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Round 3 Program Advisors (2024-2026)
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.
Round 3 Program Consultants (2024-2026)
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.
Image Description: A white woman with long curled brown hair smiles directly at the camera, she wears a bright pink top, black jacket and mixed metal jewelry. Photo by Natalie Sinisgalli-Kettavong.
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
Round 3 Proposal Coaches & Fellows Advisors (2024-2026)
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 2024 Washington Award. She is currently the 2025-2026 Roman J. Witt Artist-in-Residence at the University of Michigan as well as a Center for Racial Justice Fellow at UM. 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 and was the national director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program that used the arts strategically to transform schools facing severe inequities. www.hollybass.com
Image description: A Tamil woman turning her head towards the camera. She wears her hair up in a bun and has a nose ring on her right nostril per her Tamil culture. Photo by Nathan Cornetet.
Dr. Prathiba Batley (she/her) is a three-time Indian National Champion of Bharatanatyam and a recipient of the Dance/USA fellowship funded by the Doris Duke Foundation for her work addressing social justice in and through Bharatanatyam. She strongly believes in challenging the status quo in Bharatanatyam by addressing caste/religious hegemonies while also giving more agency to women practitioners. She is the founder/chairperson of Eyakkam Dance Company. Her recent works include Dirty Secrets - a dance short film and Parai+Natyam which brings together the parai drums (of the oppressed Dalits) and Bharatanatyam (predominantly practiced by the dominant caste).
Image Description: A devilishly handsome (but modest) man wearing a blue chinoiserie tuxedo looking like he sees a bowl of noodles just out of his sightline. Photo: Eli Schmidt.
Phil Chan is a co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface and the President of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation. He is a graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School. He has held fellowships with Dance/USA, Drexel University, Jacob’s Pillow, Harvard University, the Manhattan School of Music, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, NYU, and the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris. As a writer, he is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact and Banishing Orientalism, and has served as the Executive Editor for FLATT Magazine and contributed to Dance Europe Magazine, Dance Magazine, Dance Australia, and the Huffington Post, and currently serves on the Advisory Board of Dance Magazine. He served multiple years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel and the Jadin Wong Award panel presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. He was a Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Dance at Carleton College, and was named a Next 50 Arts Leader by the Kennedy Center. His recent projects include directing “Madama Butterfly” for Boston Lyric Opera (garnering “Best of 2023” in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Broadway World), and staging a newly reimagined “La Bayadere” for Indiana University. His dances are currently in the repertory at Ballet West and Oakland Ballet, where he serves as Resident Choreographer.
Image Description: A white woman with long curled brown hair smiles directly at the camera, she wears a bright pink top, black jacket and mixed metal jewelry. Photo by Natalie Sinisgalli-Kettavong.
Mariclare Hulbert (she/her) serves as a Marketing & PR Advisor for the DFA program (Rounds 1, 2, and 3). She has 20+ years of experience in the arts and nonprofit fields, specializing in strategic communications, marketing, PR, and media relations. She worked at the internationally renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for nearly 10 years, serving as Director of Marketing & Communication. At the Pillow, she led a team of marketing, PR, and ticket services staff, graphic designers, photographers, and videographers in all matters related to traditional and digital marketing, press and communications, and ticket sales. As a consultant, she supports clients with an array of marketing, PR, and communications needs. Recent projects and clients include Dance/NYC (Dance Advancement Fund Program), the National Center for Choreography-Akron, Kinetic Light/Alice Sheppard, Kayla Hamilton/Circle O, BODYTRAFFIC, Embraced Body/How We Move Program, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, Visual Studies Workshop, and others. She is based in Rochester, NY, the ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee people. For more information, visit mariclarehulbert.com.
Image description: A Chinese American woman smiles at the camera. She has straight black hair and glasses. The background behind her is a blue sky and the green tops of trees. Photo by C.S.
Delphine Lai (she/her) is a writer, arts advocate, and arts administrator with over twenty-five years of nonprofit experience. In 2009, she founded Del Arts Consulting to make the arts more accessible to all, to support the creation of new work, and to further art as a means for social change. Clients have included Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Bay Area Mind and Music Society, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association, ODC, and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. Delphine is also the organizational dramaturg for the National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron), and she is a contributor for the forthcoming book "Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography" that will be published by University of Akron Press as the second title in the NCCAkron Series in Dance.
Throughout her career, Delphine has experimented across mediums, studying the creative process as a dancer, designer, engineer, visual artist, and writer. At Stanford University, she discovered partner dancing (western social dance forms and contact improv) and earned a B.S. in Product Design Engineering and a B.A. in English with a poetry writing emphasis. She worked as a graphic designer and user interface designer. However, her path shifted to the nonprofit world with positions at George Coates Performance Works, Dance Through Time, Performing Arts Workshop, and Bay Area Youth Fund for Education. She also became an Associate Director of Individual Giving at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, overseeing the SFMOMA Director’s Circle and Artist’s Circle giving programs. Her volunteer work has included helping local PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) develop equity statements, creating art with patients through Art for Recovery at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, and teaching art to children through DrawBridge at Hamilton Family Center, an emergency overnight shelter for families.
