BAX Announces 2017-18 Artist in Residence & Space Grant Recipients

BAX is proud to welcome 2017-18 Artists in Residence (AIR) and Space Grant recipients. This group of artists embodies a vision, promise, and deep commitment to investigative practices in line with their and BAX's core values. Together, we are making space for bold and challenging work that asks deep questions about our ever-changing world and our place in this world.

Joining returning Artists in Residence Tanisha Christie (Interdisciplinary), Catherine Galasso (Dance) and Mariana Valencia (Dance) are Aya Ogawa (Theater) and Maria Bauman (Dance). Returning for another residency after her 2008-10 tenure at BAX is luciana achugar (Dance).

In addition to Artists in Residence, BAX is excited to work with incoming Summer Space Grant recipients Claro de los Reyes (Theater), Nia Shand & Ness White (Interdisciplinary), Dane Terry (Theater), Fall Space Grant recipients Natalie Green (Dance), Johnnie Mercer (Dance), and Itamar Segev (Interdisciplinary), and Alumni Space Grant recipient Julianne Carino. Selected through a rigorous and competitive process, these dance, theater and performance artists will have an opportunity to create or delve into work within a setting that is conducive to working deeply and exploring new territory. Artists receive free studio space, opportunities to share work, and engage in conversations with other space grantees.

Stay connected to their journey at artistservices.bax.org/2017-summer-fall-space-grants and artistservices.bax.org/alumni-space-grant.

BAX has identified some of the most challenging passages and transitions for artists living and working in NYC. In addition to providing residences to emerging, mid-career, and established artists, we provide separate residencies and resources to parent/artists of young children as they renew their studio practice after having a child; teaching artists whose individual generative work often takes a backseat to their work with young people; and alumni artists, who after "graduating" from BAX, are offered a "start up" to re-engage as adult professionals in the NYC performing arts world.

BAX believes that no matter what - whether young, emerging, mid-career or established - all artists deserve a space to deepen their work and push the boundaries of what they do in a nurturing and supportive environment. Ultimately, all artists at all ages and stages are in progress.

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2017/18 BAX Artists in Residence

First Year Artists in Residence are:

luciana achugar | Dance

Maria Bauman | Dance

Aya Ogawa | Theater

Second Year Artists in Residence are:

Tanisha Christie | Interdisciplinary

Kat Galasso | Dance

Mariana Valencia | Dance

2017 Space Grant Recipients

The 2017 Summer Space Grant Recipients are:

Claro de los Reyes | Theater

Nia Shand & Ness White | Interdisciplinary

Dane Terry | Theater

The 2017 Fall Space Grant recipients are:

Natalie Green | Dance Johnnie Mercer | Dance

Itamar Segev | Interdisciplinary

The 2017 Alumni Space Grant Recipient:

Julianne Carino | Dance Artist Bios

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

luciana achugar is a Brooklyn choreographer from Uruguay who has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently since 1999. She is a two-time "Bessie" Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch" in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY's "Best of Dance". She received the 2015 Austin Critic's Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO, after being presented at the Fusebox Festival, and having premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her latest work, An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, premiered at Gibney Dance in December 2015 and received a nomination for a 2016 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production. Most recently, she received a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography.

Maria Bauman is a Black queer dance artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, Florida. Her MBDance choreography is based on her sense of physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and fascination with intimacy. Bauman brings the same tenets to organizing to undo racism in the arts and beyond with ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), the grassroots organizing body she co-founded. In particular, Bauman's dance work centers the non-linear and linear stories and bodies of queer people of color onstage.

Bauman is the Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance Center (NY), and she recently received their Beth Silverman-Yam Social Action Award. Among other honors, she has also received 2015 and 2014 CUNY Dance Initiative Residency Awards, 2012-13 and 2009-10 Harlem Stage Fund for New Work via The Jerome Foundation, a 2010-11 Dance Theater Workshop Studio Series, and the Temple University Katherine Dunham Award for creative research.

She is a trainer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond on Understanding and Undoing Racism workshops.

