Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE is dedicated to creating opportunities that nourish our artists and collaborators. That nourishment is critical to making artistic experiences that feed and sustain our communities as a whole. As such we are thrilled to announce the inaugural Caribbean/The Future (CTF) Space Residency program!
This residency program invites a cohort of artists, offers a residency fee and creates communal space to devise ways of being together that are conversational, improvisational, legacy finding and future opening to stimulate the artists practice in new ways. This intimate group of artists has been gathering (virtually) on a bi-monthly basis from April – June to move, discuss, and dream together about resilience, liberation, and creating vibrant futures beyond the daily grind. Caribbean/The Future is a curatorial project originally authored by DCC’s founder Candace Thompson-Zachery and is supported by the ICPP Leadership Fellowship award.
Joya Powell || Marguerite Hemmings || Candace Thompson-Zachery
Fana Fraser || Rosamond S. King || Safi Harriott
Join the artists for sharing and insights from their collective research on Saturday June 26th, 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. ET. This event will be held virtually via RSVP.
MEET THE COHORT!
Fana Fraser is an artist, performer, and full spectrum doula in training. Her creative work is rooted in a contemporary Caribbean aesthetic and framed by narratives of eroticism, power, and compassion. A 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Dance and 2021-22 Performance AIRspace Resident at Abrons Arts Center, Fana was shortlisted for the 2020 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize. Her live performance work has been presented at several venues including Brooklyn Museum, Gibney, and Trinidad Theatre Workshop. She served as Rehearsal Director for Ailey II from 2016-20 and currently works as a co-director for South Bronx-based arts organization, Pepatián. Fana has taught as a guest artist in dance programs at University of the Arts, Adelphi University, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Georgia at Athens, and Appalachian State University. As a dancer she has worked with Camille A. Brown & Dancers, Raja Feather Kelly, Ryan McNamara, Sidra Bell Dance New York, The Francesca Harper Project, Andrea Miller for Hermès, The Metropolitan Opera, and Ailey II. An Honors graduate of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Dance Program, Fana was born and raised on Kairi, in Trinidad and Tobago, and began her dance training at Caribbean School of Dancing. fanafraser.com
A multiethnic native Harlemite, Joya Powell is a Bessie Award winning Choreographer and Educator passionate about community, activism, and dances of the African Diaspora. Throughout her career she has danced with choreographers such as Paloma McGregor, Katiti King, Nicole Stanton, Neta Pulvermacher, and Mar Parrilla. In 2005 Joya founded Movement of the People Dance Company, dedicated to addressing sociocultural injustices through multidisciplinary immersive contemporary dance. Her work has appeared in venues such as: BAM, Lincoln Center, SummerStage, La Mama, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Dance Complex (Cambridge), Mudlark Theater (New Orleans), Movement Research @ Judson Church, The School of Contemporary Dance & Thought (Northampton), BAAD! among others. MOPDC also facilitates community engagements nationally and internationally, and hold an annual Free Day of Dance and acclaimed Winter Intensive. Joya has taught and studied in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Israel. Awards and recognition include: The 2016 Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Bessie Award, Angela’s Pulse’s North Star Arts Incubator 2020-21, CUNY Dance Initiative AIR 2020-21, The Unsettling Dramaturgy Award 2021. She is a collaborating member of Dance Caribbean Collective and Radical Evolution Theater Company. Joya is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University.
Marguerite Hemmings is a Jamaican born, Jersey-raised performance artist and educator currently based in Philadelphia, USA. She focuses on one’s own body, one’s own way of moving, adapting, healing, releasing, protecting, and changing. As a choreographer she specializes in emergent, improvisational and social dance movement styles and technologies, rooted in the story of the African Diaspora. Hemmings’ work centers itself in liberation. She has been creating with youth as a teaching artist for over 10 years. As a dancer/choreographer she has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Harlem Stage, University Settlement, and Dancing While Black to further her work. She is most recently a recipient of the 2017-18 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship, and through that, also the Projecting All Voices Fellowship at Arizona State University. She is a 2017 recipient of the Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer in Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s Skeleton Architecture. She currently directs a multimedia endeavor called we free. we free looks at the millennial and gen z approach to liberation through its music, social dance and social media.
Rosamond S. King draws on reality to create non-literal, culturally and politically engaged interpretations of African diaspora experiences. King’s performance art has been curated into venues including the New York Metropolitan Museum, the VIVA! and Encuentro Festivals, Dixon Place, and the African Performance Art Biennial. Also a creative and critical writer, King is author of All the Rage, the Lambda Award-winning poetry collection Rock | Salt | Stone, and the scholarly book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, winner of the Caribbean Studies Association best book award. www.rosamondSking.black
Candace Thompson-Zachery, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago and now local to Brooklyn, NY, operates between the spheres of dance, cultural production and fitness and wellness, with a focus on the Contemporary Caribbean. She has had an established career as a performer, choreographer, fitness professional, cultural producer, teaching artist, community facilitator and Caribbean dance specialist. In addition to her work in these areas, she leads ContempoCaribe, an ongoing choreography and performance project and is the founder of Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE, an organizational platform for Caribbean dance in the diaspora that spearheads the New Traditions Festival in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Adelphi University’s BFA program for Dance, and has presented, performed and taught at major venues including: Queen’s Hall (T&T), John F. Kennedy Center, New York Live Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and The Ohio State University. She was an inaugural member of the Dancing While Black Fellowship Cohort 2015/2016, was an awardee of Adelphi University’s 2017 – 10 Under 10 program, and a Dixon Place Artist-in-Residence for fall 2017. Candace holds an M.A. in Performance Curation from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University and a Executive Program Certificate in Arts & Culture Strategy from National Arts Strategies and the University of Pennsylvania. As a cultural producer and strategist, Candace has worked with the Dance and Performance Institute of Trinidad and Tobago, WIADCA (NY), Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, Renegade Performance Group, and curator Claire Tancons, for the 2019 Sharjah Biennial. Candace is currently to the Senior Manager of Programming and Justice Initiatives at Dance/NYC – a non-profit umbrella organization for dance in New York City.
Safi Harriott specializes in dance education and cultural studies. She combines an awareness of her own movement through the world with an evolving understanding of systems of power and their impact on individual bodies. She has served as Visiting Lecturer in Dance at the Excelsior Community College in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also served as adjunct faculty and External Examiner (Repertory, Intermediate Modern Technique, Improvisation) for the Edna Manley College (EMCVPA) School of Dance. Harriott has facilitated workshops and presented choreography for the Kingston on the Edge Urban Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Jamaica Dance Umbrella (JDU) in addition to serving as primary coordinator and assistant to the Curator for the JDU and Junior JDU. Committed to international exchange, she has performed and co-taught in Kingston and New York with collaborators Zita Nyarady (Toronto, Canada) and Nancy Hughes (Buffalo NY, USA). More recently, she has served as Visiting Dance Faculty at the Cambridge School of Weston. In 2014 she received an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Smith College.
Meet the CTF Space Residency Cohort
