Participate
Support is may be applied for by Dance Films Association Members in good standing.
Grant Application Window:
Opens: February 18, 2022 at 12:00 a.m. ET
Closes: March 31, 2022 at 11:59 p.m.
- Individual Membership with Dance Films Association: Click here to learn more about DFA Members’ benefits and sign up.
- Project Description
- Team Description
- Timeline and Schedule
- Budget and Budget Notes
- Outline/Treatment, Storyboard, and/or Script
- Current Needs to Complete Film
- Visual Support
- Submission by Deadline
We encourage creativity in applications, and require an outline, treatment, storyboard, or script, as well as visual support and a budget. Video work samples are not required, since projects in various different stages of productions are eligible to apply, though if available, it is highly recommended to include a video work sample. Additionally, we ask for a synopsis, artistic statement, team description, timeline, outline of needs, and distribution strategy. Your application should convey a comprehensive sense of your project. DFA is interested in supporting projects that demonstrate their ability to be completed and released. In the application, you will be asked if you would like the project to be considered for the Work-in-Progress Screening award (this does not disqualify your application from any monetary award).
Dance Films Association Members in good standing may submit their applications. Click here to submit.
Monetary Award
The full recipient of the Production Grant receives an award of $2,000 to $2,500, and two recipients receive $500 honorary awards. Each recipient receives an opportunity with Dance Films to evaluate their project’s needs, followed by periodic check-ins as the films near completion.
Works in Progress Selection
One Production Grant recipient receives the Work-in-Progress Screening award: an opportunity to show their project at Film at Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater as part of the annual Dance on Camera Festival. This special screening is designed to increase the film’s visibility and provide the filmmaker with audience feedback in a post-screening discussion moderated by an esteemed member of the dance film community. The selected film must be in the final in a stage of production that enable a screening of the project. In order to be eligible, applicants must be available to attend the annual Dance on Camera Festival for a presentation at Film at Lincoln Center. Please note: travel and accommodation are not provided.
Recipients
Tens Across the Borders
Full recipient
By: CHAN Sze-Wei
Recipient of an honorable mention award in 2021
SYNOPSIS
When New York’s underground ballroom culture burst onto mainstream media, hardly anyone knew the nascent scenes in Southeast Asia. This film follows Sun, Teddy and Xyza trailblazing the way in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. They build found families and safer spaces, walk international balls and gain recognition as members of major ballroom houses. Their stories and struggles are interwoven with the colouful fabric of daily life in Southeast Asia. Teddy and Xyza finally travel to meet their houses in New York, while Sun premieres his dance solo, using ballroom culture to tell his life story.
When New York’s underground ballroom culture burst onto mainstream media, hardly anyone knew the nascent scenes in Southeast Asia. This film follows Sun, Teddy and Xyza trailblazing the way in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. They build found families and safer spaces, walk international balls and gain recognition as members of major ballroom houses. Their stories and struggles are interwoven with the colouful fabric of daily life in Southeast Asia. Teddy and Xyza finally travel to meet their houses in New York, while Sun premieres his dance solo, using ballroom culture to tell his life story.
A Sigh of Origin
Honorary award
By: Katherine Maxwell
SYNOPSIS
Conceptualized by Katherine Maxwell, ‘a sigh of origin’ is a dance film featuring nine dancers representing a single individual and the various lives lost and found throughout a lifetime: processes of shedding and transforming. Influenced by time spent with Maxwell’s 90-year old grandmother, ‘a sigh of origin’ will convey how change in a person over a lifetime, be it 18, 34 or 90 years, affects how one relates to the world around them. The cast made up of men, women, and non-binary individuals from a range of cultural backgrounds, represent how a person evolves as an effect of pivotal moments.
Conceptualized by Katherine Maxwell, ‘a sigh of origin’ is a dance film featuring nine dancers representing a single individual and the various lives lost and found throughout a lifetime: processes of shedding and transforming. Influenced by time spent with Maxwell’s 90-year old grandmother, ‘a sigh of origin’ will convey how change in a person over a lifetime, be it 18, 34 or 90 years, affects how one relates to the world around them. The cast made up of men, women, and non-binary individuals from a range of cultural backgrounds, represent how a person evolves as an effect of pivotal moments.