Julianne Carino is a Brooklyn-based dancer and creative artist. She has trained in classical ballet, modern, West African, Gaga, Latin contemporary, Bikram yoga, Anti-gravity yoga, and Improvisation. Julianne's choreography aims to inform and highlight a dancer's physical characteristics which affect their political, and often spiritual, identities. The ideas Julianne explores in movement influence her photography, visual art, and poetry. Julianne graduated Urban Academy High School in 2016 and has chosen not to attend college directly after graduating. Julianne attended the Bates Dance Festival for three consecutive summers and the American Dance Festival during the summer of 2016. She has performed her work at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, 92Y Harkness Dance Center, and Bates Dance Festival. Julianne has had the privilege of performing in the work of Sara Procopio, Monstah Black, Donna Costello, and Kelly Bartnik as part of the BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange) youth Dance Company. She has also performed in the work of Netta Yerushalmy and Sean Dorsey as part of a repertory courses at the American and Bates Dance Festivals.

As a theater artist Tanisha Christie has produced, directed and performed for many regional theaters across the country, including the Hip Hop Theatre Festival, former Ohio Theatre; Arena Stage; Commonweal Theatre; PCPA Theatrefest and many others. She has directed children's theater in Boston and a new work for the Deaf Way II International convention in Washington, DC, as well as, produced shows at Performance Space 122, Baltimore Theater Project and the District of Columbia Arts Center.

As a teaching artist, she credits her training to her time as Assistant Director of the former Living Stage Theatre Company, one of the preeminent Theatre for Social Change in the U.S. There she directed original performance works and led hundreds of workshops in improvisational theatre making for people ages 3-103. She has taught at many traditional and nontraditional performance spaces, schools and universities, including the Anacostia Mental Health Center, My Sister's Place, New York University, Amherst College, Goucher College, The Kennedy Center, and Looking Glass Theatre.

Tanisha began filmmaking while creating and performing in an original interdisciplinary media-theater-dance piece Memory is a Body of Water (with Lisa Biggs, PhD and Kristin Horton, Dir.) for The National Black Theater Festival. She went on to work for several production companies and landed on the production team for PBS' Citizen King. Her experimental shorts flag/body has been screened at international conferences in Australia and Denmark; GroundWater was screened as a part of an intercontinental artist exchange in Panama co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Panama. Her feature length documentary Walk With Me (directed & produced with Ellie Walton), about three women who use theater for social justice, was digitally released in 2013 by Filmbreak/GoDigital and can be seen on Amazon, Google Play and other outlets.
Tanisha holds a BFA Theatre performance with a concentration in Holistic Drama from Arizona State University and an MA in Media Studies from The New School. She is pursuing her Masters in Social Work at Hunter College to deepen her vision of arts, healing and community engagement. A member of Actor's Equity Association, her work has been recognized through an Artist's Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Puffin Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Humanities Council of DC. She was a 2015 Target Margin Theater Fellow. www.tanishachristie.com.

Catherine Galasso creates live performance at the intersection of dance, theater, and installation. Since 2006 she has created eight evening-length, cross-disciplinary, cast-specific works and numerous shorter performances, presented by places like Joyce SoHo, SFMoMA, Bibliotheque National in Paris, Harvard University's Carpenter Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and the International Theater Festival in Pristina, Kosovo. Her Bring On The Lumière! (2011) was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award and is featured in the 2016 Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Her 2016 La MaMa revival of Jim Neu's The Floatones (with co-director Keith McDermott) was a New York Times "Critics' Pick." Residencies include The Watermill Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Kaatsbaan, ODC Theater (San Francisco), and ZonaD Studio (Bucharest). Galasso received 2015 commissions from Danspace and The River To River Festival, is a 2015-17 Resident Artist with LMCC's Extended Life Program, as well as a 2016/18 BAX AIR.

Natalie Green is an experimental choreographer and dancer based in Brooklyn. Her work has been presented at Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project's "Food for Thought," Roulette, Movement Research's "About Town," Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), Catch, and the Merce Cunningham Studios. Natalie was a 2006 BAX Space Grant recipient, held a 2009-2010 Studio Series residency at DTW and was a 2011 Foundation for Contemporary Arts EmergenCy Grant Recipient.

