Torkwase Dyson

Harry Alexander

Harry Alexander trained at Bird College. He has been a member of Michael Clark Company since 2010, started performing with Julie Cunningham & Company in 2016 and has also danced choreography by Lea Anderson, Carlos Pons Guerra and Thick and Tight. He is represented by Kult London and has worked with photographers including Oliver Hadlee Pearch, Bruno Staub and Tim Walker. Harry was awarded ‘Best Emerging Artist’ at the Critics Circle National Dance Awards in 2017.

Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist known for formal experimentation and the beauty and urgency of her work. Brand’s award-winning poetry books include Land to Light On; thirsty; Inventory; and Ossuaries (winner of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize). Her latest, The Blue Clerk, an essay poem, won the Trillium Book Award. Theory, her latest of five novels, won the Toronto Book Award. She is the author of the influential nonfiction work, A Map to the Door of No Return. Her most recent non-fiction work is An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading. Brand is a recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, 2021. She served as Toronto’s third Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012 and was named to the Order of Canada in 2017. She is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Joseph Funnell

Joseph Funnell is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and activist based in London, who works to support migrant rights, the LGBTQIA+ community, the movement for black lives and the anti-racist struggle. Their research based practice considers the pedagogical potential of embodiment and emancipatory potential of performing agency within contexts of historic negation. In collaboration with Carlos Maria Romero they facilitate somatic workshops in order to empower queer people of colour. They have presented solo work at Les Urbaines (Lausanne, Switzerland), Steakhouse Live (London), Slap Festival (York), The Albany (London), CLAY (Leeds) and Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw). They have performed internationally with collaborators at institutions including Tate Modern (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Swiss Institute (New York), and Somerset House (London).

Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Distinguished Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Shani Ha

Shani Ha (b.1987) is a French-Algerian multidisciplinary artist, based in Paris and New York. Her sculptures, performances, public art, and drawings investigate the somatic fragility of empathy, intimacy, otherness, and humanity at large.

From the intimate to public, individual to collective, singular to universal, ephemeral to permanent, contemplation to action; the abstraction and fluidity of space in her work has been central to her practice. Often found to be a disruptive force, an "infra-ordinaire" scale to create embodied collective moments.

Metamorphose, relation and improvisation define the framework through which she attempts to manifest concrete utopia.

Shani Ha received her MFA from l’École Supérieure des Beaux Arts du Mans. Her work has been presented the Manifesta biennale in Marseille (France), Fiminco Foundation for Jeune Creation (France), Museum of Art and Design of New York (US), Grand Palais (CH), Central Park with NYC Arts in Parks (US), Marseille European Capital of Culture (France) and is part of the CNAP collection.

Malik Nashad Sharpe

Malik Nashad Sharpe is an artist working with choreography. They create performances that are formally experimental and engaged with the construction of atmosphere, affect, and dramaturgy. Their performances often utilise social themes and topics as portals to unveil and unearth ulterior and the undercurrent perspectives. Often making underneath their alias and aesthetics project marikiscrycrycry, they have been especially concerned with the affective and textural qualities of dance and how it can transform, disarm, and critically reflect upon mourning and melancholia.