Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a 2023 United States Artists Fellow, and recently celebrated her debut as choreographer for the New York Metropolitan Opera, El Niño (2024). She is an awardee of the prestigious Dance Magazine Harkness Award (2020) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2020). Saunders is a three time NY Dance & Performance/Bessie Awardee and an inaugural recipient of 3 distinguishing fellowships in dance, including Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2017), the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2018), and the DanceUSA Artist Fellowship (2019).
Her practice has been forging my physical and energetic bodies to conjure transformative moments in space and time. Her art poses and processes questions, such as: What might freedom, a reality that elevates culture, life, wisdom, the intangible and mysterious, look like? Can we achieve it?
Marjani is a part of a multi-platformed collective vision called 7NMS (pronounced seven names), with composer and sound designer Everett Saunders. The work of 7NMS houses the Art, the Studios, and the Creative Incubator that is Art x Power- which is dedicated to building resilient futures for Black Artists, by creating pathways towards long-term, fiscal and creative wellness. The creative duo architects of the project, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist, which premiered at Abrons Arts Center in 2022. 7NMS are recipients of New Music USA Award (2021), the MAP Fund (2020) and the National Dance Project Production & Touring award, for this work. In 2023, PROPHET had its Los Angeles premiere, at the REDCAT ROY AND EDNA DISNEY/CALARTS THEATER (REDCAT), and traveled to the Musuem of Contemporary Arts Chicago, May 2024.
Humbly, Saunders embraces the depth of her career and craft as a divine opportunity and command to listen, serve, and transform. She defines her work by its lineage stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving, irreverent conjurers. With joy, Saunders’ most creative, commanding and rewarding practice is as a Mother, which operates inextricably alongside her visioning as an artist.
SPEAKER BIOS
Natalie Marrero is the Cultural Affairs Supervisor of Cultural Programming at the City of Santa Monica, where she oversees cultural producing and grant-making. With a career spanning cultural policy, nonprofit leadership, and place-making, she brings a deep commitment to preserving and uplifting culture through intentional, equity-driven programming.
Previously, Natalie served in executive roles at Conga Kids, Everybody Dance Now!, and Viver Brasil, where she expanded organizational capacity and arts education access across Los Angeles and beyond. She also contributed to public sector initiatives at LA Metro and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Special Projects and Community Events.
As a core organizer with the Undoing Racism LA Collective, Natalie champions anti-racist education in the arts. She holds degrees in Dance, Urban Policy, and Arts Management from The New School and Claremont Graduate University. Her work continues to bridge cultural heritage, public engagement, and community transformation through the arts.
Ishmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd presented by Danspace Project. In 2020 he received a fourth “Bessie” for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project. As an author Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies and in numerous journals and magazines. His FAT and Other Stories: Some Writing About Sex was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press.
Tara Aisha Willis, Ph.D. is a dance artist, and currently Getty Research Institute African American Art History Initiative Fellow and Curator of Dance & Theater at EMPAC. Her book manuscript in progress focuses on practices of Black experimentation in dance through two improvised performances she was involved in creating. She is co-editor of a forthcoming artist book on taisha paggett’s body of work (Soberscove Press, 2025) and of of
Marking the Occasion (Wendy’s Subway, 2021). She has performed with artists like Will Rawls, Yanira Castro, Paulina Olowska, Anna Sperber, and Kim Brandt.
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar earned her B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University. In 1984 Zollar founded Urban Bush Women (UBW) as a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change. She serves as director of UBW’s Summer Leadership Institute and is the Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Jawole has received fellowships from United States Artists (2008), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2009), and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2021). She received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and honorary degrees from Columbia College, Chicago, Tufts University, Rutgers University, and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Jawole received the Dance Magazine Award (2015), the Dance/USA Honor Award (2016), and the Bessie Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award (2017). In 2020, The Ford Foundation awarded Urban Bush Women as one of America’s Cultural Treasures. In 2021 Jawole received the DanceTeacher Award of Distinction and the 2022 APAP Honors Award of Merit and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and most recently the recipient of the 2024 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Lifetime Achievement Award.