Born in Ruston, Louisiana and raised across Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas, Aaliyah Christina creates and supports performance work as an administrator, curator, movement artist, and writer. She makes dances and writes poetic stories about relationship/power dynamics, mental health, and Blackness as a resident on the South side of Chicago. She works as the Artist Programs Manager & Associate Curator at Links Hall, co-organizes with Performance Response Journal (PRJ), and collaborates with community organizations and fellow artists across the city of Chicago. Since 2015, she has collaborated with Chicago artists like Keyierra Collins, Ysayë Alma, Darling Shear, Wisdom Baty, Ayako Kato, and Dorian Sylvain to name a few. In 2021, Aaliyah received the 3Arts Make-A-Wave grant and as of 2023, she received the Illinois Arts Council Agency 2023 Artist Fellowship Finalist Award. In 2024, she was selected as a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist and a part of the Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio Residency cohort. She created PRAISE MOTHER SQUAD to highlight the multifaceted possibilities of Black majorette dance and platform stories about mental health, reproductive rights, and queer/chosen family dynamics

She is currently interested in African American movement vernaculars, especially as they pertain to jubilation and spiritual veneration within communal spaces. Her movement practice includes Liturgical/praise dance, Black majorette styles, and improvisation that negotiates moments of irreverent play and personal questioning. She explores interpersonal relationships between Black femmes, their mothers, and their sociopolitical position in the African diaspora. 

Michael Davis (Born on 3 November 1983) better known as Mike D Chicago, raised on the southside of Chicago, is a man of many talents. For years he lived in these amazing God giving gifts and talents on separate occasions but now he has created a way to do them all together. Sing, dance, rap, instruct, mentor, produce, create and choreograph. His single “Claim It” is a testimony to what he’s attempting to do and where he’s headed with it. Being able to use all of his gifts at once and at the same time help and encourage someone along the way.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0NFi3U_laeutmuIzRRLAAQ  

bookmikedchicago@gmail.com 

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Books: Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance, Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion ( 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings ( 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. Has chaired Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016.

MEDIA

• Podcast: Thomas DeFrantz, “Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture”.
• Exploring the lived Black experience through dance by Trevor Hook with Thomas DeFrantz
• Bone-Breaking, Black Social Dance, and Queer Corporeal Orature.

MONCELL DURDEN An associate professor of practice at University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman International School of Dance. Moncell spent 10 years performing with Philadelphia Hip Hop company Rennie Harris Puremovement. He is a performer, dance educator, choreographer, documentarian, embodied historian, and author. Moncell specializes in pedagogical practices that prove cultural and historical context in what he calls the morphology of Afro-kinetic memory. Moncell teaches practical and theoretical classes in the U.S. and abroad; an expert in locking, house, hip-hop, authentic jazz, and American and European social dances from 1800 to the present. He’s book Beginning Hip Hop Dance was published by Human Kinetics, other articles appear in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches and the Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America, Rooted Jazz Dance, and the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance. He has consulted on the Baz Luhrmann film “Elvis”, Disney+ “The World According to Jeff Goldblum,” the TV show “The Porter” and for Camille Brown’s “Mr, Tol E. RAncE,” TED ED “The History of African American Social Dance,” “Ma Rainey” and new Broadway production “The Hippest Trip.” Moncell also appears in a number of documentaries, Uprooted: A story of the journey of jazz dance, WACO “The Evolution of African Dance,” and “Why Do We Dance” produced by sky studios in the U.K. to name a few. His own documentary “Everything Remains Raw: A Historical Perspective of Hip Hop Dance,” is available on his website moncelldurden.com 

Chicago-based burlesque artist Jenn Freeman, also known as Po’Chop, uses elements of dance, storytelling, and striptease to create performances and inspire students and collaborators across the country. Po’Chop is the creator and author of the blogzine, The Brown Pages and has performed at the Brooklyn Museum in Brown Girls Burlesque’s Bodyspeak, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance for TedxChicago 2022, as well as headlined shows in New Orleans, Minneapolis, Denver, St. Louis and New York. Po’Chop is a board member & cast member, for Jeezy’s Juke Joint, an all Black burlesque revue. Po’Chop performs on Netflix’s Easy (Season 2), appears in music videos for songs by Jamila Woods and Mykele Deville, and creates and performs in experimental dance films such as LITANY. Jenn Freeman was recognized as a 2022 United States Artist Fellow; a 2021 Foundation of Contemporary Art Grant for Artist recipient, a 2019-2020 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow, and as a 2018 Chicago Dancemakers Lab Artist. Po’Chop was voted #10 Most Influential Burlesque Artist by 21st Century Magazine and was dancer in residence at Rebuild Foundation in 2020. 