107 Eileen Kramer
Honorary award
By: Sue Healey
SYNOPSIS
Eileen Kramer is an Australian dancer, choreographer, artist and writer – a true creative spirit – born in 1914 and still making art in 2022 at the age of 107. A member of the Bodenwieser Ballet (1940s), Australia’s first modern dance company, Eileen toured internationally and then spent the next 70 years living and working in India, Europe and America. She returned to Sydney at 99 with only a suitcase and a desire to keep creating. Using interviews, recent and historical footage from the 1940s, this dance portrait/doco reveals her creative manifesto and inimitable spirit.
SYNOPSIS
Eileen Kramer is an Australian dancer, choreographer, artist and writer – a true creative spirit – born in 1914 and still making art in 2022 at the age of 107. A member of the Bodenwieser Ballet (1940s), Australia’s first modern dance company, Eileen toured internationally and then spent the next 70 years living and working in India, Europe and America. She returned to Sydney at 99 with only a suitcase and a desire to keep creating. Using interviews, recent and historical footage from the 1940s, this dance portrait/doco reveals her creative manifesto and inimitable spirit.
Conference of the Birds
Work in Progress screening
By: Bijoyini Chatterjee
SYNOPSIS
Eight exceptional dancers from diverse cultures, different bodies and different concepts of beauty gather in Boston and embark on a unique journey to reinterpret a beloved 12th century Sufi poem “Conference of the Birds”. The film will follow the ephemeral journey of these eight dancers as they learn to be different together and merge their artistic voices through an Islamic text, motifs and symbols. By interweaving Attar’s allegorical poem with the story of the dancers, the film will capture the importance in difference, in found communities and the interdependence of all of us.
Eight exceptional dancers from diverse cultures, different bodies and different concepts of beauty gather in Boston and embark on a unique journey to reinterpret a beloved 12th century Sufi poem “Conference of the Birds”. The film will follow the ephemeral journey of these eight dancers as they learn to be different together and merge their artistic voices through an Islamic text, motifs and symbols. By interweaving Attar’s allegorical poem with the story of the dancers, the film will capture the importance in difference, in found communities and the interdependence of all of us.
This One Then
Directed by Charlotte Griffin with producers Johanna Witherby and MiRi Park
Recipient of an honorable mention award in 2021
Logline
Arrive, accumulate, repeat. Personal objects clutter around solo and duet performers “at home” during pandemic isolation.
Description
This One Then is a remote screendance project featuring a multigenerational ensemble of solo and duet performers “at home” during pandemic isolation. Directed by Charlotte Griffin with producers Johanna Witherby and MiRi Park, This One Then explores repetition and accumulation to highlight the monotony and intimacy of this time. Drawing connections across individual scenes, a narrator and singer describe the evolving duets creating a lyrical and touching portrait of “alone, together.”
Image Credit
Still Image By: Johanna Witherby
Dancers (Clockwise from top left corner): Waeli Wang, Krystal Matsuyama-Tsai, Cinthia Pérez Navarro, Harumi López Gallardo, Hadassah Perry, Kira Fargas, Nyama McCarthy-Brown, and Kasim McCarthy-Brown
Everything You Have Is Yours
Directed by Tatyana Tenenbaum, produced by Brighid Greene, edited by Colin Nusbaum, documenting the work of Hadar Ahuvia and her collaborators.
Synopsis
Israeli/American NYC-based choreographer Hadar Ahuvia is the granddaughter of Zionist ‘kibbutzniks,’ collectivist pioneers in 1920’s Palestine. Out of their need for a national cultural identity grew Israeli folk dance. Salient amongst their source material were dances and songs appropriated from Palestinians, the people whose land they occupied and ultimately displaced. While Hadar’s family moved between Israel/Palestine and the US/Turtle Island, Hadar grew up dancing in her mother’s Israeli folk dance troupe. As an adult, she begins to question the implications of these dances. Motivated by voices of Palestinians, the Jewish Left and the insights of her collaborators, Hadar’s growing awareness drives a wedge between her ideological past and an emergent future beyond Zionism.
Image: Mor Mendel (L) and Hadar Ahuvia (R)
Martyr’s Fiction
by Kayla Farrish
Recipient of an honorary award in 2021
Synopsis
Martyr’s Fiction witnesses five venturing Black American and Women characters allowing themselves to finally dream, eruptively questioning reality, to reclaim life in a dance-theater narrative-film. Stemming from “who can afford to dream?” with lives based in survival and reality immersed in overwhelming surreal violence, each character pushes up against their boundaries-imposed and personal. In varying forms of film, histories, fantasy, and embodiment, their personal quests move through both imagination and reckon with truth as they transform. Immersing in stories of martyrs and unsung heroes, the narrative confronts what we think isn’t possible for ourselves- dismantling present conditions within American oppression.
