Podcast

Born at a UN refugee camp in the Philippines to parents seeking political asylum from the communist Vietnamese government, Duke Dang immigrated to California growing up with the assistance of Section 8 vouchers, food stamps, welfare, and attending Head Start and public schools. An inaugural Gates Millennium Scholar, he earned his bachelor’s degree in Art History at Boston University where he studied abroad in Australia, Brazil, England, India, and South Africa. At New York University he earned his master’s degree in Performing Arts Administration. Since 2006 he has served as the General Manager of Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, where he oversees nonprofit administration and manages the logistics of the artistic programming. He and Producer Caroline Cronson collectively curate the organization’s programs and commissions that traditionally take place in the theater of the Guggenheim, but in recent years have expanded to include works commissioned and made in and for the Guggenheim rotunda. Works & Process programs have been regularly selected by The New York Times as “Best of” and in 2019 More Forever by Caleb Teicher and Conrad Tao, commissioned by Works & Process, was awarded a Bessie Award. In response to the pandemic, since April 2020 Works & Process has virtually commissioned 85 new works and supported over 300 artists. Under Duke’s leadership Works & Process has led the way in producing bubble residencies as a means for artists to safely gather, create, perform and work. The model created by Works & Process has since been duplicated by peer organizations including Dance Theatre of Harlem, Jacob’s Pillow, and the New York Choreographic Institute.  These bubble residencies have helped pave the pathway to the reopening the first live in person indoor performances permitted by the New York State Department of Health, which took place in the rotunda of the Guggenheim on March 20, 2021. Prior to Works & Process, his previous professional experience includes work at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Glimmerglass Festival, Symphony Space, Sydney Theatre Company, and Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 2013, Dang with his husband Charles Rosen, co-founded and continue to serve on the steering committee of the Hudson Valley Dance Festival, benefitting Dancers Responding to AIDS. Now in its 9^th year, the event has raised over  $1 million dollar to support social service organizations in the Hudson Valley and nationally. They live in both New York City and the Hudson Valley.

Megan Williams is an independent dance artist, choreographer, teacher and repetiteur, with a BFA from the Juilliard School, and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her choreography has been produced by 10 Hairy Legs, DanceNOW NYC at Joe’s Pub and Dance Theater Workshop, and by the Rivertown Artist’s Workshop, Barnspace, MIXT Co., Purchase College, Marymount Manhattan College, Connecticut College and Interlochen Arts Academy.  In addition to performing her own work, she can be seen dancing with choreographer Rebecca Stenn and in Netta Yurashalmy’s Paramodernities project. She performed and toured internationally in the 1980’s with the companies of Laura Glenn, Ohad Naharin, and Mark Haim, among many others. In 1988, she joined the Mark Morris Dance Group, dancing for 10 years, touring worldwide, teaching, and appearing in several films, including Falling Down Stairs (with YoYo Ma), The Hidden Soul of Harmony, The Hard Nut and Dido and Aeneas. Ms. Williams continues her affiliation with Morris as a guest performer , creating the role of Lady Capulet in Morris’ 2009 Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare and dancing Bijoux at the 2014 Bessie Awards, guest rehearsal director, and guest faculty at the Mark Morris Dance Center. She has staged Morris’ work on the Purchase Dance Company, Vassar Repertory Company, Fieldston Dance Company, the Boston Ballet, and the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and on students at the Juilliard School, George Mason University, Les Etes de la Danse (Paris), and Interlochen Arts Academy, and Cal State Long Beach among others. Ms. Williams has been Morris’ assistant in a variety of settings including ballet(San Francisco Ballet), Broadway( Paul Simon’s The Capeman , which she directed in concert version at BAM’s Harvey Theater in 2009), and television( VH1 Fashion Awards). From 2000-2013 she served on the modern dance faculty of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, State University of New York. She was featured in Dance Teacher Magazine in 2010 and 2014 and has served on the faculties of Manhattanville College, Connecticut College, Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College ( the last three teaching Anatomy for Dancers). She currently teaches Dance for Parkinson’s Disease in Rye, NY, and is on the renowned Dance for PD flagship teaching/lecturing team. She taught an ongoing Professional Level Ballet class at the Gibney Dance Center in New York City(now being taught via Zoom) and is on the faculty Sarah Lawrence College.  She has served on the board of directors of the Martha Hill Dance Fund since 2011 and is proud to have a producing credit on the documentary film Martha Hill: Making Dance Matter. She is in demand as a master class teacher and  guest lecturer. Williams founded Megan Williams Dance Projects in the summer of 2016 and was the DanceNOW Commissioned Artist in 2018 , premiering her  first full evening work, ‘One Woman Show’ to great acclaim at Joe’s Pub at the Public in NYC. Williams was an Artistic Partnership Initiative (API) Fellow at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University in August/September 2019. MWDP was collaborating for over a year with composer Eve Beglarian on an evening length work with live music(supported by the O’Donnell -Green Foundation) that would have premiered at Danspace Project, NYC  in March 2020. Megan created two short dance films for the Katonah Museum of Art in October, 2020 and previewed a new work at Arts on Site, NYC in November. 

