ARTIST SERVICES
Artists in
Residence
(AIR)
2023 SADC Artist in Residence (AIR) Program
Overview
Shawl-Anderson Dance Center is proud to welcome back our Artist in Residence program for emerging and established artists in the Bay Area. Choreographers of all dance styles/forms are welcome to apply. Residencies prioritize the gift of time and space for creative process, and do not require a final piece or other product.
Established Artist Residency: this residency is for artists who have been making work for at least 5 years. One Established Artist Residency will be awarded in 2023.
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$1,000 stipend (paid at start of residency)
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50 hours of rental space, February 15 - December 31, 2023
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Monthly check-in support from SADC Artistic Director
Emerging Artist Residency: this residency is for the artist who is within the first 5 years of making work. Two Emerging Artist Residencies will be awarded in 2023.
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$500 stipend (paid at start of residency)
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25 hours of rental space, February 15 - December 31, 2023
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Monthly check-in support from SADC Artistic Director
Timeline
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AIR period - February - December 2023
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Application and fee deadline - Monday, January 9, 2023 by 8pm
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The panel will review applications in late January, and all applicants will be notified on January 31, 2023 by email.
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The 2023 selection panel will consist of 3 community members selected from an open call process.
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Eligibility
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Must be at least 18 years of age
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Artists who have received a residency within the last 5 years are not eligible to apply
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Dancers currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate dance program are not eligible to apply
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If you applied previously and were not selected, you are encouraged to re-apply
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We strongly encourage BIPOC and LGBTQIA2+ artists to apply
Additional
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Available hours at SADC for residency use are Mon-Fri: 9am-9pm, Fri: 9am-9pm, Sa-Su: 9am-9pm
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PLEASE NOTE: The time slots with the most availability are Monday through Friday from 10am-4pm, and Sat/Sun after 2pm.
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Accessibility: Please note that SADC's Alcatraz Ave location is not wheelchair accessible. We will have a wheelchair accessible residency space available by July 1, 2023. If you are an applicant in need of an accessible space, please plan to use your awarded time between July-December 2023 if offered the residency.
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SADC will spotlight and amplify your work and residency throughout 2023 via social media and the weekly email list; you are welcome to do a social media takeover as well.
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There will be two recipients for the emerging artist residency, and one recipient for the established artist residency for our 2023 season.
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There is a $25 fee to apply, NOTAFLOF (no one turned away for lack of funds). Please write to Adult Program Registrar Clarissa Dyas at adults@shawl-anderson.org for additional financial support.
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If you are not selected as an artist in residence, SADC still wants to honor your time applying and paying the fee. We will provide written feedback from the panel based on your submitted application, and also credit your account for 2 hours of studio time to be used in 2023 ($44 value).
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From December 7, 2022 through January 5, 2023, Artistic Director Jill Randall can review any drafts of applications and offer feedback. (Jill is not on the selection panel.) Email jill@shawl-anderson.org with a Google Doc of your drafted responses and video links. She will review and offer feedback within a week via email or document comments.
How to Apply
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Submit application using the Apply Now link below.
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The application questions are here if you want to copy them and make a draft prior to submitting.
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Create an account Union.fit if you do not already have one or sign in to your current account
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Pay the $25 application fee here on Union.fit
Questions?
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Please write to Artistic Director Jill Randall with any general questions

