Pioneers Go East Collective Names 2026-28 NEXT! Mentorship Cohort

Pioneers Go East Collective has announced the six artists selected for the second cycle of its NEXT! Mentorship Program. Created to support New York City-based artists at pivotal stages in their practices, the NEXT! Program offers tailored opportunities for knowledge sharing and public presentation, platforms that are often unavailable or otherwise unaffordable to artists.

The 2026-28 artists are Rohan Bhargava/Rovaco Dance Company, Maxi Hawkeye Canion/GUT PUNCH, Jade Manns, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Liberty Styles, and Annie MingHao Wang.

The NEXT! Mentorship Program offers support through exchange, monthly meetings, discussions, workshops, and presentations for a period of 20 months. Participants receive guidance in several areas, including production, design, grant writing, and budgeting. Artists also receive $3,000 compensation for presenting their artistic work in either Pioneers Go East's biannual CROSSROADS series or the yearly Out-FRONT! Festival. The program also provides each artist with professional video and photo documentation of their work for their portfolios.

The Mentorship Program is a unique meeting ground for interdisciplinary artists developing distinct artistic voices and experimenting with new approaches that expand aesthetic and performance modes. The program intends to address a compelling need in the field; providing artistic, administrative, and financial support for emerging underrepresented artists who are recognized in their field for their groundbreaking work and creative process. Participants will have the opportunity to network with other artists, their communities, industry professionals, and funders as their performances are presented through Pioneers Go East Collective's two curated series.

'As a creative incubator designed by artists for artists, we are fully invested in finding ways for artists to feel supported and thrive,' said co-curators Philip Treviño and Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte. 'We launched the NEXT! Mentorship Program in response to the pandemic, which saw funding and many programs for artists reduced, and aimed to fill this gap by offering direct support and mentorship. We feel this program offers unique opportunities, helping artists build community and share experiences, and we want to pass on the information we learned from mentors who helped Pioneers Go East Collective grow.'

Mentors include leading artists of Pioneers Go East Collective as well as guest artists who provide classes in specific areas. This year, Pioneers Go East received 95 applications and a guest panel of artists and curators in the field evaluated the applications and assisted in selecting the artists for the 2026-28 cycle.

2026-28 NEXT! MENTORSHIP ARTISTS

Rohan Bhargava, raised in New Delhi, India, moved to New York in 2012 to earn his BFA in dance from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Bhargava is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rovaco Dance Company, which produces immersive events exploring queerness, South Asian culture, and contemporary performing arts. Bhargava has received commissions from Sam Houston State University, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, The Dance Gallery Festival, and CUNY Dance Initiative. Bhargava's work has appeared at Battery Dance Festival, Little Island NYC, Provincetown Dance Festival, and Movement Research at Judson Church. Since 2021, the company's annual production, Rovaco Dance Party has merged performance with South Asian hospitality, embodying the belief that culture is best understood through intimate experience. In 2026, this event expanded into a two-day Rovaco Dance Festival with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Org, and Brooklyn Arts Council. Bhargava is a 2020 Jadin Wong Fellow of the Asian American Arts Alliance and one of Dance Magazine's 2021 '25 to Watch.' Bhargava is a recipient of Dance/NYC's Dance Advancement Fund (2022-23), Danse Mirage Foundation's Choreography Pilot Program (2024), NYU Production Lab's Artist Development Program for Dance (2024), and NYSCA's Support for Artists (2025).

Maxi Hawkeye Canion (she/they) is a performance artist based in Brooklyn, originally from El Paso, TX. She is a 2026-27 Mabou Mines Suite/Space Artist and 2025–26 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. Her series of works present as radical fantasies, surreal disruptions, decomposing realities, and ruptures of 'normalcy'. Piloted by personas known as 'doom mascots', she dissects the nuances of American class dynamics and labor, Trans-femininity, post-gender, and online culture's social and somatic impacts. Her process confronts humanity's most grotesque aspects and offers experiential containers to process. All deeply supported by integral artistic collaborations. She has presented work at MoMA, Isabella Stewart Garner Museum, Pageant, Judson Memorial Church, New York Live Arts, Les Urbaines Festival (CH), Brooklyn Museum, La MaMa, Danspace Project, and Performance Space NY.

