New York.

Some of their previous and ongoing collaborations include works with Punchdrunk International, Crystal Pite and the Kidd Pivot team, Bobbi Jene Smith, American Modern Opera Company, Yang Zhen, Boaz Yakin, Elton John.

They also work alongside Elia Mrak and Hannah Wendel with Warrior Poets, a collective that creates, produces and presents live works in unusual venues whose mission is to connect people in through performances, parties and workshops.

dancer, choreographer

Or Schraiber studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. In 2010, Schraiber joined the Batsheva Dance Company, in which he danced for seven years. In parallel to his time in the company, he served at the IDF for three years. In 2017, Schraiber moved to New York City to study acting at the Stella Adler Studio. In 2019, he starred in and co-choreographed Boaz Yakin’s feature film “Aviva.” Later that year, he starred as Thaddeus and choreographed scenes in Terrence Malick’s The Way of the Wind and appeared in the national Broadway tour of The Band’s Visit.

In 2020, he created five short dance films commissioned by the Corpus Dance Company in collaboration with Bobbi Jene Smith. Later that year, he collaborated with Smith once more to create Solo at Dusk, commissioned by the Los Angeles Dance Project. Throughout the years, Schraiber’s choreography and movement direction have been seen in videos by Wim Wenders, Asaf Avidan, Netta Barzilai, The Antlers, Yemen Blues, and more. He has directed, choreographed, and appeared in several award-winning short films that were presented by film festivals all over the world.

dancer, choreographer

Bobbi Jene Smith is an alumnus of The Juilliard School, North Carolina School of the Arts, and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. Her choreography has been presented by The Batsheva Dance Company, CORPUS of The Royal Danish Ballet, LADP, VAIL Dance Festival, LaMama Experimental Theater, and The Martha Graham Dance Company. In 2019 she was awarded The Harkness Promise Award and was The Martha Duffy Resident Artist at Baryshnikov Art Center.

Smith’s film and video work include “Annihilation,” directed by Alex Garland starring Natalie Portman; “MA,” directed by Celia Rowlson-Hall; and “Yossi,” directed by Eytan Fox. The documentary "Bobbi Jene," which follows Smith’s trajectory of leaving a dance company to create her own work, swept the Tribeca Film Festival, winning Best Documentary, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing in 2017. In 2018, Bobbi starred in and choreographed the feature films “Mari,” directed by Georgia Parris and choreographed by Maxine Doyle, which premiered at BFI; and “Aviva,” directed by Boaz Yakin, which was a SXSW selection.

Smith has been a certified GAGA teacher for the past 15 years and has taught Ohad Naharin's repertory in schools and universities around the world. She is part-time faculty at The Juilliard School, and is on guest faculty at NYU and UArts.

actress

Mouna Soualem is known for her work in the films Munich, Aviva, You Deserve a Lover and The Night of the 12th.

Bobbi Jene Smith is a director, choreographer and dancer who makes work for both live theater and film. Her work explores affect and apathy, domestic politics, and the rhythmic and formal connections between music and movement. She danced for the Batsheva Company from 2005-2014. Since then she has choreographed original work for the Martha Graham Dance Company, Los Angeles Dance Project, VAIL Dance Festival, CORPUS of The Royal Danish Ballet, the Batsheva Dance Company, and others. Her dance and music theater works have been presented and supported by the American Repertory Theater, PS 122, La Mama, ODC Theater, Stanford Live, Carolina Performing Arts, Kaufman Hall at the 92nd st Y, Luminato Festival, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and others. Additionally, she has starred in or choreographed films including Elvira Lind’s “Bobbi Jene,” Georgia Parris’s “Mari,” and Alex Garland’s “Annihilation.” She has directed her own dance films including “Broken Theater” and “Gallop Apace.”

Smith is an alumnus of the Juilliard School, North Carolina School of the Arts, and Royal Winnipeg School. She is a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC). In 2019 she was awarded The Harkness Promise Award and was The Martha Duffy Resident Artist at Baryshnikov Art Center. Smith is currently an Artist In Residence at LADP.

The mission of AMOC, founded in 2017 by Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur, is to build and share a body of collaborative work. As a group of dancers, singers, musicians, writers, directors, composers, choreographers, and producers united by a core set of values, AMOC artists pool their resources to create new pathways that connect creators and audiences in surprising and visceral ways.