Unbroken
One of the most persistent stereotypes about black fathers is that they are absent and one of the most common clichés about Krump dance is that it is aggressive, and only that. Our documentary proves both assumptions wrong. We show a group of loving and caring black fathers for whom their children mean the world. And we witness a dance form that, in all its facets and richness, for the dancers opens a way to all of their emotions, and sometimes unlocks feelings they didn’t know they were holding deep down.
Far
by Omri Drumlevich
Recipient of the full award in 2020
Synopsis
Far is a dance film that moves through 6 individual stories of fascination with the unknown and the primal urge to explore it.
In a gloomy, silent world these lonely nomadic explorers long for connection and even though they exist in different times and spaces- they manage to cross paths and even fall in love and dance together in the same place.
A Highwire of Circumstance
by Jacquelyn Elder
Recipient of an honorary award in 2020
Synopsis
A Highwire of Circumstance is an observational documentary capturing the ceaseless effort of the Martha Graham Dance Company as they continue navigating uncharted territory while striving to remain faithful to a singular groundbreaking vision of an absent founder, Ms. Martha Graham.
Martha Graham, known to many as the pioneer of American modern dance, was the charismatic embodiment of her revolution in dance. Her approach to dance and theater revolutionized the art form and her innovative physical vocabulary has irrevocably influenced dance worldwide. Until she was obliged to step down from the stage, Martha Graham performed the lead roles of all her choreographies and her passion was transmitted through her own voice and direction until April 1,1991 when Martha Graham died.
Spell Bound
by Nicola Hepp
Recipient of an honorary award in 2020
Synopsis
A woman is walking slowly through the dark, untouched forest. She is following someone in the distance, someone she can’t quite make out. She has the sensation of being trapped and her thoughts are blurred. Suddenly, the woman realizes that she doesn’t know if she is the pursuer or the one being hunted. Too late, her perception becomes clear, but by then she has already taken a dire decision.
Spell Bound is a journey into a troubled mind, an attempt to imagine what it must be like to be in a psychosis, and not be able to think clearly anymore. When that state of mind can lure you into making fatal choices, who can you trust?.
Written on Water
by Pontus Lidberg
Recipient of the full award in 2019
Synopsis
Happily married but haunted by an unresolved affair from her past, choreographer Alicia (Aurélie Dupont) plumbs the depths of her memories to create a new dance work about unfulfilled desire. Against the backdrop of an ageing theatre by the sea, she builds a sensual and naked work delicately held together by the threads connecting her dancers with each other and with her. Alicia soon finds herself fallen down the rabbit hole of her own creation, in love with the lead dancer, Giovanni (Alexander Jones), and the siren of her fictional work becomes the siren of her life. As she recounts her story to Karl (Pontus Lidberg), his own story brings an unexpected dimension to this exploration of longing and artistic creation. Written on Water is a sensuous and philosophical interrogation of the permeable boundaries between fiction and reality, muse and siren, male and female, and the mutability of the roles we play—Odysseus, sailor, siren—in our lifelong quests for connection, love and inspiration.
Written on Water
by Pontus Lidberg
Recipient of the full award in 2019
Synopsis
Happily married but haunted by an unresolved affair from her past, choreographer Alicia (Aurélie Dupont) plumbs the depths of her memories to create a new dance work about unfulfilled desire. Against the backdrop of an ageing theatre by the sea, she builds a sensual and naked work delicately held together by the threads connecting her dancers with each other and with her. Alicia soon finds herself fallen down the rabbit hole of her own creation, in love with the lead dancer, Giovanni (Alexander Jones), and the siren of her fictional work becomes the siren of her life. As she recounts her story to Karl (Pontus Lidberg), his own story brings an unexpected dimension to this exploration of longing and artistic creation. Written on Water is a sensuous and philosophical interrogation of the permeable boundaries between fiction and reality, muse and siren, male and female, and the mutability of the roles we play—Odysseus, sailor, siren—in our lifelong quests for connection, love and inspiration.