Jade Manns is a Canadian choreographer and dancer based in New York and a co-founder of PAGEANT, an artist-run performance space in Brooklyn. She has been named one of Dance Magazine's 2026 '25 to Watch.' Her work has been presented by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and PAGEANT among others. Manns has received support from the New York State Council for the Arts, The Queens Art Fund, The Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA Emergency Grant), The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, NYU Artist Development Program for Dance, and Kino Saito Arts Center. She was a 2024/2025 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist and is currently the inaugural Choreographic Fellow for the Martha Hill Dance Fund Mesh Fellowship. As a performer, Manns has worked with artists such as Evvie Allison, Kim Brandt, Ayano Elson, Phoebe Berglund, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Luis Lara Malvacias, Alexa West, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Boychild, Cherrie Yu, and Rosario Zorraquin. She is an alumna of the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and holds a BFA in dance with a minor in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Marie Lloyd Paspe is a dance artist, choreographer, and vocalist whose work physicalizes kapwa, the Tagalog word for 'shared one-ness,' in re-membering we are not separate from each other. Daughter of parents from Batangas and Iloilo, Philippines, Paspe's family migrated from Singapore to Canada and the United States. As a descendent of nurses and farmers, Paspe's work manifests through the hands of a laborious body: implying the brown, hypersexualized body as a revolution against the oppressor's gaze. Paspe spent 2025-26 researching with shaman farmers in the Philippines. Her practice follows Mamerto Tindongan's teachings: 'to be a shaman is to work the rice fields' – considering our service to the land is in direct relation to the worlds we rebuild. Paspe's choreography has been presented in the US, Sweden, Germany, and the Philippines. She has worked with Ching-I Chang, Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, Ayoung Kim, Faye Driscoll, Sugar Vendil, and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (2018-24) having received a Bessie Award for choreographic contributions to Deep Blue Sea. Paspe is a research artist with Ifugao Center for Living Culture (Philippines), 2026-27 Movement Research Artist-in-Resident, 2026 NYSCA Awardee, 2026 LMCC Artist-in-Resident, and 2025 NEFA National Dance Project Finalist.

Liberty Styles is a tap dancer, electronic musician, drag artist, and choreographer based in NYC. Satire, collaged sound, and rhythmic improvisation are all pillars of their practice. Their research engages with histories of tap dance and queer performance art, drawing connections between embodied rhythm, nightlife, and experimental electronics as sites of memory, mischief, survival, and futurity. Liberty produces and performs in nightlife events that bring together diverse collaborators to explore the intersection of tap dance and drag performance. They are the recipient of grants from NYFA, Dance Lab NY, CUNY Dance Initiative, Green Box Arts, and more. Liberty performs regularly across the UK and Germany with artists including Xhosa Cole and Zyggurat, and has been featured on live albums released by Stoney Lane Records. They performed in Ayodele Casel's Diary of a Tap Dancer at the American Repertory Theater, and they also collaborate extensively with Naomi Funaki, Michela Lerman, and Orlando Hernández's Knee-Heart Connection. Other stage credits include the Guggenheim, New York Live Arts, The Joyce Theater, and The Apollo Theater.

Annie MingHao Wang (she/they) is a choreographer and dancer in New York. They are a 2025 Fellow of the Bogliasco Center, an awardee of the Van Cleef & Arpels Fellowship in Dance, and have been an artist-in-residence at Movement Research, Topaz Arts, Marble House Project, Leimay Foundation, BRIC, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Their work has been awarded grants by LMCC (Manhattan Arts Grant) and Brooklyn Arts Council. They have been presented by Danspace Project, Pioneers Go East at their 2024 Out-FRONT! Festival, Movement Research @Judson, Leimay's OUTSIGHT series, Five Myles, and the Exponential Festival. Wang is a longtime company member of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, and is lucky to also have danced for Same as Sister, Sugar Vendil's Isogram project, and Emily Johnson among other gifted artists.