by Sarah Cusson

by Lydia Daniller

by Dave Cheshire

by Sarah Cusson
2020-2022 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Kara Davis/
project agora
ARTIST STATEMENT
In my choreography, I am drawn to the intersection of set material with improvisation because I feel the collision of predictability and random occasion most accurately expresses the trajectory of any given human life. My feeling body is far more creative than my conscious mind. When making work, I follow what feels right based on my connection to myself as well as the individuals I am working with, and a piece presents itself. I invite the dancers in front of me—human bodies in motion, marked with the chaos of memory, generational histories and herstories, and the impact of unseen outside forces—to enlist their intuitive impulses as we search for the shores of a piece’s arrival. In my process I enlist my collaborators’ differences as a source of expressive power inside the work’s subject matter. I will building work that will premiere in June 2020 at Dance Mission Theater.
BIO
Kara Davis, Co-Artistic Director of project agora, danced for Atlanta Ballet, Ohio Ballet, and Ballet Jörgen in Toronto, Ontario. She is a founding member of KUNST-STOFF and Janice Garrett & Dancers, both of whom she danced for ten years. Her choreography and dancing have received multiple Isadora Duncan Awards and nominations. Her choreography has been presented at the ACDA Nationals at the Kennedy Center, YBCA, SF MOMA, SF International Arts Festival, Bates Dance Festival, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Davis has taught and choreographed at LINES Dominican University and Training Program since 2005.
Established Artist Residency
Carmen Roman
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is deeply rooted in Afro-Peruvian culture. I use traditional dance genres within Afro-Peruvian culture as the basis to create and add movements inspired by modern dance and other dances of the African Diaspora. I am interested in the intersection of dance and spirituality, creating ritual through song, dance, and rhythm. I am interested in decolonizing space, spiritual practice, and the body. Performing in public spaces to reclaim and activate space. I explore within Afro-Peruvian dance aiming to connect to my roots and make Afro-Peruvian culture known across cultural boundaries.
BIO
Carmen was raised both in Lima, Peru, and in the Bay Area. She is the founder and artistic director of Cunamacué, a dance company that promotes the continuity of Afro-Peruvian culture. As a choreographer, her work is deeply rooted in Afro-Peruvian dance vocabulary fused with movements inspired by other dances of the African Diaspora and modern dance using her practice as an art form and vehicle for self-expression. Carmen has published dance research in the African Performance Review (2013). In 2015-2016 she was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship in Dance to Peru. Her dance documentary “Herencia de Un Pueblo (Inheriting a Legacy )” shot in El Carmen, Peru was awarded Best Documentary and Best Cinematography at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival (2016). Carmen holds a B.A. in Dance from San Francisco State University and an MFA in Dance from Mills College. www.cunamacue.org
Established Artist Residency
Audrey Johnson
ARTIST STATEMENT
I make work with the belief that embodiment is a survival practice in the midst of climate, political, and human rights crises. I believe that movement is healing and generates transformation on the personal, cellular level, and in the collective, macrocosm. I create to remember my self, and to call in intuitive and ancestral knowledge. I make space for excavating unknown knowns, and I write a future into space that I want to be a part of. My work honors Black feminism in its praxis, and looks to the textures of Earth for physical memory.
BIO
Audrey Johnson is a movement artist with roots from Plymouth and Detroit, MI, currently living in Berkeley, CA. Her work sources black feminist metaphysics, afrofuturism, time travel, geology, and joy as embodied resilience practices and survival strategies. Audrey currently dances with GERALDCASELDANCE, was a collaborator for three years with Harge Dance Stories under the artistic direction of Jennifer Harge (Detroit), and has also worked with choreographers Biba Bell (Detroit), Dafi Altabeb (American Dance Festival), and Stephanie Hewett (San Francisco), among others. Audrey is a co-founder of Collective Sweat Detroit and holds a BFA in Dance with Honors from Wayne State University.
Emerging Artist Residency
Kristen Rulifson
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am currently in research of decay and regeneration, and the in-between spaces of life and death. I am inspired by the erotic nature of soil, warmth, and dampness, and how these darks spaces of digestion serve us. How can one embody their own decay? How can we be with our shared, collective morbidity? As much of my understanding of these questions comes from lived experiences relating to cancer, addiction, and loss, I am looking to termites, mushrooms, and salamanders as my teachers to research a process that is strongly rooted in memory, fear, and shame. I am inspired to make work that connects us with our humanity and interconnectedness with the environment. I strive to create spaces that surface visceral remembering and provide opportunities for integration of stories that don’t follow a linear narrative.
BIO
Kristen Rulifson is dance maker and wellness educator. She received her Bachelor's from UC Davis in Neurobiology Physiology and Behavior and Dramatic Arts (2014). She then worked as a health educator in Sacramento and developed a touring youth dance company largely composed of immigrants and refugees sharing their individual and collective stories through hip hop and spoken word. She has since trained in the Life-Art Process at the Tamalpa Institute and co-developed Naturally Expressive Leaders, an organization that offers Somatic Leadership camps for youth. Kristen shares her passion for dance as a Teaching Artist in schools and performer. She has collaborated and performed with Scott Wells & Dancers, Echo Theatre Suitcase, Piñata Collective, Artship, amongst others while co-directing an absurdist dance-theatre company called FloorPlay. Outside of the United States, her work has been received in Mexico, Turkey, and Canada.
Emerging Artist Residency
Erin Yen
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am curious if understanding through the dancing body can help pave the way for a sustainable future with technology. Currently, I am considering the body as (itself) a piece of technology, one set out to absorb and make sense of all data with which it interacts. There is too much data, so what comes to the forefront are questions around balancing subjectivity and objectivity within any processing individual. Do I train towards expert expression of specifically tailored fantasies, or do I encourage pathways that challenge the breadth of individualized sensation within clarified worlds? In my work, we try both.
