Taylor Talks

Taylor Mac (who uses “judy” – lowercase sic – as a gender pronoun) is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer. Plays include: Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (Broadway), A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (shown in its 24-hour entirety at St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Curran Theater, the Ace Theater, the Melbourne […]

InTandem Lab Thrives to create performance like environments that seek to reconfigure the audience’s perspective. We function as a collective inside which the artist’s roles are fluid and exploratory and shift with each project. Unlike the traditional theatrical narrative, we are especially interested in minimalist theatrical presentation to re-direct focus on strong story-telling and actors […]

Grace Galu is a vocalist, actor, guitarist and composer. She combines the sounds of her Irish and Congolese heritage and her LES upbringing in a soulful and gritty twist.. Grace was featured in Buskerball, and recorded “Firelight” with Fearless Music. Her composition, “Ordinary Sentiment” was featured in the Ed Burns film, “Purple Violets'' which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Grace devised The Mendelssohn Electric with Trusty Sidekick, and was cast as the lead in their production, The Gospel Electric, commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory. She is a core member of the band Soul Inscribed, and was twice selected as a cultural ambassador for the American Music Abroad program. She has been selected as a cultural ambassador for their next residency program (2022). Grace is also a recipient of the NEFA NTP grant. Soul Inscribed has recently been signed to the music label, Tokyo Dawn and just released their EP, Tune UP. Grace is an artist in residence at HERE Arts Center and the composer for Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville. Grace voiced Wisdom in Nia Witherspoon’s production, The Dark Girl Chronicles (2021 at The Shed).

   

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Baba Israel is an artist, producer, educator and consultant raised in New York by parents who were core members of the Living Theatre. He co-founded Playback NYC, the first playback theatre company to integrate freestyle hip hop. His debut solo show “Boom Bap Meditations” was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Hip Hop Theatre festival. He has toured across Asia, Africa, Europe, the South Pacific, North and South America as a hip hop and theatre artist and led cultural ambassador programs internationally supported by the US State Department. His work has been featured in documentaries such as Freestlye and Hip Hop for Hope, and on MTV and BET.He was Artistic Director and CEO of Contact Theatre in Manchester, a leading venue at the intersection of youth leadership and innovative performance. He premiered his most recent multimedia performance The Spinning Wheel as a resident artist at BRIC in Brooklyn. The production was developed and toured in the UK, Holland and Norway and in America with MDC Live Arts and the University of Madison, Wisconsin. He holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and is the Co-Artistic Director of the Performance Project based at the University Settlement.Soul Inscribed is a hip hop, and spoken word collective who are the core band for the production. The ensemble creates an eclectic new vision of jazz, dub, and funk.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a queer Bengali writer, director and performance-maker. He is currently in residence at HERE, BRIC, and The Public Theater, and recently at Ars Nova, New York Theatre Workshop, Soho Rep, SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Drama League, and The Flea.

Nia O. Witherspoon is a black queer NAACP-nominated theatre-maker, vocalist/composer, and cultural worker investigating the metaphysics of black liberation, desire, and diaspora

Gelsey Bell is a Brooklyn-based songwriter, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and scholar. She has been described by The New York Times as “one of New York’s most adventurous musicians” and “a charismatic and fiercely intelligent performer.” She is a core member of thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. She is currently a resident artist at the HERE Arts Center and is looking forward to a music residency at Pioneer Works in November 2022. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, the Japan Foundation, and others. Recent residencies include Mount Tremper Arts and the Kinosaki Arts Center in Japan. Her recent works include Cairns (2020), a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery (included on the New York Times Best Theater of 2020 list); shuffleyamamba: Yamamba as a Bear (2021), a dance piece created with Yasuko Yokoshi; Meander (2021), a soundwalk created with Joseph White for Brooklyn Botanic Garden; SubtacTTTTTTTTT (2020), an early pandemic online performance created with thingNY; and Skylighght (2019), created with saxophonist Erin Rogers. She has released multiple albums, including the EP This is Not a Land of Kings, and performed her work Performance highlights also include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Improvement and Crash, Kate Soper’s Here Be Sirens, Gregory Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen, Anthony Gatto’s Wise Blood, and a great many of John King’s Micro-Operas. She has a PhD from New York University in Performance Studies, and is part-time faculty at the New School.

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya are a Colombian and Japanese multidisciplinary artist duo. Their collaborative works manifest as live installations, dance and theater performances, operas, and sculptures that are presented in theaters, museums, galleries, and public spaces. Alongside their performative work, Ximena and Shige also invest their energy in critical research, printed and digital publications, and community projects. Shige and Ximena are the co-founders and artistic directors of LEIMAY and the LEIMAY Ensemble. The word LEIMAY is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn, or the transition from one era to the other. Ximena and Shige work out of their home studio CAVE, which is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Garnica and Moriya are Creative Capital, National Dance Project, National Endowment for the Arts and Café Royal Cultural Foundation Award recipients, and Watermill Center and Chelsea Factory Artists in Residence. Garnica received the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She has been on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Marymount Manhattan College and Sarah Lawrence College. Garnica and Moriya have been nominated for The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and a United States Artists Fellowship. Her article ‘LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival’ was recently published in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. Ximena and Shige's work is rooted in questions of being, perception, interdependency and coexistence. They look to expose the multiplicity of spatial and temporal intervals that exist within the body, between materials and environments. They are curious about what emerges when the stability of habits, affirmation of binaries, social norm expectations, and the crystallization of identity dissolve and expose the potentialities of being.

Minor Theater makes plays in a minor key. With dark humor and goofball precision, we lure you into the tunnels where we feed off pop culture’s sticky undergut. Our plays are written and directed by Julia Jarcho in collaboration with award-winning theater artists Ásta Bennie Hostetter, Jennifer Seastone, and Ben Williams.

Sachiyo Takahashi is a composer, musician, and artist whose work centers around storytelling. Compositing sensory elements in a minimalist manner, she explores the border between narrative and abstraction to generate fables for the subconscious.

gamin is a distinguished NYC soloist who tours the world performing both traditional Korean music and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Normandy Sherwood is a theatermaker who has been building worlds in NYC for two decades. She is a writer, a director, a costume and scenic designer, and occasionally a performer. Her shows include Madame Lynch, Tiny Hornets, Permanent Caterpillar, and The Golden Veil, and they have been presented by The New Ohio Theatre, Rubulad, The […]

Maiko Kikuchi is a Brooklyn based artist, who received her B.A. in Theatre Arts from Musashino Art University, Japan in 2008, and her M.F.A. in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012. She has extensive multifaceted professional experience in the areas of illustration, painting, drawing, collages, sculpture, animation, and puppetry/performance. Her recent self direction object theatre […]

Spencer Lott is a maker, writer and puppeteer based in Brooklyn. His puppetry credits include A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (starring Tom Hanks), Sesame Street, The Relationtrip (Hulu/SXSW 2017), and more. He has been the recipient of multiple Jim Henson Foundation Grants for his original work. His plays include Campfire (Trusty Sidekick Theater Company […]