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Image description: The headshot of Peter Rockford Espiritu is of a mature and handsome native Hawaiian male with black hair neatly combed back. He has brown eyes, a thin black mustache and goatee under his chin. He is wearing a traditional long sleeve, button collar, black Hawaiian print shirt in a bold geometric chevron design in a golden mustard color that resembles traditional Hawaiian Tapa or bark cloth design. Mr. Espiritu is wearing ten strands of golden brown traditional Ni’ihau shell lei that surrounds his neck and rests on the middle of his chest. He has a calm and welcoming demeanor with a slight smile on his face. Photo: Chris Rohrer
ID: Laurel, a white woman with creamy skin, cropped silvery hair, and hazel eyes, looks thoughtfully to one side. Crimson lipstick punctuates a slight smile.
Choreographer, designer, and artist-engineer: Laurel is a transdisciplinary artist making work which imagines new kinds of experience, reinterprets traditional stories, and questions cultural assumptions. Her performing arts career began in music before serendipity brought her to dance, where she found a discipline combining her lifelong loves of athleticism and art. Featuring synthesistic mythology and partnering, her work includes choreography for both disabled and nondisabled artists as well as novel ways of extending and creating embodied art through technology.
Laurel began her dance career with Full Radius Dance in 2004. She is an artist and access & technology lead with Kinetic Light, the internationally acclaimed disability arts organization, co-founder and CEO of CyCore Systems, a boutique systems architecture & product design firm, and the director of Rose Tree Productions, where she choreographs transdisciplinary art and supports equity-centered arts work; her justice and community-centered work was recognized as a 2019 DFA Fellow. Laurel’s latest project, in collaboration with Sydney Skybetter, is The Choreodaemonic Platform: a multiply-manifesting choreo-computational performance which centers embodied knowings of interdependence as artists, audiences, and AI contend with human-mediated symbiotic and adversarial relationships between nature, art, and emerging technologies. This project is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation and has received a 2023 Creative Capital Award. Find her online at laurellawson.com or instagram/worldsoflaurel.
Image Description: brown skin girl with big brown eyes, a gold nose ring and long black knotless box braids and a bright smile wears a black spaghetti strap top in front of a light grey background. Photo: Eboné Camille Amos.
Eboné Camille Amos is an inspired performer, choreographer and educator from Memphis, TN. As a graduate of Florida State University with her MFA in Performance and Choreography, her work is demonstrative of her point of view as a young, Black, female-identifying body living in the Southern United States. Eboné is currently the Assistant Professor of African American Studies (and Coordinator of the minor) in the Theatre and Dance Dept. at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. Here, she continues her interdisciplinary approach to her research, choreography and pedagogy; teaching courses in composition/choreography and African American history and culture through the lens of Black visual and performing arts. Her commitment to sharing her artistic vision extends beyond her home institution, with recent guest residencies at Rhythmically Speaking (MN), Jacksonville University, Western Kentucky University, and other distinguished programs across the country. Most recently, Eboné was awarded the 2024 Individual Artist Fellowship Grant in Dance: Choreography by the TN Arts Commission.
Her latest works include Girl, Gurrl, GWORL: iterations of freedom (2023)—an interdisciplinary solo that examines the (mis)representations of Black womanhood and the power of self-definition as resistance—and cabins in the sky (2025, commissioned by Jacksonville Dance Theatre) that explores the body as a bridge between imagination and action, drawing on the Black radical tradition to question how movement can shape future possibilities.
Through her embodied scholarship and artistic practice, Eboné continues to illuminate the intersections of Black identity, Southern heritage, and radical imagination—creating work that both honors ancestral wisdom and charts new pathways for investigating storytelling, joy and liberation through movement.
ID: A white woman with long brown hair smiles, she wears a black and white polka dot top. Photo Credit: Christopher Duggan
Mariclare Hulbert (she/her; Rochester, NY) serves as a Marketing & PR Advisor for the DFA program. She has 20+ years of experience in the arts and nonprofit fields, specializing in strategic marketing, communications, public relations, and outreach. She worked at the internationally renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for nearly 10 years, serving as Director of Marketing & Communication. As a consultant, she supports clients with an array of marketing, PR, and communications needs. Recent projects and clients include Dance/NYC, Dance/USA, the National Center for Choreography-Akron, Kinetic Light/Alice Sheppard, Bridge Live Arts, Leela Dance Collective, Visual Studies Workshop, and others. She is based in Rochester, NY, the ancestral lands of the Onondaga or Seneca people. For more information, visit mariclarehulbert.com.