Written on Water
by Pontus Lidberg
Recipient of the full award in 2019
Synopsis
Happily married but haunted by an unresolved affair from her past, choreographer Alicia (Aurélie Dupont) plumbs the depths of her memories to create a new dance work about unfulfilled desire. Against the backdrop of an ageing theatre by the sea, she builds a sensual and naked work delicately held together by the threads connecting her dancers with each other and with her. Alicia soon finds herself fallen down the rabbit hole of her own creation, in love with the lead dancer, Giovanni (Alexander Jones), and the siren of her fictional work becomes the siren of her life. As she recounts her story to Karl (Pontus Lidberg), his own story brings an unexpected dimension to this exploration of longing and artistic creation. Written on Water is a sensuous and philosophical interrogation of the permeable boundaries between fiction and reality, muse and siren, male and female, and the mutability of the roles we play—Odysseus, sailor, siren—in our lifelong quests for connection, love and inspiration.
MONSTER NEWS FEED (working title)
by Cara Hagan
Recipient of an honorary award in 2019
Synopsis
This work follows a central character who, when overwhelmed and attacked by the media they consume (literally and figuratively) through digital and analogue means, decides to fight back to reclaim sound body and mind. Following an epic battle, the character makes their way through a magical portal that brings them to the land where they can heal. Born of the director’s research on device use, information addiction, and the effects of a constant stream of news on the body, this piece weaves aspects of science, shared cultural experiences and magical realism to make commentary on our ever-changing relationship to wellbeing.
Western
by Ellen Smith Ahern
Recipient of an honorary award in 2019
Choreography, performance & direction by Kate Elias & Ellen Smith Ahern
Cinematography & editing by Tori Lawrence
Music by Vicki Brown
Voices from community members of Wyoming’s Big Horn Region
Synopsis
Western experiments with storytelling by pairing women’s dancing bodies with the landscape and voices of a rural Wyoming community.
The project integrates dance, film and storytelling to explore perceptions of the American West and American identity. Set in rural Wyoming, Western depicts relationships shaped by great distances, manifest in both the vast expanse of sky and landscape and the immediate physical tension of two humans moving in and out of sight and contact. When layered with the voices of community members, the work becomes an experiment in inclusivity, creating space for diverse voices and bodies in a rich, challenging landscape while engaging modern dance to provide visceral access points to the truths and memories words touch upon.
OBSESSED WITH LIGHT: THE GENIUS OF LOIE FULLER
by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbuehl
Recipient of the Work-in-Progress Screening in 2019
Synopsis
OBSESSED WITH LIGHT will tell the story of Loïe Fuller, a visionary artist and technological trailblazer who overcame numerous hurdles to become one of the most famous dancers of her day. She launched Isadora Duncan’s career, promoted Auguste Rodin’s sculpture in the U.S. and inspired Picasso, Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. Her passion for science and technology led her to extraordinary innovations in lighting and stagecraft. The film will be structured around the creation of a new dance by American choreographer Jody Sperling, interweaving stunning hand-tinted vintage footage of Fuller’s dances and interviews with contemporary artists and performers influenced by her.
Written on Water
by Pontus lidberg
Recipient of the full award in 2019
Synopsis
Happily married but haunted by an unresolved affair from her past, choreographer Alicia (Aurélie Dupont) plumbs the depths of her memories to create a new dance work about unfulfilled desire. Against the backdrop of an ageing theatre by the sea, she builds a sensual and naked work delicately held together by the threads connecting her dancers with each other and with her. Alicia soon finds herself fallen down the rabbit hole of her own creation, in love with the lead dancer, Giovanni (Alexander Jones), and the siren of her fictional work becomes the siren of her life. As she recounts her story to Karl (Pontus Lidberg), his own story brings an unexpected dimension to this exploration of longing and artistic creation. Written on Water is a sensuous and philosophical interrogation of the permeable boundaries between fiction and reality, muse and siren, male and female, and the mutability of the roles we play—Odysseus, sailor, siren—in our lifelong quests for connection, love and inspiration.
Panelists
2022 panelists: Sonia Dawkins, Francisco Graciano, and Marta Renzi
Sonia Dawkins
Panelist
Sonia Dawkins, founder and artistic director of SD/Prism Dance Theatre, is a graduate of The University of the Arts and earned a Master’s in Dance/Kinesiology & Choreography from SUNY Brockport. A faculty member at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle (the first African American female teacher, 12 ½ years) and Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C( 3 years), she has also been an Artist-in Residence at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre School; University of North Carolina School of the Arts; University of Oklahoma; Cincinnati Ballet School; and Jones-Haywood Dance School.
