HERE ARTIST
RESIDENCY PROGRAM
One of the most robust residency programs in the country and serving as a national model, HARP provides a commission, developmental support, career planning, and an opportunity for a full production to cross-genre artists within a collaborative environment of peers working across disparate art forms – including theatre, dance, music, puppetry, visual art, and new media. Each HARP artist receives significant long-term support of $125,000, which includes $50,000 in cash and more than $75,000 in equipment, space, and services over 2-3 years to tailor each residency to each artist’s individual needs.
With the launch of URHERE (our new digital and outdoor platform), HERE has expanded our HARP cohort to include digital and outdoor artists. Selected artists will partake in a 1-2 year residency to create digital native and/or outdoor works that will premiere on URHERE. URHERE HARP residents will receive $50,000 ($25,000 in cash and $25,000 in equipment, space, and services) over 1-2 years. Through significant investment of time and resources, dynamic work within a strong community is created.
Throughout the year, we offer a window into the creative process of the artists in our nationally recognized HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP). Watch for RAW / Resident Artist Works to catch these fresh in-process works!
See below for details on our current HARP artists.
The HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Additional support provided by Alliance of Resident Theatres/ART NY; Café Royal Cultural Foundation; Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Inc.; Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; Doris Duke Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Fund for the City of New York; Howard Gilman Foundation; The Mertz Gilmore Foundation; IRT Theater; The Jim Henson Foundation; Jerome Foundation; JKW Foundation; The Leon Levy Foundation; Lucille Lortel Foundation; Mellon Foundation; The Mental Insight Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation; National Performance Network; New England Foundation for the Arts; New York Community Trust; New York Foundation for the Arts; OPERA America; Puffin Foundation; Royal Little Family Foundation; The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; Select Equity Group; The Shubert Foundation; The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation; Tow Foundation, and HERE’s generous community of individual donors.
Nia Witherspoon’s new work, Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure + Wisdom School – inspired equally by the “bad bitches” of hip-hop, the reproductive justice movement, and the sacred sex workers that graced Egyptian temples – presents women and trans folks of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, in the hopes of increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity.
A new interdisciplinary dance performance: part-ritual, part-celebration, part-laboratory, and part-dinner. Commissioned and produced by HERE with an expected premiere in fall 2024, this multi-sensorial live performance centers on food justice and environmental ethics. The show is structured as a series of vignettes that audiences will wander through to participate in the act of eating together, witnessing embodied performance by mythological creatures, and experiencing sound/video movement installations. The team includes: Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya as directors/choreographers/
RHEOLOGY is the autobiography of an avalanche. A physics symposium. A concert. My mother studies the rheology of granular materials: how the natural landscape flows in fits and bursts. She also sings the songs of Bengali poet-composer Tagore. Most singers approach his songs delicately. But my mother’s voice is strident. Confrontational. She says, “gawla khule ga”: sing with your throat open. When she’s teaching me a song, I ask her to translate lyric by lyric. Scattered throughout the house are yellow pads scrawled with equations. Sigmas and deltas. I’ve always been mystified by these other, intricate languages my mother speaks. RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir. A translation across boundaries of language, gender, discipline, and generation. An artist son studies his physicist mother. She studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science—the story—of how things flow.
The HawtPlates are a family singing group that was formed in a one-bedroom apartment in The Bronx. They create live vocal works by breaking down vernacular musical forms and reconstituting them into other modes of performance, producing sound tonics and “one pots’, harkening to the spirit of the family heirloom recipe. Their work honors their lineage and personal histories while outwardly reporting an ultimately human experience.
The HawtPlates music breaks down vernacular music styles into multiple modes of vocalizing, producing their sound and songs in the spirit of the family heirloom. Their work honors lineage while reporting a universally human experience. Experimental and unique to them as a trio and family, The HawtPlates create soul music that feels rooted and lived in yet indifferent to genre.
Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriters The HawtPlates have collaborated with Meshell Ndegeocello, Abigail DeVille, Kaneza Schaal, Hilton Als, Helga Davis, Steffani Jemison, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and The D.R.E.A.M. Ring, National Black Theater, The Public Theater, Performance Space New York, Symphony Space and The Park Avenue Armory among many others. The HawtPlates is comprised of drama desk-nominated singer-songwriter/artist Justin Hicks, his sister, singer-songwriter Jade Hicks, and his wife Tony-nominated actor/singer Kenita Miller-Hicks.
Led by twin choreographers Hilary Brown-Istrefi and Briana Brown-Tipley, Same As Sister (S.A.S.) is a New York- and Toronto-based performance collective celebrating 10 years of collaborative and interdisciplinary storytelling. Their performance and film commissions have been presented and screened internationally at The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (Toronto); Base: Experimental Arts + Space (Seattle); Archaeological Museum of Messenia (Greece); Centre d’Art Marnay Art Centre (France); Danspace Project, BRIC, and New York Live Arts (NYC), among other venues. S.A.S. is currently a commissioned collective in the HERE Artist Residency Program and a Guest Curator at Dancemakers, supporting the creation and development of UPSTAIRS, IN OUR BEDROOM, premiering in 2026 at HERE in NYC. Dance/choreography awards include Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts’ 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Award Nominee for Outstanding Production (THIS IS NOT A REMOUNT), Jerome Foundation’s 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow Alternate, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants (2022 and 2017), Queens Council on the Arts/Queens Arts Fund’s 2020 New Work Grantee, and New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts 2019 Artist Fellow
Janani Balasubramanian is an artist and researcher creating accessible, inviting, and beautiful portals to natural and computational worlds. They work in emerging media, installation, immersive performance, poetry, prose, conceptual art, and public art.