BIO
Erin Yen shares a personal practice which investigates one’s understanding of self and ‘other’ (in a growing age of technology.) She is a Bay Area transplant, bringing with her an eclectic movement training which begun in Chicago. She is lucky to have absorbed many grooves, incorporating styles from tap to ballet and Cunningham to Gaga in her body history. Erin holds a BFA with Distinction in Dance from The Ohio State University. She has performed works by artists Ohad Naharin, Bebe Miller, Johannes Weiland, and Eddie Taketa, and she has danced with companies such as Alvin Ailey and BalletMet. Erin is fluent in the Laban Systems of Movement Analysis, and was the first to use Labanotation to document a piece of Doug Varone’s work, Possession (‘94.) Her choreography continues to consider physical effort alongside logical design in hopes of clarifying the body’s relationship to continued technological processes. Clashes are imminent. yenerinc.wordpress.com
New Voices
Residency
Frankie Lee Petersen III
ARTIST STATEMENT
.fLEE dance stands for the acronym fleeked, loving, enlightened & educating. The purpose is to bring glory to God the Father, the Son & the Spirit.
BIO
Frankie received his BFA from UNCSA & has trained with the Zion Dance Project, the Merce Cunningham Trust, The Dance Company Experience, Springboard Danse Montreal, Shen Wei Dance Arts & American Dance Festival. He has danced for Zaccho Dance Theater, Oakland Ballet, dawsondancesf, Helen Simoneau Danse, Antonio Brown Dance, Gaspard & Dancers, Rising Rhythm, Rawdance SF. He is an Izzie Award Nominee, Webby Award Winner & has choreographed for the Bay Area Ballet Conservatory, Gritty City Repertory Youth Ensemble, Alabama State University, Alvarado Elementary School, June Jordan School of Equity, Design Tech High School, Dance Mission Grrrl Brigade & Zion Dance Project. He was recently an Adjunct Professor at Mills College & also teaches for the Bay Area Ballet Conservatory, the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco, Dance Mission Grrrl Brigade, and LINES Dance Center.
Black Choreographers' Festival Residency
Natalya Shoaf
ARTIST STATEMENT
i am a freelance movement analyst— as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher of my passion for movement, i focus on the embodiment of ideas as a way to tap into individuals interpretation of their lived experience through their innate movement.
BIO
Natalya Shoaf was born and raised in Southern California where she began her dance training and later attended Los Angeles County High School of the Arts. Natalya currently resides in the Bay area as she finishes out her senior year in the Alonzo King LINES Ballet BFA program at Dominican University of California. She attended Springboard Danse Montreal in 2017 and now has had the opportunity to attend the Addo Platform summer intensive as a scholarship recipient. She has performed works created by dazaun.dance, maurya kerr, gregory dawson, david harvey, katie scherman, bobbi jene smith, alex ketley, peter chu, ohad naharin, and many more.
Black Choreographers' Festival Residency
Jen Meller &
Lili Wecker
ARTIST STATEMENT
Our work dreams new futures. We look to dance-making to uplift queer, feminist identities, increase space for marginalized voices, and create avenues for female and gender-nonconforming bodies to be the subjects of our own lives. We seek connection between the ancient and the futuristic, asking questions about what the future could include if post-industrial, patriarchal capitalism did not regulate and contain our bodies, psyches and relationships. Constructing performances allows us to invigorate new self-conceptions and to populate a world onstage that is radically inclusive, cooperative and experiential, and privileges human need and connection between our somatic selves and the earth we are from and towards.
BIO
Jennifer Meller comes from a long line of visual artists and performers. She studied design at Parsons School of Design and music at California Institute of the Arts where her focus was on world music and dance. As a professional musician, she played and recorded with numerous artists and composed music for film and dance. She currently teaches Baroque Dance at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center and other Bay Area institutions, directs her own historical dance company. Lili Weckler was the recipient of a Fleishhacker Grant in 2018, was a participant in ODC’s Pilot 68 in 2017, and appeared in SPF Festival in 2016. Her work was written about in the SF Chronicle and the J Weekly. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of Integral Studies, attended the Lecoq School in Paris, toured with Bread & Puppet Theater, and founded HATCH Performance Collective. Her teaching history includes East Bay Gyrotonic, LINES Ballet, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, the Brightworks School, New Conservatory Theater Center, and for the SF Mime Troupe’s Youth Theater Program. http://liliwecklerunhinge.com/ sfrenaissancedancers.org
Creative Dialogue Residency
with Randee Paufve
Claire Calalo Berry
ARTIST STATEMENT
My dance company, for change dance collective, has worked together for the past ten years. The deeply collaborative methods we have cultivated, allowing all of the dancers to act as choreographers and have ownership over the work, are sacred to me. The challenge I now face is how to be unafraid of my individual artistic vision, while also honoring the artistry and autonomy of my collaborators. I have
been intrigued by the ecological concept of pyriscence: the maturation and release of seeds, triggered by fire or smoke, and a larger theme around fire and it's transformational, destructive, and potential energies. www.forchangedance.org
BIO
Claire Calalo Berry is the founder of for change dance collective, a dance company that seeks to make work through a process that reflects the ideals of socially conscious art. Calalo Berry graduated from Santa Clara University with degrees in Dance and Biology, and holds an MFA in Dance from the University of California at Irvine, where she studied with Donald McKayle, Loretta Livingston, Jodie Gates, and other esteemed faculty. There, she first began to cultivate a choreographic method she refers to as “democratic dance-making,” which attempts to explore deeply collaborative practices within the context of professional concert dance. She teaches at the Performing Arts Academy of Marin and has been an Adjunct Lecturer in modern dance and
choreography at Santa Clara University. Her professional performance credits include works by Tandy Beal, Angela Demmel, Sue Li Jue, Nina Haft, Nhan Ho, Kristin Damrow, and Lauren Baines.
Creative Dialogue Residency
with Nina Haft
PAST ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

