ON SECOND THOUGHT

Lisa Davies has been working in the professional dance field for over 30 years, in Quebec and internationally. Throughout her career, she danced on international stages as a performer (Les Grands Ballets, Édouard Lock/La La La Human Steps, Crystal Pite, Ohad Naharin, William Forsythe etc.), as a guest teacher and rehearsal director for over 15 different companies (Emily Molnar/Ballet BC, RUBBERBANDance Group, BJM Danse, Akram Khan Company, National Ballet of Canada, Ballet Zurich, Czech National Ballet etc.), and founded Danse à la Carte where she was general and artistic director for nearly a decade. Sought after for her expertise and renowned for her integrity, passion and her dedication to exploring and advancing the practice, she took over artistic direction of École de danse contemporaine de Montréal in 2023.

Medhi Walerski was appointed Artistic Director of Ballet BC in July 2020. His leadership tenure has been highlighted by an artist-centred approach and deep commitment to creation and innovation, an expanded global touring program, increased dancer compensation and equity, a world-renowned brand identity, and unprecedented audience growth. Raised in France, Walerski initially trained in Normandy with Laurie Bokobza and Christine Caroly before joining the Conservatoire Superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. He danced at the Paris Opera Ballet and the Ballet du Rhin before joining the Nederlands Dans Theater in 2001. Walerski was awarded the prestigious Dutch dance prize VSCD Zwaan in 2013. As an educator, he is regularly invited to lecture and give workshops at dance conservatories, intensives, and festivals around the world. 

RS BUCK is an international producer, designer, and manager for live experiences. Their work focuses on fostering safe-spaces for whimsy and reflection. Recent collaborators include: Meow Wolf, The Broad, The Resonance Collective, The LA LGBT Center, California Institute of the Arts, Sunweaver Creative, Electric Workshop, Universal Studios, WB Studios, Estrella TV, BE Moving, Woolf and the Wondershow, Center Theater Group, Deaf West. They have also designed, mentored, and taught at many universities, including CalArts, CSUN, Pomona, USC, UCLA, and more. Buck holds their MFA in Experience Design and Production from CalArts. They are currently based in Los Angeles and Santa Fe, and are the head of Lighting at Meow Wolf.

Shira Kagan-Shafman is a New York–based dancer, choreographer, and producer. Her work has been presented at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Poster House, Arts On Site, Spring for Spring Dance Festival, Triskelion Arts, Green Space, Ki Smith Gallery, and Barnard College’s Movement Lab. She is a recipient of the 2023 B. Wilson Foundation Grant, was a 2023 artist-in-residence at Mother’s Milk, and is a 2024 LEIMAY Incubator artist.

Kagan-Shafman has performed in works by Joanna Kotze, Mariana Valencia, Ohad Naharin, Noa Zuk, Roni Chadash, Peggy Florin, Caitlin Corbett, Kelley Donovan, Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, Dean Moss, Rebecca Stenn, jess pretty, and with the Aston Magna Music Festival.

Alongside her creative practice, she collaborates with opera singer and creator Davóne Tines and composer/multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey. She is the founder and producer of Artist Afternoons, a multidisciplinary performance series, and has produced projects throughout the United States and Europe, including at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bozar, and the Barbican Centre.

Her choreographic work often involves multidisciplinary collaboration, partnering with visual and sound artists. Kagan-Shafman has guest lectured at Columbia University and is currently in residence at the Barnard Movement Lab, developing a new work with composer Ihlara McIndoe.

WYATT CODAY is intersex and autistic. She lives in Los Angeles, where she founded NOR RESEARCH STUDIO with Evan Kleekamp in 2017. She named herself its sole Research Director in 2023 and absorbed the DBA entity as one of her several aliases. Her work spans legal interventions, essays and contemporary folk tales, unorthodox disability accommodations, lecture-performances, and photography. In 2020, Coday was named as a columnist-in-residence at Open Space, SFMOMA's online writing platform. Nightboat Books anthologized another excerpt in WE WANT IT ALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RADICAL TRANS POETICS (2021). Her research interests include: disability, psychoanalysis, common law, transitive painting, the lecture-performance, and kitty cats.

MAXWELL TRANSUE is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, DJ, and sound designer known for creating immersive, thematic work that blends organic and synthetic elements, intricate rhythms, and finely detailed textures. His music spans film, live theater, dance, commercial projects, and artist recordings, and has been recognized internationally with multiple awards for original scoring, including First Place and Audience Choice honors at dance film festivals.