Ms. Dawkins has performed extensively with choreographers and companies in the United States and the National Dance Company of Jamaica. Her national and international choreography credits include: Village Theatre (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; My Heart is a Drum); Seattle Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, Goodman Theatre (Pullman Porter Blues); Seattle Repertory Theatre (Three Musketeers, Brother Size, The Breach); Seattle Children’s Theatre; Pacific Northwest Ballet; Nevada Ballet; Seattle Theatre Group (Dance This); and Broadway Bound (13 the Musical, Bye Bye Birdie, God Lives in Glass). She choreographed her dancers to perform at the Iliev Foundation at the Bulgaria Dance Festival and the Mexican International Festival. At Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, she choreographed and coached winning participants in the Youth Grand Prix and the Young Arts Recognition. SD/Prism has presented workshops at dance schools in Barcelona, 2017-2019 andat Studio Harmonica in France, 2017. In 2019, she served as a Judge for the World Cup Dance Competition.
Ms. Dawkins has received the Gypsy Rose Lee Award for choreography for Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2019; Brother Size, 2011; and was nominated for the same award for Pullman Porter blues, 2012. A recipient of the New Directors Choreography Lab from Alvin Ailey American Dance Foundation, she has also been selected to present a new musical at the New York Theatre Barn. She has served on the faculty of Ballet Academy East, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet summer intensives, as choreographer and faculty at SLK Ballet, and is very honored to have choreographed an excerpt of the world premier ballet on PHILADANCO, Pieces of My Heart, based on unpublished poetry by August Wilson.
Most recently, during the summer of 2022, Ms. Dawkins choreographed and directed the premier production of Pieces of My Heart as the inaugural artist in residence at the Des Moines Performing Arts Center; served her 3rd as faculty and choreographer for the Oklahoma Dance Festival; and presented workshops Lunch Dance Institute, San Diego. Currently, she serves on the Dance/Film Association Board; is a member of the Stage Directors, Choreographers Society; and teaches at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre School/Fordham University.
Francisco Graciano
Panelist
Marta Renzi
Panelist
Since 2005, Marta has directed and edited over 3 dozen short films, completing her debut feature film Her Magnum Opus, in 2017. She has received 7 NEA Choreographic Fellowships, and a New York Dance & Performance Award (a “Bessie”), as well as funding from Metropolitan Life, the Jerome Foundation and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Awarded by Dancing in the Streets as a “fearless explorer” in 1995, her Project Co. took every opportunity to perform outdoors for free including yearly appearances at venues like Lincoln Center Out of Doors and SummerStage in Central Park. Renzi was a resident choreographer twice at The Yard, and at Jacob’s Pillow, where she helped inaugurate its Inside/Out program. Marta is a 2013 Bogliasco Fellow, a RAW supported artist, and in 2019 was the only filmmaker selected for the inaugural Mabel Residency at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Rhode Island. Twice in the 80’s Renzi was commissioned to direct half-hour videodances which were broadcast on PBS. Most recently, she premiered A Different Day for Rhode Island College, her 7th commissioned dance film for a university dance company. She has collaborated in theater (Andre Gregory), circus (Cecil MacKinnon) and film (John Sayles), and danced with David Gordon, Douglas Dunn, Kei Takei and with Twyla Tharp in Hair.
2021 panelists: Cara Hagan, Pioneer Winter, and Marta Renzi
Cara Hagan
Panelist
Cara Hagan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work exists at the intersections of movement, digital space, words, contemplative practice, and community. Hagan’s work has been seen on stage, on screen, and in educational settings across the United States and abroad. Hagan serves as director and curator for ADF’s Movies by Movers, an annual, international screendance festival under the auspices of the American Dance Festival. Hagan is an author as well, and her book Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice is due out from McFarland Publishing this year.
