Collaborators

ANGIE HAUSER (Collaborator) has been a dancer/collaborator with the Bebe Miller Company since 2000. She has contributed to BMC company works Verge, Landing/Place and Necessary Beauty, receiving a 2006 BESSIE award for her work in Landing/Place. In addition to her work with BMC she is a dance maker, performer and teacher who has been presented throughout North America and Europe.  Ms. Hauser collaborates with many gifted artists and leaders in the field of dance improvisation including Andrew Harwood, K.J. Holmes, Darrell Jones, and Kathleen Hermesdorf.   She has an ongoing collaboration with dance artist Chris Aiken creating evening length improvisation performances in collaboration with musicians and other dancers.  The duo received NPN Commission grants in 2007 and 2011 for their works Dwell and Utopia Parkway.  Recently she has taught and performed at Bates Dance Festival, Florida Dance Festival, Transformation Festival (Montreal), Earthdance (MA), TransContact Festival (Romania) and International Improvisation Festival (Germany) as well as other colleges and universities.  Ms. Hauser has danced with the companies of Elizabeth Streb, Liz Lerman and Poppo Shiriashi. She received her MFA in dance from the Ohio State University and holds a BA in Art History from University of South Carolina.  She is an Assistant Professor at Smith College, Northampton, MA.

CODY CHEN (Stage Manager) is a freelance stage manager currently based in New York City.  He is grateful to collaborate with Bebe and the company on the development of History.  Chen has worked internationally with companies such as TheatreWorks Singapore, Millbrook Playhouse, Line Storm Productions LLC, Armitage Gone! Dance, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Katherine Helen Fisher Dance, TAO Dance Theatre, Jinliansheng Gaojia Opera, Canum Entertainment, and Xiamen Media Group.  Chen received an MFA in Stage Management from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

DARRELL JONES (Collaborator) has performed in the United States and abroad with a
variety of choreographers and companies such as Bebe Miller, Urban Bush Women, Ronald K. Brown, Min Tanaka, Ralph Lemon and KOKUMA Dance Theater. Along with performing, Darrell continues to choreograph and teach. He has collaborated with other choreographers including Kirstie Simson, Angie Hauser, Jeremy Wade, Lisa Gonzales, Paige Cunningham and writer, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor; musicians Jessie Mano, Brian Schuler, and DJ Franco De Leon; and designer, Mawish Syed, in dance films, documentations and interactive multimedia installations. In addition to his collaborative work Darrell has also choreographed and produced group projects. Darrell is presently a
full-time, tenure-track faculty member at The Dance Center of Columbia College in Chicago.  His classes are informed by his training and studies in a variety of contemporary dance techniques and traditional dance forms.

MAYA CIARROCCHI (Video Installation) is a video artist and projection designer. Her work has been exhibited in New York at: Chashama; the Chocolate Factory; Dance Theater Workshop; the 2010 Governor’s Island Art Fair; School of Visual Arts; Westbeth Gallery; Sasha Wolf Gallery and: Artisphere, (VA); Borderlines Film Festival, (UK); Hammer Museum, (CA); Moving Pictures Festival, (Canada). In addition to her gallery installations she has created video and projections for dance and theatre with such performing artists as Merce Cunningham, Ping Chong, Bebe Miller, and Donna Uchizono. Ciarrocchi has received residencies from the Kala Arts Institute (CA), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NYC) and the Ucross Foundation (WY) and is the recipient a 2006 Bessie award for her video design in Bebe Miller Company’s Landing/Place. Upcoming projects include a commissioned installation for New York Live Arts and a large-scale installation centering on Mountain Top Removal mining practices in Appalachia. Ciarrocchi earned a BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase and an MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts.

LILY SKOVE (Video Artist) is a filmmaker and choreographer, creating for the screen, installation, and live performance. Her films have been shown at Dance Theater Workshop's Digital Series, The Ohio Short Film and Video Showcase, The San Diego/Tijuana DANCEonFILM Festival, and Dance Camera Istanbul, her music videos have been released for The Chandeliers on record labels Pickled Egg Records in Europe, and Obey Your Brain in the States, and she has worked as the video editor on Synchronous Objects For One Flat Thing, Reproduced, a website and installation made in collaboration between The William Forsythe Company and The Ohio State University. Her dance company, Skoveworks, has been presented at the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York City, the Laiks Dejot International Contemporary Dance Festival in Riga, Lativa and Oberlin College among other venues. Lily has been on faculty at the The Ohio State University teaching in the Dance and Technology program, and has taught at Oberlin College and the Latvian Academy of Culture's Institute for Choreography in Riga, Lativa. Currently, Lily freelances in camera departments of feature films and owns the production company, Electric Orange Media, with her husband, TJ Hellmuth. Lily holds a Diploma in Dance Studies from the Laban Centre, UK, an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, and a BA in Dance and English from Wesleyan University.

MICHAEL MAZZOLA (Lighting Design) is a long-time Bebe Miller Company collaborator. His critically acclaimed lighting and scenery have been seen in venues all over the U.S. and Europe, ranging from opera houses to circus tents to outdoor amphitheaters. A three-time New York Dance and Performance Award recipient, Michael has recently been given awards on the west coast for his lighting of musical theater and drama.