Current and past projects include:

• The No One’s Rose, a devised music-theater-dance piece featuring new music by Matthew Aucoin, directed by Zack Winokur with choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith
  

• EASTMAN, a multi-dimensional performance piece contending with the life and work of Julius Eastman
  

• Winokur’s production of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón, which has been performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Repertory Theater
  

• A new arrangement of John Adams’s El Niño, premiered at The Met Cloisters as part of Julia Bullock’s season-long residency at the Met Museum
  

• Davóne Tines’s and Winokur’s Were You There, a meditation on black lives lost in recent years to police violence
  

• Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt’s dance/music works With Care and A Study on Effort, which have been produced at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and elsewhere
  

Conor Hanick’s performance of CAGE, Zack Winokur’s production of John Cage’s music for prepared piano, was cited as the best recital of the year by The New York Times in 2018 and The Boston Globe in 2019.

Additionally, AMOC served as the Ojai Music Festival’s 2022 Music Director, only the second ensemble, and first explicitly interdisciplinary company, to hold the position in the festival’s 75-year history.

In 2017, the year the company was founded, AMOC also created the Run AMOC! Festival at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA; the company has curated and performed that festival annually for the past three years. The company’s past engagements also include performances at the Big Ears Festival, the Caramoor Festival, National Sawdust, The Clark Art Institute, and the San Diego Symphony. The company has also been in residence at the Park Avenue Armory and Harvard University.

runningamoc.org

Carolina Performing Arts is located on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The mission of Carolina Performing Arts is to spark curiosity, inspiring all members of our community to discover and more fully engage with the world.

We collaborate with dynamic and compelling artists from across the globe to create novel, mission-driven performing arts experiences in partnership with our community. We also open our venues to others to explore, create, and celebrate their own work.

carolinaperformingarts.org

La Mama is an Off-Off-Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer Ellen Stewart.

Located in Manhattan's East Village, the theatre began in the basement boutique where Stewart sold her fashion designs. Stewart turned the space into a theatre at night, focusing on the work of young playwrights. over its fifty year history it has evolved has evolved into a world-renowned cultural institution.

lamama.org

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts.

It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States.

Built by the Arnold Print Works, which operated on the site from 1860 to 1942, the complex was used by the Sprague Electric company before its conversion. MASS MoCA originally opened with 19 galleries and 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of exhibition space in 1999. It has expanded since, including the 2008 expansion of Building 7 and the May 2017 addition of roughly 130,000 square feet when Building 6 was opened.

In addition to housing galleries and performing arts spaces, it also rents space to commercial tenants.[3] It is the home of the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create new music. The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival.

MASS MoCA, along with the Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), forms a trio of significant art museums in the northern Berkshires.

massmoca.org

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969 merger of the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation. These foundations had been set up separately by Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon, the children of Andrew Mellon.

The foundation is housed in New York City in the expanded former offices of the Bollingen Foundation, another educational philanthropy once supported by Paul Mellon. Poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander is the foundation's current president. Her predecessors have included Earl Lewis, Don Randel, William G. Bowen, John Edward Sawyer and Nathan Pusey.

In 2004, the foundation was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

mellon.org

Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, South Arts is a nonprofit regional arts organization empowering artists, organizations, and communities, and increasing access to arts and culture.

In partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the State Arts Agencies of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee — with additional funding from other public and private donors such as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — South Arts supports artists and organizations through a rich and responsive portfolio of grants, fellowships, and programs.

southarts.org

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence.[2] It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government by an act of the U.S. Congress, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 29, 1965 (20 U.S.C. 951).

The foundation consists of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The NEA has its offices in Washington, D.C. It was awarded Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 1995, as well as the Special Tony Award in 2016.

In 1985, the NEA won an honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its work with the American Film Institute in the identification, acquisition, restoration and preservation of historic films.[5] In 2016 and again in 2017, the National Endowment for the Arts received Emmy nominations from the Television Academy in the Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series category.

arts.gov

The Ozgener family established OZ Arts Nashville in 2013 as a gift back to the city and country that have been so hospitable to them as first-generation, Turkish-Armenian immigrants.

Nashville residents since 1968, the Ozgener family are internationally recognized for innovation in their entrepreneurial endeavors, having built one of the world’s foremost cigar companies, CAO Cigars.

After selling the company, the family converted their former headquarters into a nonprofit cultural center for contemporary art, performances, and events.