clarissa rivera dyas
Clarissa Rivera Dyas (they/she/he)Clarissa Rivera Dyas is a Black, Filipinx, Bay Area, Ohlone land, based dancer, choreographer, and arts producer. Her artistic practice flows from the truthfulness of improvisation, is rooted in her communities, and centered around movement as a spiritual practice and a conduit of change. Clarissa graduated from SFSU in 2017 with a B.A in Dance and a B.S. in Health Education. They have been a company member of Zaccho Dance Theatre, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Flyaway Productions and have performed with Lenora Lee Dance, Megan Lowe Dances, OYSTERKNIFE, Sarah Crowell, Keith Hennessy and many others. She is currently in collaboration with Sara Shelton Mann (2020) and Embodiment Project (2023). They have performed throughout the U.S. such as in New York, Jacob’s Pillow, Seattle, WA and internationally in Berlin, GER. They have presented work in CounterPulse’s SEED Residency, REYES Dance, Dance Thrill Fest (2021), Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency (2022), Queering Dance Festival’s FROLIC! (2023), KH FRESH Festival (2024), Dance Up Close East Bay (2025), and in the Black Choreographers’ Festival in 2020 and 2025. They were awarded Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2024. Clarissa is a member of Queering Dance Festival’s Steering Committee and is a Co-Director of ROT (KH FRESH) Festival.
Gabriele Christian
Gabriele Christian (b. 1991) is a San Francisco-based movement artist, director, curator, dramaturg, and descendent of stolen folk. Experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production and community arts facilitation, they locate and center BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernacular, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They perform original work and collaborate trans- and inter-nationally, most recently in Berlin, New York City, Vienna, and Amsterdam. They are a founding member of multiple Bay Area born performance collectives and land projects including: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; LXS DXS; and BlaQyard. As co-director of OYSTERKNIFE, they were granted a competitive Creative Work Fund grant and a special citation Izzie Award for mouf//full, presented at Grace Cathedral in 2024. They currently serve as Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director of Jess Curtis/Gravity, a body-based arts and accessibility non-profit living on in the wake of Jess Curtis' transition in March 2024. At the heart of all their work: exhaustive research into belonging, spirit, and desirability while living in the fangs of dehumanizing times.
jose esteban abad
jose esteban abad (they/them) is an Afro-Caribbean Filipinx interdisciplinary performance artist nesting in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco). Their work is rooted in the embodied and sonic poetics of relations, collaboration, and improvisation, as tools of resistance and liberation across geopolitical borders. abad’s work centers QT/BIPOC experimental collective process-based practices of re-membering and be-coming to highlight the most intelligent technologies that exist in this world—our bodies, ancestral wisdom, and the environment. Their practice is shaped by mentorship and communing with artists including Alleluia Panis, Ishmael Houston Jones, Anne Bluethenthal, Joanna Haigood, Keith Hennessy, Beatrice Thomas, Jess Curtis, Sherwood Chen, Sarah Shelton Mann, Meg Stuart, Florentina Holzinger, Brontez Purnell and others. They are currently the Co-Director of Bridge Live Arts, a core company member of Bandaloop, AD of fugitivity labs, and have engaged in creative and pedagogical exchanges nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Palestine, Chilé, Mexico, and Europe.
Stephanie Hewett
Stephanie Hewett (she/they) Stephanie Hewett is a queer multidisciplinary artist working within the mediums of movement and sound. She is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts in New York City and has studied at the Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She holds an MFA in Dance from Mills College and has held artist residencies at Counterpulse in San Francisco and the Paul Dresher Ensemble in West Oakland. She experiments with different sonic frequencies to uncover ancestral vestiges in the body while exploring polyrhythmic potentialities for intergenerational healing. Hewett also DJ's and produces electronic music under the moniker, Madre Guía.
Styles Alexander
Styles Alexander (they/them) Afro-Indigenous transdisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Styles graduated from the Boston Conservatory, where they received a B.F.A in Contemporary Performance and Choreography. While attending the Boston Conservatory, Styles performed and collaborated in creative processes with choreographers such as Andrea Miller, Robert Moses, Dwight Rhoden, Doug Varone and others. Styles has collaborated with artists including Maurya Kerr, Robin Aren, Joy Davis, and many others. Styles's choreographic work is a practice of reimagining and communicating with history through speculative future-crafting, hauntological investigation, ancestral mediumship, and their own punk epistemology. Styles's work has been featured in Urbanity NeXt, DougVarone's DEVICES program, Jess Curtis' Gravity PPP, ROT Festival, and the SENSEOBJECT residency. In 2023 Styles was a DanceWeb Impulstanz Scholarship recipient, under the mentorship of Clara Furey and Lara Kramer. Styles is currently a recipient of the Zellerbach Family Foundation award and Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s NEW award for the creation of their new work TarNation- premiering Summer 2026.