MICHAEL WALL (Sound Composition / Design) began collaborating with dance and other art forms at an early age and continues to work with artists, internationally. He has made work for the Jose Limon Company, Mark Haim, Lisa Race, John Evans, Lucky Kele, David Dorfman, David Grenke, Rudy Perez, Pam Pietro, Pat Mayer, K.J. Holmes, Paulette Sears, Julia Ritter, Randy James, Martha Tornay/East Village Dance Project, Jenn Nugent, Wally Wolfgruber, Heather McArdle, everything smaller, Incidents Physical Theater, Merge Dance and many others. Michael and designer, Jamie Karczewski, have formed the company ASIMPLESOUND, LLC that produces music and resources for dance, film and other media. Michael works full-time in the Department of Dance at Ohio State University and accompanies at the Bates Dance Festival and the American Dance Festival. His music and new recordings can be found at: http://www.asimplesound.com

TALVIN WILKS (Dramaturgy) is a playwright, director and dramaturg. His plays include Tod, the boy, Tod, The Trial of Uncle S&M, Bread of Heaven, and An American Triptych.  Directorial projects include the world premiere productions of UDU by Sekou Sundiata (651Arts/BAM), The Love Space Demands by Ntozake Shange (Crossroads), No Black Male Show/Pagan Operetta by Carl Hancock Rux (Joe’s Pub/The Kitchen), Banana Beer Bath by Lynn Nottage, (Going to the River Festival), the Obie Award/AUDELCO Award winning The Shaneequa Chronicles by Stephanie Berry (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Relativity by Cassandra Medley (Ensemble Studio Theatre – AUDELCO nomination for Best Director 2006) and On the Way to Timbuktu by Petronia Paley (Ensemble Studio Theatre – AUDELCO nomination for Best Director 2008). He has served as co-writer/dramaturg for ten productions in Ping Chong’s ongoing series of Undesirable Elements, and dramaturg for four collaborations with the Bebe Miller Company, Necessary Beauty, Going to the Wall, the Bessie Award winning, Verge, and Landing/Place for which he received a 2006 Bessie Award for Dramaturgy.

Past Collaborators Include

AIN GORDON (Writer) is a two-time Obie Award winning writer and director, a two-time NYFA Playwriting fellow and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. Gordon is currently developing a one-woman play about the Galveston, TX flood of 1900, a multi-year project rooted in real and imagined histories of his home, New York City, and an alternative historical portrait of Lexington, KY funded by Rockefeller MAP and the NEA and slated for production (with the Actors Guild of Lexington and LexArts) in 2008. Recently, Gordon appeared in Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell.

ALBERT MATHIAS (Composer) is a multi-instrumentalist who has been making music in San Francisco since 1992.  He has released five CDs as a solo artist and four albums with LiveHuman, trio with bassist Andrew Kushin and DJ Quest.  His work on MOTION LAB's Blue 2000 was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Award and used as the sound score for "Artists in Exile", a Bay Area dance documentary by RAPT Productions.  He is the Musical Director of MOTION LAB.

CYNTHIA OLIVER (Dancer) has danced with numerous companies, including most notably, the David Gordon Pick Up Co. and Ronald Kevin Brown/Evidence. As an actor she has performed in Greg Tate's My Darling Gremlin, Ione's Nginga the Queen King, Ntozake Shange's A Photograph Lovers in Motion, and Laurie Carlos's site specific production Vanquished by Voodoo as well as her BESSIE award winning White Chocolate for My Father.  Cynthia is a BESSIE award winning choreographer and performer who works with a mélange of dance theatre and the spoken word, incorporates textures of Caribbean performance with African and American sensibilities.  She was named "Outstanding Young Choreographer" by reviewer Frank Werner of German magazine Ballet Tanz and has had her dance film AfroSocialiteLifeDiva aired on European television's Canal Arte (France, Germany, Italy) and 3sat (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). She holds a PhD. in Performance Studies from New York University. She joined the dance faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2000.

KATHLEEN HERMESDORF (Dancer) has been dancing in San Francisco since 1991.  She co-directed Hermesdorf & Wells Dance Company with Scott Wells, recognized with a SF Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award, and was a member of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, receiving an Isadora Duncan Award for Ensemble Performance.  She has worked with Contraband/Sara Shelton Mann since 1994, acted as Artistic Director of MOTION LAB since 1998 and joined the Bebe Miller Company in 2002.

KRISTINA ISABELLE (Dancer) originally from Columbus, earned her BFA in dance from The Juilliard School and an MFA in dance and choreography from The Ohio State University.  She has performed with The Stephen Petronio Company, Earth Circus Productions, Jordan Fuchs, and currently Bebe Miller.  She is the artistic director of Kristina Isabelle Dance Company and co-director of HighJinks Productions, an entertainment company.  Isabelle has been dancing on stilts and incorporating stilt work into her choreography for more than a decade and is also a fire performer, aerialist and circus performer. Her choreography has been produced in Columbus, New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Fort Worth, England, Ireland and Poland.  She has served as a guest artist for The Ohio State University, Kenyon College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Wittenberg University, Alfred University, and The College of Lake County.

VITA BEREZINA-BLACKBURN (Animator) is a digital and animation artist born and raised in the Soviet Siberia. The downfall of the empire opened Vita's eyes on impermanence of material reality, and thus her journey into the virtual began. Vita holds an MA in Computer Art from West Texas A&M University, and an MFA in Art and Technology from the Ohio State University where she began collaborating with dancers. Presently Vita is an animation specialist at ACCAD (Advanced Center for Computing in the Arts and Design) at the Ohio State University, teaching computer animation and participating in various animation-related multidisciplinary and art projects.

YEN-FANG YU (Dancer) is a performer and choreographer from Taiwan. She received a B.F.A. in performance and choreography from Taipei National University of the Arts and recently graduated with an M.F.A. in choreography from The Ohio State University. From 2001 to 2004, she studied and performed improvisation, contact improvisation, and choreography with Ku and Dancers Dance Company (Taiwan). Yu has presented her work in various events in New York City, Columbus, and major cities in Taiwan.