Pioneer Winter
Panelist
Pioneer Winter (he/they) is a Miami-based choreographer and dance artist. He directs Pioneer Winter Collective, a group of artists, activists and allies in their own right, whose bodies and voices transform their social, political, and cultural landscapes. PWC is a dance-theater company, rooted in social practice and community, queer visibility and beauty beyond the mainstream. Recognized in Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch, PWC democratizes performance in public spaces, museums and galleries, stage, and film. Pioneer has been commissioned by the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Miami Theater Center, Karen Peterson and Dancers, Tigertail Productions, Jacksonville Dance Theatre, and FundArte. Pioneer Winter’s work is supported by local, state, and foundation grants and fellowships, including MAP Fund and New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Production support for the project Birds of Paradise, which premieres at the Adrienne Arsht Center in September 2021. Pioneer is the Adrienne Arsht Center’s first Artist-in-Residence collaboration in a decade. They earned an MPH Public Health and Epidemiology from Florida International University’s Stempel College of Public Health (2009) and MFA Choreography from Jacksonville University/White Oak (2016), as the first artist recipient of the Dennis R. Washington Achievement Scholarship. An extension of their creative practice, Pioneer has curated and directed ScreenDance Miami Festival since 2017, presented first by Tigertail Productions and now by Miami Light Project; their own films screen internationally. Pioneer serves as Assistant Teaching Professor in the Honors College and Theatre Department at Florida International University. Affiliations include the Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment (CHUE) and the Miami Studies Program.
Marta Renzi
Panelist
Since 2005, Marta has directed and edited over 3 dozen short films, completing her debut feature film Her Magnum Opus, in 2017. She has received 7 NEA Choreographic Fellowships, and a New York Dance & Performance Award (a “Bessie”), as well as funding from Metropolitan Life, the Jerome Foundation and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Awarded by Dancing in the Streets as a “fearless explorer” in 1995, her Project Co. took every opportunity to perform outdoors for free including yearly appearances at venues like Lincoln Center Out of Doors and SummerStage in Central Park. Renzi was a resident choreographer twice at The Yard, and at Jacob’s Pillow, where she helped inaugurate its Inside/Out program. Marta is a 2013 Bogliasco Fellow, a RAW supported artist, and in 2019 was the only filmmaker selected for the inaugural Mabel Residency at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Rhode Island. Twice in the 80’s Renzi was commissioned to direct half-hour videodances which were broadcast on PBS. Most recently, she premiered A Different Day for Rhode Island College, her 7th commissioned dance film for a university dance company. She has collaborated in theater (Andre Gregory), circus (Cecil MacKinnon) and film (John Sayles), and danced with David Gordon, Douglas Dunn, Kei Takei and with Twyla Tharp in Hair.
Many thanks to our 2020 panelists: Sophia Attebery, Marta Renzi, and Harry Streep.
2019 panelists: Chisa Hidaka, MD and Marta Renzi
Chisa Hidaka, MD
Panelist
Chisa Hidaka, MD is a dancer, dance educator and dance filmmaker. With partner Benjamin Harley, she directs the Dolphin Dance Project (www.dolphin-dance.org), which has produced several award winning short films featuring the collaborative dances co-created by wild dolphins and trained human dancers in the open ocean, as a touchstone to upend assumptions about our relationships with all the creatures with whom we share our planet. The debut film “Together,” (2010) was a recipient of the first DFA production grant.
Marta Renzi
Panelist
Marta Renzi’s short films have screened in festivals all over, and in 2017 she completed her debut feature film Her Magnum Opus. Called “a fearless explorer of unconventional sites” for her site-specific choreography, Renzi made 2 half-hour video dances for PBS in the 1980’s. She served on the DFA Board of Directors for a decade, and on a Production Panel once during that time when there were many fewer applicants!
Jonathan David Kane
Panelist
Jonathan David Kane combines light and sound to convey narratives. His work as a film director, producer, and cinematographer has screened at festivals and institutions worldwide including Sundance, Toronto International, SXSW, Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand, Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), New World Center (Miami), CERN (Geneva), the MoMA, and Brooklyn Museum.
Jennifer Newman
Panelist
A New York based dance and theatre artist and producer, Jennifer Newman has been an artist in residence at Yale University, Central Connecticut State University, The Field, Mabou Mines, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 651 Arts, and Sisters Academy. She has taught workshops across the United States as well as in Sweden, South Africa, China, and Mexico. Her class focuses on classical and modern technique with an emphasis on performance and expression with a specialization in helping students to create personal work inspired by individual experiences. She is currently the Producing Director of Heartbeat Opera and Compagnia de’ Colombari and is on faculty at Central Connecticut State University.