A sepia tone headshot of Yvonne Montoya, a smiling Latina woman with dark sparkling eyes and long wavy hair. Photo by Dominic AZ Bonuccelli.
YVONNE MONTOYA is a mother, choreographer, bi-national artist, and founding director of Safos Dance Theatre. Based in Tucson, AZ and originally from Albuquerque, NM, her work is grounded in and inspired by the landscapes, languages, cultures, and aesthetics of the U.S. Southwest. From 2017-2018 Montoya was a Post-Graduate Fellow in Dance at Arizona State University, where she founded and organized the inaugural Dance in the Desert: A Gathering of Latinx Dancemakers. From 2019-2020, Montoya was a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and a member of Round One Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists program In 2020, Montoya was the first Arizona-based artist to receive the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Project Production Grant. In 2022, her company Safos Dance Theatre received the National Performance Network Creation Fund Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Project Grant for her piece Stories from Home. Stories from Home premiered at GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C. in October 2023. Montoya was recently featured in KQED’s If Cities Could Dance and KNME’s ¡COLORES! www.yvonnemontoya.co.
Hope Mohr is a licensed attorney and a Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center. She co-leads the Artist Legal Cafe, a collaboration with Vital Arts and the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Her law practice, Movement Law, supports artists, arts organizations, and mission-driven organizations.
Visit movementlaw.net for more information.
AFFILIATIONS
- Fellow, Sustainable Economies Law Center (current)
- Fellow, CA for the Arts’ Grassroots Artist Advocacy Program (2025)
- Member, Cooperative Professionals Guild (current)
- Lawyer Referral Panel, California Lawyers for the Arts (2024-25)
- Community Enterprise & Solidarity Economy Clinic, University of Illinois at Chicago (Visiting Staff, 2025)
- Thought Partner/Artist Mentor, National Center for Choreography’s Creative Administration Research (2024-current)
- Board Member, Southern Exposure (current)
- Stewardship Committee, Non Profit Democracy Network (2020-21)
- Creating New Futures, Contracts Working Group, White Caucus (2021-2023)
ARTS LEADERSHIP
Mohr has woven art and activism for decades as a choreographer, curator, and writer. After a professional dance career with Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs, she founded the nonprofit Hope Mohr Dance and its signature presenting program, The Bridge Project, which for over 15 years supported over 100 socially engaged artists. In 2020, Mohr co-stewarded the organization’s transition to an equity-driven model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. Mohr transitioned out of co-leadership at BLA in 2023.
WRITING
Mohr’s book about activist cultural work, Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance, was published in 2020 by the National Center for Choreography. She is a contributor to Artists on Creative Administration (2024), edited by Tonya Lockyer and also published by the National Center for Choreography. She co-authored Notes for Equitable Funding (2022) as a part of Creating New Futures.
EDUCATION
Mohr earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Human Rights Fellow. As an undergraduate at Stanford, she worked at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, won the Michele Rosaldo Thesis Prize for Outstanding Feminist Research, and was awarded a Kennedy Public Interest Fellowship for field work in the Nicaraguan women’s movement.
ImagJames shown here is a dark skinned Black man wearing glasses and a black mock turtleneck short sleeved shirt, he is obviously a man of a certain age
James Scruggs is an artist who creates large-scale, topical, theatrical productions, live and virtual. He’s the recipient of multiple grants and awards. He was recently awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship Grant. He was the first playwright commissioned by The Perelman Arts Center, NYC; he wrote The American Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was awarded a MAP Grant. He was also recently awarded an NPN Creation Fund Grant to create OFF THE RECORD: Acts of Restorative Justice which was commissioned by Arts Emerson in Boston, The Center at West Park in NYC and Art2Action in Tampa, Florida. This piece will be presented at HERE Arts Center in Spring of 2026.
His 3/Fifths SupremacyLand (2017) was a fully immersive, interactive ethno-theme park, exploring racism, for which he was awarded a MAP Grant and a 2016 Creative Capital Grant. James Scruggs has a BFA in film from School of Visual Arts. www.jamesscruggs.com.
Image description: A white woman with blue eyes and short brown hair, wearing a black top and silver earrings, smiling. Photo by Kim Carson Photography.
Amy Smith (she/her) is a dance and theater artist, educator, and facilitator based in Lenapehoking/Philadelphia. She is white, middle class, and non-disabled, and is committed to racial justice, economic justice, and disability justice. She works on these issues by threading them through all the work she does: leading financial well-being workshops, one-on-one sessions with artist clients giving financial advice and doing tax preparation, consulting with arts organizations, co-facilitating anti-racism sessions with co-facilitators of color, and as a dance and theater educator. Amy co-founded, co-directed, and performed with Headlong, a dance theater non-profit that transformed into a community arts organization over 25 years. While there she co-created an education program and an artist incubation program, and invested heavily in community resource-sharing efforts. She left Headlong in 2019 to pursue her freelance work. She has led financial well-being workshops through Creative Capital, Assets for Artists, at the Sundance Institute, for many funders, and in many other settings. She has been greatly affected by her learning as part of artEquity’s National Facilitator Training and other anti-oppression trainings, and used those experiences to help develop and facilitate the Accomplices Leadership Institute for the Arts Administrators of Color Network. For more about Amy’s values and background, please visit www.amyelainesmith.com.