2019
Established Artist Residency
Byb Chanel Bibene | Embodiment Project | Epiphany Dance Theater | Megan Nicely
Emerging Artist Residency
Liv Schaffer | randy reyes
New Voices Residency
Rebecca Morris
Frank Shawl Residency
Jessica Damon | Wax poet(s) | Andrew Merrell & Shaunna Vella
Black Choreographers Festival Residency
Shawn Hawkins | Joslynn Mathis Reed
Deaf Dance Festival Residency
Urban Jazz Dance/Antoine Hunter

2018
Established Artist Residency
Erika Chong Shuch | Katie Faulkner
Emerging Artist Residency
Julie Crothers
New Voices Residency
ragbag
Frank Shawl Residency
ka.nei.see collective | Nol Simonse
Black Choreographers Festival Residency
Visceral Roots Dance | Dazaun Soleyn
Deaf Dance Festival Residency
Urban Jazz Dance/Antoine Hunter

2017
Iu-Hui Chua
Xochitl Colmenarez
Kim Ip
Dohee Lee
Mix'd Ingrdnts
Karla Quintero
Simpson/Stulberg Collaborations
2015-
2016
2015
Fog Beast | Lisa Hyde
Mid to West Dance Collective | Jessi Barber | Melanie Cutchon | Emmeline Gonzalez-Beban & Ramon Pulido
2016
Christy Funsch | Lauren Baines | Mariah Steele | Heidi Carlsen | Claudia Anata | Aura Fishbeck | Katherine Hawthorne

2012-
2014
2012
Anne-Rene Petrarca | Peling Kao | Fog Beast
2013
Rebecca Wilson | Troy Macklin | Ashley Trottier & Jochelle Pereña | Kevin Paul Hockenberry
2014
Kate Jordan | Stranger Lover Dreamer | Tanya Chianese | Tyler Eash | Daria Kaufman
Rogelio Lopez

2005-
2011
2005
Nina Haft | Carol Kueffer
2006
Paufve Dance | Dana Lawton
2007
little seismic dance
Jane Schnorrenberg & Kegan Marling
2008
ahdanco | Aileen Kim | Marcia Cantillana
2009
Mo Miner | Nina Haft & Co.
2010
Dandelion Dance Theater
2011
Valerie Gutwirth | Nadia Oka
Janet Collard | Anne-Lise Reusswig
COMPANIES IN
RESIDENCE
(CIR)

Nina Haft & Company
in residence since 2010
Director: Nina Haft
Nina Haft & Company is an Oakland-based contemporary dance group. Taking a ‘live cinema’ approach to performance, Artistic Director Nina Haft integrates movement, sound, light and space into evocative works that foster a deeper understanding of place. Nina Haft & Company is known for the Dance in Unexpected Places Series, which has presented cultural commentary and site-specific performances in dockyards, synagogues, parking lots, libraries, train stations, bars, government buildings, historic Mountain View Cemetery and other liminal spaces. Nina has presented her work throughout the Bay Area and abroad, including performances in West Wave Dance Festival, Bare Bones, 8x8x8, ODC’s 24 Views, the Bay Area Dance Series, Festival at the Lake and at numerous other venues.
ninahaftandcompany.com

Dana Lawton Dances
in residence since 2016
Director: Dana Lawton
Dana Lawton Dances' mission is to celebrate social diversity and develop meaningful collaborations with other artists. The company ranges in age from 25-70. Working with dancers of diverse ages offers a unique perspective into the rich multiplicity of human lives, provides the audience with a new perspective on what constitutes a dancer, and inspires people to re-imagine what is possible at any age.
danalawtondances.org
Applications Accepted By Invitation Only
Urban Jazz Dance/Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival Residency
(50 hours)
Shawl-Anderson Dance Center is pleased to be hosting a 50-hour residency with choreographer Antoine Hunter (Urban Jazz Dance) in preparation for the annual Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival.
Black Choreographers Festival Winter Residency
The Black Choreographers Festival and Shawl-Anderson Dance Center are partnering together to support at least one artist each year. Stay tuned for news about the 2023 residency/partnership.