Abby Zbikowski created her company Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 with founding members Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley. She is an assistant professor of Dance at the University of Illinois and on faculty at American Dance Festival. She has taught at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia; at Festival Un Pas Vers L’Avant in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and studied at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal. Zbikowski holds a BFA in dance from Temple University and an MFA from The Ohio State University.

Zbikowski has performed with Charles O. Anderson/Dance Theater X, Momar Ndiaye, and the Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project. Her company has been presented nationally, performing at venues such as Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA, and the Fuse Box Festival in Austin, TX, among others. Her company’s new work Radioactive Practice is set to premiere at New York Live Arts in New York City in March 2020.

Dianne McIntyre is a dancer, choreographer, researcher, mentor, director, producer, and dance-driven dramatist. McIntyre’s artistic intention is to “express dance as music moving.” She has sustained a career over many decades with choreography in concert dance, theatre, film, and opera. In the 1970s, after moving from Ohio to New York City, she founded Sounds in Motion in Harlem, which grew from a dance/music company into a school into a mecca for artists, scholars, and activists through the 1980s.

Current work for her company and others is performed internationally and encompasses dance connections with live “jazz” music, cultural history, social movements, personal narrative, and legend. She has transformed words into dance, from the work of acclaimed writers Ntozake Shange, James Baldwin, and August Wilson to the aviator stories of her mother. Her work spans genres and collaborators including Olu Dara, Lester Bowie, Cecil Taylor, Amina Claudine Myers, Bartlett Sher, Regina Taylor, and Jonathan Demme. She has choreographed for Broadway plays, London’s West End, over forty regional theatre productions, and for film with Beloved. She received an Emmy nomination for HBO’s Miss Evers’ Boys.

Elizabeth Streb has dived through glass, walked down London’s City Hall, dumped a ton of dirt on her head, and set herself on fire, among many other feats of extreme action. Streb founded the Streb Extreme Action Company in 1979 and established SLAM (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics) in Brooklyn in 2003. Streb holds a MA in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, a BS in Modern Dance from SUNY Brockport, and honorary doctorates from SUNY Brockport, Rhode Island College, and Otis College of Art and Design, and has received numerous honors including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award.

A board member of the Jerome Foundation, she has been a featured speaker at TED2018: The Age of Amazement, BRAINWAVE at The Rubin Museum, TEDxMET, the Institute for Technology and Education, POPTECH, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the Penny Stamps Speaker Series, Chorus America, and on NPR’s Science Friday. 

Lisa Nelson is a choreographer, improvisational performer, videographer, collaborative artist, editor, publisher, and educator who has been exploring the role of the senses in the performance and observation of movement for nearly five decades. Improvisational dance, which posits values of collaboration, dialogue, and flexible survival strategies (both biological and cultural), has been at the core of her artistic research and practice.

Since 1976, she has co-edited and published the independent dancer-written Contact Quarterly dance and improvisation journal, a forty-five-year archive of movement experience and exploration. Her writings appear in numerous journals and books. She maintains long-term collaborations, including with Steve Paxton, who was instrumental in developing a worldwide network of workshops for independent dance artists, and founded Videoda in 1978, a documentation project for improvisational dance. 

Currently, she is developing two digital publications with the Brussels publisher, Contredanse, that invite a wider public into the innate creativity and pleasure of their senses of movement and touch. Nelson lives and farms in Vermont.

Will Rawls is a New York-based choreographer, performer, curator, and writer. His work explores the relationship between dance and language through the prisms of blackness, abstraction, and opacity. His choreographic work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Danspace Project, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Issue Project Room, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Fisher Center at Bard, and Abrons Arts Center. In 2016, he co-curated Lost and Found, a six-week program of performances and artist projects at Danspace Project focused on the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS on dancers, women, and people of color.