Choreographer, performer, educator, essayist Kimberly Bartosik creates viscerally provocative, ferociously intimate choreographic projects that are built upon the development of a virtuosic movement language, rigorous conceptual explorations, and the creation of highly theatricalized environments. Her work dramatically illuminates the ephemeral nature of performance while critically, tenderly, and violently etching away at deeply distressing threads of our society. 

Bartosik is a 2020 Bessie Honoree for Outstanding Performance & Outstanding Performer (Burr Johnson) for her recent work, through the mirror of their eyes. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography and a 2020 Virginia B. Toulmin Women Leaders in Dance Fellow at Center for Ballet and the Arts (CBA) at NYU.  Bartosik’s work has been commissioned and presented by BAM Next Wave Festival (2018), New York Live Arts, LUMBERYARD, American Realness, FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, Abrons Art Center, Gibney, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, La Mama, and BEAT Festival.  She has toured to Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic (Melbourne, Australia), Bratislava in Movement (2021), Wexner Arts Center, Dance Place, American Dance Festival, The Yard, MASS MoCA/Jacob’s Pillow, FlynnSpace, Bates Dance Festival,  Columbia College, Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort, Festival Rencontres Chorégraphique Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis, Artdanthe Festival, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (2021), Church, Mount Tremper Arts, and others. 

Bartosik’s 2020 digital quarantine project, The Game, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation and presented as part of Fusebox Festival. She is currently collaborating with Visual Artist Matthew Ritchie on You will see more stars, a multi-iteration work merging Augmented Reality into the live performance arena. In 2021-22 she will create a new work in partnership with Torn Space Theater with teens of refugee immigrants. She will create The Encounter, her CBA work for 12-15 year old pre-professional dancers, in spring 2021. Her articles Give Artists a Home! and It’s Time to Reimagine Dance Funding, were featured in Dance Magazine (Dec 2020, Feb 2021).  

Bartosik was a 2017-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency Artist; a 2019-20 Harkness Dance Center Artist-in-Residence @ the 92nd St Y; and a 2019 Exploring the Metropolis (EtM) recipient with Composer Sivan Jacobovitz. In 2017 she received a National Dance Project (NDP) Production & Touring Grant and Community Engagement Fund awards, supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts. A 2010 and 2017 MAP Fund grantee, Bartosik and has also received support from the Jerome Foundation; FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts in partnership with The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French American Cultural Exchange; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, USArtists International;  Creative Arts Initiative (CAI); New York Foundation for the Arts, Building Up Infrastructure Levels for Dance (BUILD); American Dance Abroad; New Music USA, Live Music for Dance; and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists and Emergency Grants. 