Tiffany Rhynard
Screener
Tiffany Rhynard is a filmmaker, choreographer, and activist. Having created over 60 works for stage and screen, Rhynard’s choreography, dance films, and documentaries have been presented nationwide and internationally. Her dance for the camera pieces have screened at film festivals such as the Dancing for the Camera at the American Dance Festival and at ScreenDance Miami where she won First Prize for her film Invisible Queens. Her documentaries focus on social justice issues and her first doc Little House in the Big House won best documentary at the Central Illinois Feminist Film Festival. Her most recent documentary Forbidden: Undocumented and Queer in Rural America premiered at Outfest LA summer 2016 where it received the Freedom Award for promoting justice and equality in the LGBTQ community. Forbidden was also awarded the first ever Social Justice Film Award from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Rhynard is currently in post-production for Black Stains, a docu-dance film collaboration with choreographer Trent D. Williams, Jr. that addresses dynamics of black male identity in the 21st century. The project received a Production Grant from Dance Films Association.
Alexx Shilling
Screener
Alexx Shilling creates live and filmic dancescapes that invigorate memory and investigate transformation. Shilling prioritizes the body as her primary research site, utilizing improvisation as both a generative tool and a performance practice. Each work yields its own unique process that includes thematic research and active engagement with cameras, costume and material objects, sound and site/place, resulting in an integrated bricolage of multiple logics existing at once, a new logic, forms yet unseen. As artistic director of alexx makes dances, her original choreography has been presented nationally and internationally, through residencies at the Millay Colony, Hammer Museum and Ebenbökhaus / Jewish Museum München, and with generous support from institutions including the Center for Cultural Innovation, Dance Film Association, UCLA and CHIME. After re-locating from New York to Los Angeles, she has been collaborating as a performer with Victoria Marks since 2010 and is currently dancing with Ros Warby, Laurel Jenkins, Alison D’Amato and Richard Rivera/PHYSUAL (New York).
In 2013, Alexx received her MFA in Choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts & Culture/Dance. She teaches at the Loyola Marymount University Dance Department’s Wellness Lab and is a current Artist-in-Residence with Los Angeles Yiddishkayt’s HELIX Project.
Jules Rosskam is an award-winning filmmaker, educator and interdisciplinary artist, whose practice investigates the means by which we construct individual and collective histories and identities. His films have shown internationally and stateside, including the Queens Museum of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the British Film Institute, and Arsenal Berlin. His films have also broadcast on PBS and CBC. In June 2015, Jules mounted a solo exhibition of film and photography works at Action Field Kodra in Greece, in tandem with the Thessaloniki Biennale. With the support of The Center for Independent Documentary and the LEF Foundation’s Moving Image Fund, Jules is completing his fourth feature-length film, Paternal Rites, which will be released in January 2017. www.julesrosskam.com
Sylvie Vitaglione is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, where she is currently working on a dissertation that investigates location shooting and site-specific practices in contemporary Screendance. Her next project explores the use of video as a tool for training the body in movement and fitness practices. Her chapter “Surface Tension: Experimental Dance Films and the Undoing of Urban Space” is forthcoming in April 2016 in Imaging the City: Art, Creative Practices and Media Speculations, edited by Steve Hawley and published by Intellect Books.
She has been an adjunct professor at New York University, The New School, Queens College and the College of Staten Island. She teaches classes on Choreography and the Moving Image, the History and Aesthetics of Music Videos and Documentaries and the Visual Arts. She has programmed screenings, panel discussions and workshops on the Tiny House movement, definitions of experimental film, and dance and documentary form for New York University, Gibney Dance Center and Dance Films Association. She trained in ballet and contemporary dance in Monaco, San Francisco, London and New York, and is a certified yoga instructor.
Erin Crawley-Woods received an MFA in Dance from the University of Maryland, College Park in May 2014. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant at UMD she directed Visible Seams, a site-specific sound/dance/video installation for the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, participated in national and international dance conferences and served as Education Fellow for the Dance Films Association. From 2007-2011 she was a Company Member and Director of Community Outreach at Keshet Dance Company in Albuquerque, NM where she taught and developed curriculum for Keshet’s nationally-recognized Outreach Program for Incarcerated Youth. She has performed in the US and abroad with Adriane Fang, Sharon Mansur, the Nancy Meehan Dance Company, Leslie Satin & Dancers, Sara Rudner & Company, Anneke Hansen, and the Irish Modern Dance Theater. In 2014 she participated in artistic residencies in Oulchy-le Chateau, France and at the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent NY. Crawley-Woods holds a Diploma in Wholistic Bodywork from the New Mexico Academy of Healing Arts and a B.A. in theatre, dance and French from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Dickinson College.