His compositions and sound design are featured in works by dance companies BEMOVING, LA Moves, and the Kaufman School of Dance, as well as in collaborations with choreographers and filmmakers Bret Easterling, Robert Bruce Hope, The Kusanagi Sisters, Anindo Marshall, Jermaine Spivey, and Spenser Theberge.

As a performing artist, Maxwell produces and performs house and electronic music under the moniker Jurassic Spine, sharing stages with artists such as Slow Magic, Low Leaf, and Monster Rally.

MT Laaperi grew up dancing in Portland, OR where they trained with the Jefferson Dancers. While creativity and art remained at the forefront of their world, MT felt a distance begin to grow in their relationship to dance as they worked to fi nd ways to navigate the dance community as a trans, autistic, queer artist. They found themselves working in special education where their creative problem solving and passion for equity found them in many district leadership groups seeking to change how students access and interact with the often rigid systems within schools. MT currently resides in Los Angeles where their enthusiasm for aesthetics, history with dance and performance, past work in education, and lens for equity, is ever present in the work that they do.

Derrick Belcham is a Canadian filmmaker based out of Brooklyn, NY whose internationally-recognized work in documentary and music video has led him to work with such artists as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma, Ryuichi Sakamoto and hundreds of others in music, dance, theater and architecture. He has created works and lectured at such institutions as MoMA PS1, MoCA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum Of American Art, Musee D'Art Contemporain, The Philip Johnson Glass House, Brooklyn Academy of Music and The Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati. His work regularly appears in publications such as The New York Times, Vogue, Pitchfork, NPR and Rolling Stone as well as being screened at short, dance and experimental festivals and retrospectives around the world.

Bret Easterling is a multidisciplinary artist, director, and educator creating performance, film, and community-based projects that use movement as a tool for connection, inquiry, and collective experience. He received his BFA and the Hector Zaraspe Prize for Choreography from The Juilliard School, and became a formative member of Gallim Dance and a prominent performer and creative contributor with Ohad Naharin’s internationally renowned Batsheva Dance Company.

Easterling has created and presented work across live performance and interdisciplinary platforms at institutions including Jacob’s Pillow, Lincoln Center, REDCAT, 92NY, Opera Philadelphia, LA Dance Project, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), Whim W’Him, Backhausdance, b12, Dance Camera West, Dance on Camera Festival, and Hauser & Wirth. His collaborative practice includes projects with Anthony Roth Costanzo, Kesha, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and Jurassic Spine. He also maintains an artistic partnership with Julia Eichten as EICHTERLING, spanning choreography, curation, film, and fashion.

As Founder and Artistic Director of the LGBTQ+ nonprofit BEMOVING, Easterling builds infrastructure supporting the creation, presentation, and sustainability of dance. He is on faculty at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, co-director of Ghost Light Residency, co-founder of PAY DANCERS, and an Ilan Lev Method practitioner, grounding his work in care for artists.

Originally from Portland, Oregon where he studied with the Jefferson Dancers, Austin went on to graduate from NYU - Tisch School of the Arts. Following university Austin became a member of Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance, then a performer and rehearsal director for Punchdrunk’s ‘Sleep No More’ in NYC. Austin currently freelances with a home base in LA performing for choreographers such as: Micaela Taylor, Rebecca Margolick, and Bret Easterling. Austin is a frequent contributor as a performer, teacher, and creative developer for BEMOVING, a LA based non-profit uplifting queer voices in dance. Austin is also a certified Pilates instructor and studying to become an Ilan Lev Method practitioner.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bella Allen is a queer movement artist invested in work that engages individuals in connection-based movement practices. During her formative years she trained with Westside Dance Project and attended the Orange County School of the Arts. Bella graduated from the USC Kaufman School of Dance in 2022 where she organized community events in collaboration with peers, Change the Stigma, and USC Visions & Voices. Since graduating, Bella has worked with esteemed artists such as Bret Easterling, Charissa Kroeger, Genna Moroni, Sara Silkin, and Mike Tyus & Luca Renzi. Additionally, Bella has collaborated with LA based companies Volta Collective, GUM Collective, BEMOVING, and directors Claire Loudis, Curry Tian, and Joey Frank. Outside of her performance experience, Bella has continued her work in community engagement by teaching somatic classes at R&R Health to share the healing properties of communal movement. Bella is currently based in Los Angeles as a freelance artist.