ID: Headshot of a middle-aged man with glasses, wearing a dark collared shirt and a patterned baseball cap. He has a neatly trimmed beard and a serious expression on his face. The background is plain white, keeping the focus on the man's portrait.
Gene Pendon is based out of Montreal, Canada and is a graduate of Concordia University’s Fine Art Bachelor’s Program in Painting & Drawing in the early 90's.
As a contemporary painter and visual arts producer, Gene has created within various spheres of mural work, street art and music marketing, graphic illustration and fine art, animation, installation, art performance, and art direction for stage spanning the last 30 years.
After the first two decades of project development and production work for U.S. and international-based street & contemporary art projects, exhibitions and street branding & music marketing campaigns during the 2000's, Gene re-establish his original interest of contributing creative projects within Montréal’s public cultural life.
Since then, Gene has been involved in personal and professional research and presentation of interdisciplinary philosophies of embodied authorship. Gene has presented research methodologies within public forums in both Canada and the U.S. including “The Tuning Fork” online live forum for the International Institute for Cultural Activism, Delhi, NY (2022), as a guest educator at Champlain College of Vermont, Montreal campus (2023-24), and as a panelist at both the Global Cultural Districts Network Annual meeting and conference in Montreal (2023), and the American Studies Association at Harvard University’s Revisiting Regions Conference (2024) in Cambridge, MA.
ID: White female-identified middle-aged person with a wide smile and squinting eyes, wearing a yellow V-neck top, along with dangling earrings and shoulder-length medium brown and grey streaked straight hair. Blurred in the background is the back of some houses and a wooden fence. Photo: John Whiting.
Since retiring as a dancer and choreographer, Michèle Steinwald has managed performing arts projects and professional development programs for On the Boards (Seattle), New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project (Boston), DanceUSA (DC), and the Deborah Hay Dance Company (Austin). She joined the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) in October of 2006 as Assistant Curator for the Performing Arts and remained in that role until summer of 2013. She was on the boards of the National Performance Network (New Orleans) and Movement Research (NYC) from 2012-2018. She has served on panels for the NEA, MANCC, NPN, McKnight Foundation, USA Fellows, Pew Foundation, Herb Alpert Award, MAP Fund and been an artist mentor for Creative Capital's retreat and Arts Midwest's ArtsLab. She holds an MA from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University and was published in Curating Live Arts (Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford) and Shifting Cultural Power (NCCAkron Series in Dance, University of Akron Press). Committed to social justice in the arts, she has researched and facilitated original sessions at conferences and professional gatherings such as Grantmakers in the Arts (2022), Association of Performing Arts Professionals (2018 & 2019) in partnership with American Realness, Interrarium at Banff Centre (2018), National Performance Network (2017 & 2018), Arts Midwest (2011 & 2014), and DanceUSA (2012 & 2013 + 2014 host & showcase committees). Half Québécoise and half American, Steinwald is currently living in Montréal as an independent curator, community organizer, dramaturg, and occasional writer. www.44artsproductive.com
Image description: Holly Bass wears bright blue glasses, a dark blue leather jacket and a wide smile against a backdrop of blurred twinkle lights. Photo by Pamela Janzesian.
Holly Bass (she/her) is a multidisciplinary performance artist, educator and cultural worker. Her visual art work includes photography, installation, video and performance. A Cave Canem poetry fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies. She studied modern dance (under Viola Farber) and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning her Master’s from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As an arts journalist early in her career, she was the first to put the term “hip hop theater” into print in American Theatre magazine. She has received numerous grants from the DC Arts Commission and was a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow as well as receiving Engaging Dance Audiences grants from Dance/USA. She was awarded a 2022 MAPFund grant. She was a 2019 Red Bull Detroit artist-in-residence, a 2020-2022 Live Feed resident artist at New York Live Arts and a 2021-22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. A gifted and dedicated teaching artist, she directed a year-round creative writing and performance program for adjudicated youth in DC’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services for four years as well as facilitating workshops nationally and internationally. She is currently the national director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program which uses the arts strategically to transform schools facing severe inequities. www.hollybass.com.