As a dancer she has been greatly honored to dance for Tere O'Connor, RoseAnne Spradlin, Heather Kravas, Anna Sperber, Levi Gonzalez, Daniel Linehan, Rebecca Lazier and Juliette Mapp. Natalie graduated from the SUNY Purchase Dance Conservatory in 2003 and is originally from Austin, Texas. Her most influential teachers include Neil Greenberg and Juliette Mapp. Further, she has gained a wealth of experience in somatic practices and Body Mind Centering through extensive work with RoseAnne Spradlin. Related to that practice, Natalie led a Sunday Process Lab through Movement Research in January 2015 that focused on pre-show regimens and performance mindstate.

Natalie spent the spring of 2015 touring, teaching and performing for Rebecca Lazier in Turkey, Poland, Nova Scotia. She is currently engaged in a new project with Donna Uchizono.

Johnnie Cruise Mercer is a native of Richmond, VA and a BFA graduate from Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Dance and Choreography. As a performance artist, Mr. Mercer has professionally collaborated with Antonio Brown, Edisa Weeks, Monstah Black within his recent production Hyperbolic, yon Tande (Whitney Hunter), André Zachery with Renegade Performance Group, and, most recently, in Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez's reimagining of John Bernd's past work in Danspace Project's ' Platform 2016: Lost & Found. He is also a current company member of Dance Theater X led by Charles O. Anderson. As a choreographer, Mr. Mercer's work has been presented at the Center for Performance Research, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!), The Old First Reformed Church of Brooklyn, The Dance Place, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, Danspace @St. Mark's Church, Greenspace, The Buttenweiser Hall at the 92Y, The Marlene Boll Theatre in Detroit, The Dance Place and at various festivals throughout the country. Mr. Mercer, the artistic director of TheREDprojectNYC, has been a recent resident artist at Chez Bushwick Inc., University Texas at Austin, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Silo Farms, The Denmark Arts Center, a 2016-2017 92Y Harkness Dance Center Artist in Residence, and will be in residence at York College as a part of the Cuny Dance Initiative. He is happy to join, and grow with the BAX community this coming fall! www.trpnyc.com

Aya Ogawa is a Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based playwright, director, and translator for the theater. She challenges traditional notions of the American aesthetic and identity by creating plays infused with a multiplicity of perspectives and languages, and by incorporating influences from outside the U.S. - of style, form, and content.

She wrote and directed oph3lia at HERE (hailed by The New York Times as "great theater");Journey to the Ocean, commissioned by The Foundry Theatre; and most recently Ludic Proxy, commissioned by The Play Company, which the NY Theatre Review described as "enchanting and poetic, deeply in tune with the spirit of many different cultures." She is currently developing a performance piece around the theme of failure.

She has translated numerous Japanese plays into English, including works by Toshiki Okada, Yudai Kamisato, Takeshi Kawamura, Yoji Sakate, and Tomohiro Maeda, among others. Her translations have been described as "fluid and delicious" by American Theatre Magazine, published by Samuel French among many others, and produced in the U.S. and U.K.www.ayaogawa.com

Claro de los Reyes is a social practice theatre artist whose work aims to further build community, encourage cross-cultural dialogue, and champion underrepresented histories particularly around the Asian Pacific Islander diaspora. Recent projects include My Baryo My Borough, a community-centered oral history theatre project launched as a commissioned artist of the Laundromat Project's Create Change program 2015. Additional recent works were presented at Topaz Arts and Interference Archive. As a theatre actor Claro has performed with NY theater companies including Pan Asian Rep, NAATCO, and International WOW. He has also had the honor of devising theatre alongside community members in NYC, the Philippines, and Rwanda. Education: Fordham LC Theatre Program, TWN Film Workshop, MA in Applied Theatre from CUNY SPS. As a 2016-17 National Artist Strategies Creative Community Fellow, Claro is in the midst of launching a theatre-based initiative that brings API perspectives in NYC schools and public spaces.

