K. Alexandrite is a practice-based researcher living in North Carolina. They work in performance and installation with a focus on sacred & material transformation of social memory in relationship to computation. Alexandrite studies at Duke’s Computational Media, Arts and Cultures program and is a member of the Lab for Social Choreography.

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. Books include Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004), Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (2014), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion, co-edited with Philipa Rothfield (2016), the Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance co-edited with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft (2018); and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Black Dance (forthcoming 2025). Creative: Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017. 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. In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin, he founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 300 researchers.

Ayan Felix (NC Based) is a Gulf Coast-bred movement artist, dreamy storyteller, and Ayan “Felix” (Durham-based, They/Them) is a 3rd-coast-bred movement artist, shapeshifting storyteller, and cultural organizer. They perform Southern Black American cultures of excess, slowness, and futurity through site-responsive processes. Ayan or “Felix" lives in the movement legacies of F&M Dance Program (’16), SUCHU Dance/Jennifer Wood, Pilot Dance Project, and Dance Afrikana. Their study on climate and BlackQueer sensuality has also produced screen dances shown at the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance (2022), freeskewl (NYC), and the Black Endurance Community Series at The Movement Lab ATL (2021). Collaborative practice with spirit, pleasure, conspirators, and the land has led to live performance at Barnstorm Dance Festival (Houston; 2018, 2019, 2022), Kuumba Dance Fest (Houston; 2021), and Houston Fringe Festival (2021). They are a 2023-2024 North Carolina Dance Festival Resident Artist. “nascent,” is their recent choreopoetic work which has shown at Performance Mix #37 (NYC; 2023) and Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens (Durham, 2023). IG @whichfelixbean

photo by Madylin Nixon-Taplet

MX Oops is a multimedia performance artist and educator whose work centers hybridity, encouraging ecstatic disobedience as a path toward embodied wellness. Their vision is of a world where we can each be held in the fullness of our complexity. The party is the point of departure, a queer site of transnational Afro-diasporic imagining. Their creative practice links urban arts [breaking, house, vogue femme, rap, dj, vj, fashion], somatic studies [yoga, thai yoga massage, energy healing, sound baths], media studies, and gender studies. Through this transdisciplinary approach, their work questions whether consciousness itself is the primary medium. These mediums come together to welcome party people into a lush world of queer becoming. A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, trained in various forms of energy healing, they completed a BA in dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Dance, Multimedia Performance, and Somatic Studies in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College, City University of New York, USA. [www.mxoops.com]

photo by Sekou Luke