Meida Teresa McNeal is the Director of Honey Pot Performance, an Afro-feminist collective dedicated to critical performance and public humanities. Recent projects include ways of knowing (2019), a performance and media project exploring systems of knowledge production that premiered at Experimental Station in November 2019 and The Chicago Black Social Culture Map (2019), an online map, community archiving, and live program series exploring Chicago’s Black social lineage from the Great Migration to the present, which included  6 programs across the city’s South, West, and North sides. As a solo artist, Meida recently created and produced Fifth City Revisited in June 2019 through Links Hall’s Co-Mission Fellowship. A remount of the show along with community programming will be staged in April 2020 at First Church of the Brethren in the Fifth City community. 

Jamal “Litebulb” Oliver is a renowned artist, savant, and cultural bearer of the Chicago Footwork dance style. As a dancer, musician, producer, choreographer, curator, educator, public speaker, and community leader, Litebulb continues to push the genre’s boundaries, expanding and amplifying the artistic forms within footwork culture and empowering Chicago Footwork dancers to be producers and organizers of the form. 

A summary of Work: “New Ghost” is a multimedia dance exhibition by footwork artist Litebulb that explores the history and development of Chicago footwork by examining one foundational move: “the Ghost.” In this installation dance piece, which includes photography, lighting design, film projection, original music, and footwork, Litebulb encounters legends of footwork—some living, some deceased—who take him on a movement journey to explore the development, impact, and innovation of “the Ghost.” 

Danielle Roper is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her work on racial and queer performance, feminist activism, and racial formation in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean has appeared in GLQ, Latin American Research Review, and Small Axe.  Her first book Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas is forthcoming with Duke University Press (May 2025).  Roper is the curator of the visual exhibit Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive. She is currently completing her second book Racial Reckoning: Black Performance and Visual Art in the Caribbean and its Diasporas. 

Dr. Ayo Walker is an Assistant Professor of Critical Dance Studies at Columbia College Chicago and the Hip Hop Pedagogy Dance instructor at Rennie Harris University. As an anti-racist educator utilizing culturally relevant and critical dance pedagogies, her praxis is committed to substantiating the techniques, vernaculars, and genealogies, and embodiment of historically marginalized and othered dance aesthetics in higher education dance spaces. Her general choreographic practice is rooted in visibilizing the “blood memories,” “aesthetic of the cool,” and the “get down” qualities evident in Africanist and Black dance aesthetics. These qualities represent the nature of the practice and how dancers of all backgrounds engaging with the practice and performance of these aesthetics, generates new knowledge contributing to the operational significance for this practice. All of which drives her duty as a complete artist/scholar to reflect the times viscerally and candidly, connecting the past with the present via staged representations of history on a loop. Employing social justice choreography representative of anti-essentialist movement that is at once exposing and undoing stereotypical assumptions historically signifying the Black body politic, her works challenge what performing Blackness is and isn’t. “Through my research, creative scholarship, and pedagogy I urge the much-needed cultivation of a comprehensive cultural dance literacy beyond the dominant Eurocentric perspective in the United States.” Performed by her dance company Ayo & Company her works have been commissioned by PUSHfest, Sacramento/Black Art of Dance (S/BAD), the Rhythmically Speaking Dance Company and the Modern American Dance Company (MADCO). Ayo & Company recently premiered one of her latest works, “Jadine’s Son” at both the 2022 We Create Festival: BIPOC Legacy in the Arts and the BIG MUDDY Dance Festival. This work was then commissioned by the International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) 33rd annual Conference and Festival. Ayo’s latest work “P-I-E-C-E-S” premiered and was adjudicated at the 2023 Southeast American College Dance Association Conference (ACDA) 50th Anniversary Festival and subsequently invited to perform at both the GALA and National concerts. Adjudicators Maura Keefe, Daniel Gwirtzman and Juel Lane described the strength of this work as an “unexpected crisscrossing of movement cultures-in conversation with a powerful rhythmic score that keeps revealing new dimensions of movement possibilities.”