Janani has received residency and commissioning support for their work from the Tow Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Sundance Institute, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, NYFA, New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, CAST at MIT, MAP Fund, Public Theater, Pioneer Works, Mount Tremper Arts, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, UCross Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. Their work has been presented at dozens of venues internationally, including the New York High Line, SF Exploratorium, Red Bull Arts, Academy of Natural Sciences, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Janani is a member of the Guild of Future Architects, and has been the artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History since 2017.
In 2023, they will be in residence at Colorado College, University of Colorado, Camargo Foundation, and Djerassi Arts Center. In 2023-2024, they will be the Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University, jointly hosted by the Physics and Electrical Engineering Departments.
Joshua William Gelb is the director, performer, and creative technologist behind Theater in Quarantine, the Obie and Drama League Award-winning digital performance laboratory operating out of an East Village closet measuring only 8 sq feet. Working with over one hundred collaborators and livestreaming dozens of productions to its YouTube Channel, TiQ has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Japan’s NHK Television, and has been profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Gelb holds a masters in directing from Marianne Weems’ Future Stages Program at Carnegie Mellon, has participated in the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and prior to the pandemic created both Jazz Singer and The Black Crook in residence at Abrons Arts Center while his Drama Desk nominated adaptation of A Hunger Artist, created in collaboration with Sinking Ship Productions, continues to tour. TiQ’s full archive can be found and streamed anytime at youtube.com/theaterinquarantine.
nicHi douglas is an AUDELCO and Princess Grace Award-winning experimental artist based in Brooklyn. you can refer to her/them/him/us using any pronouns said with Respect. nicHi is interested in leading community care centered creative processes born out of personal inquiry and cultural curiosity. they are an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU/Tisch undergrad in the Experimental Theater Wing where they teach dance & movement methodologies. Recent theater: (pray) (National Black Theater + Ars Nova, Playwright/Director/Choreographer; 6 Lortel Award Nominations in 2024), The Cotillion … (The Movement Theatre Company + New Georges, Choreographer), WEIGHTLESS (WP Theater, Choreographer), SKiNFoLK: AN AMERICAN SHOW (Bushwick Starr + National Black Theater, Choreographer). Upcoming: Public Displays of (self) Affection, a dance film commissioned by Lincoln Center and RECONSTRUCTING (The Team/BAM, Choreographer). mynameisnichi.com
About ONLY I
from 2nd grade through 8th grade, i was the only Black student in my wealthy, conservative Catholic-school classroom.
that’s 1994-2001.
some of the students were Asian-American.
some were Latine.
nearly everyone was White.
ONLY I was Black.
folded into the pleats of my uniform skirt are all the spells i cast to make myself less Black:
“straighter hair, that’ll do it …”, “tell Mom that we should just get a bigger house!”, “shift the intonation of your speaking voice to mirror theirs …”
ONLY I is a 30-year-old tantrum. it is a dance-driven maelstrom constructed to inspect the cultural isolation of my most formative years.
i invite my body to remember and purge and heal and rage.
have i grown out of the mindset(s) that delayed self-actualization?
ONLY I can know.
Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Angélica is known for playing with the unexpected intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds. Recent commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, the LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the NY Botanical Garden, Kronos Quartet and Roomful of Teeth. As the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Angélica composed a work synchronized to the setting sun for EnsembleNewSRQ. She regularly performs a solo show and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún. As an educator, Angélica has been a teaching artist with NY Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program and with Lincoln Center Education. Angélica lives in Brooklyn, where she’s always looking for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.
About Chimera
Chimera (working title) is a deeply personal chamber opera featuring drag queen performers that explores the complexity and boundlessness of identity. Chimera will feature film, a chamber ensemble, vocalists and electronics, as well as drag queen performers. The opera will be experienced as a film and live music installation, with audiences traveling through the performance space, encountering different films, each featuring a unique world built around a drag performer’s personal story and the intersections between their story and my own fragmented childhood memories. Chimera is intended to be non-narrative in form, favoring an abstract and surreal montage style that blurs the line between deeply personal memories and newly imagined ones. Chimera is preoccupied with evoking a very direct connection towards emotions through a vivid collage of memories from a collective past. With performers personifying different facets of one individual, Chimera is an homage to the women who have shaped me.
Piehole is a live arts collective that draws from a shared fascination with objects, media, and handmade universes, to pursue delight, humor, and beauty in unexpected places. Their work encourages audience agency, as well as an expanded sense of potential realities.
Since 2008, Piehole has made 16 major performance projects for live and virtual spaces. Recent works include Christmas Mountain, an interactive advent calendar media installation at WNYC’s The Greene Space, and Disclaimer at Under the Radar (Drama League Award Nominee). Piehole also collaborated with the LA-based Tender Claws on award-winning XR games The Under Presents and Tendar. Piehole has received support from The Public Theater, New Georges, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Theatre Workshop, The Drama League and The New Ohio, as well as NYC Women’s Fund, Jerome Foundation, Puffin Foundation, NYSCA-A.R.T./New York, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Mental Insight Foundation and Puppeteers of America.
About For You Alone
For You Alone is a theatrical experience for one, and for everyone. A group of Baroque-ish courtiers in search of stability find their King among the audience. They set to work creating a private luxury viewing experience for their Highness, pulling out all of the stops—puppetry, perspective, pampering, Pepper’s Ghost, etc. The rest of the audience will just have to adjust to life as non-kings, finding common cause in toiling to help entertain the King, stealing small moments of true joy and/or rebellion, or—for that rarest of special people—finding validation from a talking horse who decides YOU are the human they will talk to.
For You Alone is an interactive spectacle that draws from physical theater, puppetry and multimedia hijinks to explore loneliness, labor, luxury, illusion, power, prestige, solidarity, and community.