Jonah Tran is a queer, Vietnamese American artist, originally from Mustang, Oklahoma. He is a New York City based freelance artist and earned his BFA in Dance at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. There, he had the privilege of performing works by acclaimed choreographers such as Kyle Abraham, Peter Chu, Bret Easterling, Roderick George, Jiří Kylián, and Micaela Taylor. Jonah furthered his training by participating in programs like the BEMOVING Dance Program under the direction of Bret Easterling, and Springboard Danse SpringboardX under the direction of Alexandra Wells. He has done workshops and worked creatively with artists such as Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber, Dolly Sfier, Megan Paradowski, Lauren Edson, and JA Collective.

Kyle Carr Scheurich was born in 1992 in New York. In 2010 he graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts. During his time at LaGuardia High School he also studied at Manhattan Youth Ballet under the direction of Francois Perron. He graduated from The Juilliard School under the direction of Larry Rhodes, and joined Batsheva – the young Ensemble in 2014. Kyle joined Batsheva Dance Company in 2016-2021, with Ohad Nahirin acting as both artistic director and house choreographer. Kyle has performed with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) for the stage premiere of Bobbi Jene Smith’s & Or Schreiber’s ‘Broken
Theatre’. In 2025 Kyle served as assistant director for AMOC’s ‘Rome is Falling’, premiered at Alice Tully Hall.

Currently Kyle performs in various works, under the direction of choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas, co-founder of P.OR.K (Portugal). Kyle is a teacher of Gaga movement language and works as a stager/rehearsal director for Ohad Nahirin at universities and dance companies around the world. Kyle is also a creator, choreographing and directing his own dance-theatre works. He is an Ilan Lev Method practitioner & musician.

Marirosa Crawford is a Miami native and a New York based movement artist. She began her training at a local studio in Miami and went on to focus more extensively at New World School of the Arts. Crawford went on to study at SUNY Purchase where she received both her BFA in Dance and a BA in Literature. While at Purchase she worked with Doug Varone and Marcus Jarell Willis, and performed works by Martha Graham and José Limon. Shortly after graduating, she traveled to Montreal to attend Springboard Danse Montreal and had the opportunity perform works by Johannes Weiland and UNA Productions. Marirosa moved to Los Angeles after graduating, choreographing and performing her own solo work titled “measuring undercurrents”. During her time there she toured internationally with L.A. Dance Project, Volta Collective and worked extensively with Marcella Lewis, Bret Easterling, Chris Emile, and Genna Moroni. She has recently moved back to New York to continue researching her artistry as a performer and movement artist and hopes to begin her career as a writer.

Stephanie Dai is a dancer, choreographer, and educator based in Los Angeles. She received her B.F.A. in dance as a 2019 inaugural graduate of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance under the direction of Jodie Gates and William Forsythe. She has performed in the original choreographic works of the TL Collective, JA Collective, and BEMOVING in addition to dancing for COACH, GAP, Solange, CL, Porter Robinson, UNIQLO, and 88Rising. She is currently on faculty at the Los Angeles County High School of the Arts and has assisted with teaching and setting repertoire at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California dance programs. With her own work, Stephanie has been selected for residencies such as WIP LA at G-Son Studios, the Ghost Light Residency at the Barnsdall Theater, the USC Alumni Residency performance at the Glorya Kaufman Performance Center, and the Space Lab at LA Dance Project. Her most recent work “URETCHKO” premiered at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles and was selected for the 2025 International Modern Dance Festival (MODAFE) in Seoul, Korea. She enjoys employing dance by means of feeling and images to convey the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life.  

Valerie Chen is a Taiwanese American artist whose love for dance and movement creation began in Irvine, California. In high school she attended the Orange County School for the Arts in the Commercial Dance Conservatory, developing herself as a multifaceted dancer in both the commercial and classical spheres. Valerie simultaneously trained at Dmitri Kulev Classical Ballet Academy and Jessie Riley’s Westside Dance Project. Continuing her dance education, Valerie received a BFA in Dance at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. While at Kaufman she witnessed new movement styles, a culture of care, and ingenious innovation which nourished her passion for performance and experimentation. She has performed works by Kyle Abraham, Hope Boykin, Jiří Kylián, Micaela Taylor, Justin Peck, Christopher Wheeldon, and Paul Taylor, among others. Upon graduating Valerie joined South Chicago Dance Theatre as a main company member where she performed works by Frank Chavez, Kate Weare, and others. She is currently a guest artist with SCDT and freelance artist based in Los Angeles. Valerie aspires to bring dance to new spaces, break boundaries of expectation, and share movement histories with each community she meets.