Lorand Janos
Being a film director has allowed me to combine dance – the body in motion – with the love for my life, the moving image. Since 2013 I am also organizing Choreoscope – the International Dance Film Festival of Barcelona. My most ambitious project so far, Choreoscope is the celebration of dance on film, a step further in the exploration of body and cinematographic movement. Supported by the Dance Films Association New York, the festival aims to establish Barcelona as the dance film capital of the Mediterranean. I am always looking for new challenges, new collaborations and ways to expand my audiovisual language. As a media artist, I like to explore with new narrative forms and technologies, in order to, well, tell stories adapted to the 21st Century.
My main influences are the lifes and works of Andrej Tarkovski, Peter Greenaway, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roy Andersson, Steven Soderbergh, DV8, Wim Vandekeybus, Joel Peter Whitkin, Jan Saudek, Man Ray, Chema Madoz, Klaus Obermeier, amongst many other visionaries.
Anna Brady Nuse
Anna Brady Nuse is an Artist Representative at Pentacle and Director of Pentacle’s Metro STEP and Movement Media projects. Nuse received her BFA in dance from California Institute of the Arts, and a graduate certificate in Media Management from The New School. Since 2007 she has published the blog Move the Frame (movetheframe.com) about dance and media and continues to develop services and programs for dance artists to make and distribute their work in media through Pentacle’s Movement Media. Nuse began her career in arts administration in 2001 when she became the assistant to the Director of Booking at Pentacle. Over the past 12 years she has worked in every department of the organization doing fiscal administration, office management, development, grant writing, and marketing. As a dance filmmaker, Nuse directs and choreographs her dance videos through her production company Straight to the Helicopter. From 2004-2006 she produced the cable access television series Move the Frame featuring dance films from across the country and around the world. She has curated numerous screenings and programs including Pentacle’s Kinetic Cinema series since 2008, the 35th Dance on Camera Festival, Danzlenz in New Delhi, the Moving Sounds Festival for the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, the American College Dance Festival at Muhlenberg College, and the Festival of the Moving Body at SUNY Stonybrook. In 2008 her paper on curating dance film was presented at the Screendance Conference at the American Dance Festival. Currently Nuse is producing 14 short dance videos for Pentacle’s Metro STEP project, a program funded by DanceUSA’s Engaging Dance Audiences to help broaden and deepen audience engagement with dance.
Joe Locarro
Joe Locarro – director and producer has directed for stage, film and television. His film Finding Billy was an official selection of the 2012 Dance on Camera Festival and was also nominated for two NY EMMY Awards (best direction and best documentary), which has been broadcast nationally on PBS for the past 5 years. Recent credits include directing the series, Intelligence Squared Debates, (PBS National – 2 seasons), and the PBS series, Vine Talk, starring Stanley Tucci, along with directing numerous PBS specials. Some of his specials include: Remember Me with Parsons Dance Co & the East Village Opera Company, A Tale of Two Cities in Concert, starring Michael York, and three specials with Depak Chopra.
Joe specializes in filming and editing dance, theatre and music and he is currently directing the live web broadcasts from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room. He has also directed numerous stage productions including Ragtime and Les Miserables.
Joe began his career as a dancer and choreographer, dancing with the Boston, Joffrey and Hartford Ballet Companies creating and choreographing 30 works for dance companies across the US. After a career in ballet, he went to perform on Broadway and has been in six Broadway musicals including; the role of ‘Enjolras’ in Les Miserables, the original cast of Ragtime and as ‘Munkustrap’ in Cats as well as appearing in films and television.
Joe brings his many years of performance experience to his work with artists and arts organizations. He continues to film and edit for 25 dance companies around the world as well as numerous Broadway productions and individual artists.
Greg Vander Veer
Director of Keep Dancing and Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter
Gabri Christa
Director of Quarantine
Matthew Seig
Media Specialist, Fiscal Sponsorship at New York Foundation for the Arts
Chris Henderson
Founder/Director of Moviehouse
Program Manager of Arts@Renaissance
Chisa Hidaka
Filmmaker; Director of Dolphin Dance Projects
Ellen Bar
Director of Media Projects at New York City Ballet;
Co-Creator/Executive Producer of NY Export: Opus Jazz
Amy Greenfield
Filmmaker
Robert Johnson
Dance Writer
Elena Martinez
Producer