Itamar Segev Is a Brooklyn based maker, mover, actor, performer, writer and aspiring activist. Originally from Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine Itamar moved to NY to take a summer course in acting , fell in love with the city and never left. Finding his(?) way from writing to acting to different modes of dance and embodiment Itamar's practice is a collage that is influenced by Meisner based acting training, extensive somatic and improvisational movement methods, readings of post colonial, feminist, queer and anti Zionist thought and coming from a long linage of Femme emotional laborers. As a performer Itamar has collaborated with 600 HIGHWAYMEN, Lilleth Glimcher, Lee Sunday Evens, Morgan Green and Sarah DeLappe, Julia Gladstone, ADAM HOROWITZ, Julia Thompson, Andrew Hoepfner and Brandon Wolcott and studied movement with practitioners such as K.J Holmes, Judith Grodowitz, Miguel Guttierez and Juliana May. Itamar is a current AIR at Chez Bushwick and has previously been a Fresh Tracks AIR with long time Collaborator Georgia wall. They have shown work at NYLA, Catch at the invisible dog, Movement Research at Judson Church and Glasshouse Gallery.

Nia & Ness are a black, lesbian, dancer-poet performance art duo based in Brooklyn, NY. The duo met in 2013 and founded their company in 2016. They have performed at multiple venues in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania; sharing their work that aims at a deeper understanding of their co-reality through intense investigation of their individual identities. They have also been highlighted in local newspapers; recognized by the Brooklyn-based art group, THE CREATORS COLLECTIVE, as one of their top 5 artists of 2016; and have been featured in a 2017 BRIC TV segment.

Along with the couple's work together, Nia is a proud BFA dance graduate from Temple University. Immediately after graduation she began dancing in Germany and France with DAGADA Dance Company; and Ness, a Journalism graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh, freelances as a writer for the California-based magazine Vi?t Tide.

Dane Terry is a storyteller, composer and writer. Terry is the 2016 recipient of the Ethyl Eichelberger Award from PS122 in New York City for which a new stage work was commissioned. He was also a part of that organization's RAMP residency in spring 2016. After premiering in New York at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in April 2015, his theatrical song-cycle Bird in the House went on to be presented at The Public Theater as part of the Under The Radar Festival's INCOMING! series. Terry has also performed at Lincoln Center, A.R.T.'s Oberon in Cambridge MA, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati OH, The Wexner Center in Columbus OH and the Afterglow Festival in Provincetown MA.

Mariana Valencia is a dance artist. She has held residencies at Chez Bushwick, NYLA, Show Box L.A., Pieter Pasd, and ISSUE Project Room. Valencia's work has been supported by the Yellow House Fund of the Tides Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts EmergenCy Grant and Center for Performance Research's Andrew W Mellon Artist in Residence Program. As a Jerome Travel and Study Fellow, Valencia has researched the queer subculture of Sonidero dancers in Mexico City. Performance collaborations include projects with dance artists Kim Brandt, robbinschilds, and MPA; video artists Elizabeth Orr, AK Burns and Kate Brandt, and musician Jules Gimbrone. Valencia has costumed for dances by Vanessa Anspaugh, Lauren Bakst, Juliana May. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading group, and co-editor of Movement Research's Critical Correspondence. She holds a BA in Dance and Ethnography from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

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Founded in 1991, BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange, is a community based performing arts center dedicated to developing artists of all ages, from children to professionals. The organization offers community access to arts and culture, supporting the creation of new work by emerging artists, engaging diverse audiences and providing arts education to youth and families. BAX has intentionally constructed an environment where children study and professional artists create under the same roof. Students are mentored by professional directors and choreographers. The organization's distinct focus on developmental process makes it a nurturing incubator for experimental dance and theater artists and is an important advocate for under-represented voices in the New York City performing arts community.

For more information about BAX and its programs, call 718-832-0018, email press@bax.org or visit www.bax.org.