Bartosik has been in creative residence at New York Live Arts, Live Feed and Studio Series; Marble House Project; National Choreographic Center at Akron/NCCAkron; Centre Chorégraphique National-Ballet de Lorraine; LUMBERYARD Center for Film & Performing Arts; Gibney Dance Center’s DiP Residency; Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort; Governor’s Island through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program; Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University; Joyce Soho Artist Residency Program; University of Buffalo, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center; Jacob’s Pillow; Kaatsbaan International Dance Center; Mount Tremper Arts; White Oak Plantation; and Movement Research. Bartosik was a 2017 Bogliasco Foundation Fellow and a 2019 and 2015 Merce Cunningham Fellow. She was a recipient of an ART, a Capacity-Building grant through Pentacle. In 2018, Bartosik made her curatorial debut as part of DoublePlus at Gibney.

A member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 9 years, Bartosik received a Bessie Award for Exceptional Artistry in his work. She received her BFA in Dance from North Carolina School of the Arts, and MA in 20th Century Art and Art Criticism from The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Research of the New School University. Bartosik has been a guest artist/faculty at Hollins University, Princeton University, The Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Bates College, The Playground, University of North Carolina School for the Arts, Arizona State University’s Hergberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Colorado College, and University of Buffalo. She currently teaches at SUNY/Purchase Conservatory of Dance and the Merce Cunningham Trust.

Deborah Damast (BFA Dance, SUNY Purchase, MA Dance Education, NYU, DEL Certificate) is Associate Professor and Program Director of Dance Education at NYU Steinhardt where in addition to teaching, she is Artistic Director of concerts, Kaleidoscope Dancers, and the Uganda study abroad program. Deborah is the Past-President of the New York State Dance Education Association, has served on the boards of NYSDEA, NDEO, Dance Education in Practice Journal, and Peridance Contemporary Dance Company and is a member of the NDEO Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access IDEA committee. She is on faculty at LREI/Little Red Schoolhouse, Dance Education Laboratory, and The Yard and has directed programs at Peridance, Steffi Nossen, Harvey School Cavalier Camp, The Yard Kids Do Dance, and OBT Exposed. Deborah facilitates Professional Learning for teachers through the NYC Department of Education, 92Y DEL, and PKFCC Pre-K for all and has contributed to the NYC Blueprint for the Arts and the DEL Early Childhood model.  She has presented at numerous conferences and festivals in the U.S. including a Keynote speech at UDEO, NDEO, NYSDEA, ACDFA, CUNY, and Kymabogo in Uganda. Her choreography has been shown at over 40 venues in NYC including Ailey Citigroup, Peridance, World Financial Center, Riverside Church, Judson Church, Symphony Space, Cooper Union, 92Y, 14^th St. Y, Skirball Theatre, and internationally in Japan, Uganda, Korea, Italy, and Canada. Deborah has taught for the Education Departments of Oregon Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet, guest choreographed/taught for West Virginia University, Marymount Manhattan College, and Brigham Young University, and has written curriculum for Peridance, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, DEL, NYCB, and the NYC DOE. Deborah has collaborated with Emily Bear on music videos and co-created and starred in Move N Groove Kids creative movement video series. Deborah is a recipient of the 2009 NYU GSU Star Faculty Award, the 2010 NDEO Outstanding Dance Educator Award: Higher Education, the 2017 Steinhardt Teaching Excellent Award, the  2020 Dance Teacher Magazine Award for Higher Education and 2021 NDEO Executive Director Award. She participated in Motion Capture studies at NYU, collaborated with Music and Music Technology, and at NYU was a co-recipient of grants for Dance Literacy and Data Literacy, Professional Development, and the 2020 Diversity Innovation grant.

Dr. Carla Stalling Walter teaches and writes about dance, spirituality, and wellbeing. A former professor with a PhD in Dance History and Theory, she is also a Certified Somatic Psychotherapist, and a Certified Spiritual Counselor. Her company, Dance in the Spirit, LLC provides personal and corporate retreats, classes, and workshops on sacred dance meditation, and diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. She is a member of The Sacred Dance Guild, the Dance Studies Association, and a board member with the San Francisco Zen Center.