New Waves! 2023 PARTICIPANTS

Dr. Yanique Hume is an interdisciplinary scholar, priestess, dancer, and choreographer who specializes in the festive and sacred arts and popular cultures of the Caribbean and broader African Diaspora. She is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Dr. Hume is the co-editor of Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013); Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance (2016); and Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean (2018). As a dancer and choreographer, Dr. Hume has worked with companies in her native Jamaica as well as in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. She is the recipient of grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Development Research Centre, Ford Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Dr. Marsha Pearce is a scholar, educator and independent curator based in the Caribbean. She holds a BA in visual arts and a PhD in cultural studies. She is the Deputy Dean for Distance and Outreach, and a Lecturer in Visual Arts at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus. Dr. Pearce has worked as the senior editor and art writer for ARC Caribbean Art and Culture Magazine and is a consulting art editor for Moko Caribbean Arts and Letters Magazine. She has also served on the board of the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago. Her research and critical writings about visual culture have been published in several art catalogues as well as peer-reviewed academic journals and books. Her essays “Reimagining History as Narrative in Contemporary Art” and “An Aesthetic of Survival: Denyse Thomasos, From Middle Passage to Colossal Endurance” are published in two recent art catalogues by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her curatorial projects include collaborations with the Pérez Art Museum Miami, National Portrait Gallery London and the British Council.

Neila-Ann Ebanks is Artistic Director of eNKompan.E™ (founded in 2008) and Acting Director of Studies at the Edna Manley College of the Visual & Performing Arts (EMCVPA) School of Dance. She holds an MA (Physical Theatre) from Royal Holloway University of London/ University of Surrey, a BSc. (Sociology) from University of the West Indies, and a Certificate (Dance Theatre and Production) from the EMCVPA. Ebanks was the first Dance recipient of the Commonwealth Connections Residency (Commonwealth Foundation, 2012) and, from 2015 to 2018, was Chief Examiner for the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) in Performing Arts.

Thomas Talawa Presto's work has been developed into a complete codified system that centers "Ancient Future" and aims to reclaim "new spaces through reverse colonization". Working in over 25 countries, Tabanka dance engages with communities and youth through educational outreach, artist development and training, as well as innovative performance. For a more comprehensive engagement with the work of Thomas Talawa Presto and Tabanka African & Caribbean Peoples Dance Ensemble, please visit https://tabankadance.com

Michelle Gibson received her BFA in Dance from Tulane University and her MFA in Dance from Hollins University/ The American Dance Festival at Duke University. Michelle Gibson/Mz. G’s teaching practice and choreographic works range from genres of the African Diaspora, Contemporary / Codified Modern Techniques, Afro Funk, Jazz, and HER OWN New Orleans Second Line Aesthetic. Cultivating her craft over the years in an effort to preserve, engage, and honor Mz. G has been teaching and creating spaces that are firmly rooted in New Orleans Black rituals, ceremonies, and lifestyles gathered. “Second Line Aesthetic ” includes The New Orleans Original BuckShop LLC. The N.O. BUCKSHOP involves both technical and improvised movement, utilization of brass sound, and communal ritual. Ministering her aesthetic, techniques, and personal experiences aboard in both Haiti and France, she honors and gives homage to her Southern roots and the spiritual / improvisational impulses of the New Orleans Africanist lifestyle. A ten year faculty member with the American Dance Festival, full time dance faculty at Booker T. Washington High School of the Performing and Visual Arts is currently working towards receiving the Katherine Dunham Technique Certification. Facilitator, lecturer, and choreographer, has created works at various intensives, institutions and universities; choreographic directing for several theater companies and collaborative live arts productions with artists such as Erykah Badu and Alejandra Robles, organizations locally, in the U.S and internationally. Practitioner and freelance artist presently living in Dallas TX, Grand Marshal Michelle N. Gibson dedicates her rooted energies, spiritual alignment , pedagogical practice, and performance based art geared toward culturally uplifting and cultivating communities nationwide and the world.

In 2022, Gillian Goddard was recognized by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) as one of its “Leaders of Rurality of the Americas”. Gillian opened Trinidad and Tobago’s first organic food store - Sun Eaters Organics - and founded the nonprofit Alliance of Rural Communities (ARC), which enlightens farmers about the value of natural resources, ensures their role in public policy development and facilitates their access to the requisite financial tools.The organization encouraged cocoa farmers to produce artisanal chocolate and develop community-owned businesses in Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Jamaica, Dominica, St. Lucia and Guyana. ARC also forged linkages between Caribbean and African cocoa producers to create the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective, with members from nine African countries. Gillian has been stewarding the land at Cauracas for a decade and has collaborated with the Dance and Performance Institute over those years - hosting artists-in-residence on the land and leading workshops through her work with ARC.

Chris Walker is an artist and the director of the Division of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Walker is a professor in the School of Education’s Department of Dance, as well as the founding artistic director of First Wave, a prominent U.S. national scholarship program known for pushing the boundaries of poetry, dance, theater and art. Walker is a multi-hyphenate contemporary dance and performance artist. Rooted in “Resistance Aesthetics,” Walker’s work draws upon the danced rituals, mas traditions, and embodied performance history of the African diaspora. His research intersects dance choreography for the concert stage with collaborations with visual and performance artists for museum, alternate spaces, professional theatre, and video/film, as well as developed the pedagogical framework known as the First Wave Process.

Sheena Rose ( b.1985) is a visual artist who works in Barbados. Sheena is a Fulbright Scholar and holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Sheena's multi-disciplinary practice involves paintings, drawings, performance art, new media, public art, and mixed media. Sheena has exhibited internationally and been featured in The New York Times, Travel & Leisure Magazine, Vogue, Hospitality Design, White Wall, Wetranfer, Black Futures, Fox Television Empire Season 6, The Star Side of Bird Hill written by Naomi Jackson. In 2019, she created a two-story mural at the Inter- American Development Bank Headquarters in Washington DC. Sheena also created nine feet tall women mural for an exhibition called "The Other Side of Now" in the Perez Art Museum Miami and won the DSM Public Art Foundation commission to design 7 bus shelters in 6th Avenue Corridor, Iowa USA. Sheena received a 2020 Greensboro School of Art Distinguished Alumni award and a 2022 award from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley for Culture.

A k u z u r u is an Avant Garde artist who produces through a TransDisciplinary praxis straddling multiple approaches. Her thought provoking works invokes the unseen, where the material and the immaterial are as connectedly interspersed as the immanent and transcendent. Primarily environmental using vast spaces in the natural world and connected into the spatial appropriations of interiors of building spaces, her other- worldly forms in her installations or 'spatial works ' and expansive Performative AkTivations inoculates into the viewer deeply indelible emotive experiences. The artist has established a multi-faceted lexicon of performative works which include her Ak-tionisms, Spontaneous Art, Spatial Works, Gesture Works, Experiential Art, whether live or on film. A pioneer Performance and Transdisciplinary artist, A k u z u r u' s Experiential Art Productions are renowned intense interactive direct experiences. Her visceral situations ak-tivate energy processes integral to her praxis. An extensive walker, vastness in the natural world and metaphysical timelessness proved catalytic. Her complex Spatial Works- a Total Art sensorial experience- demand the physiological engagement of the gaze. With her BA fashion UK and MA textiles Nigeria, her broad artistic formative studies included classical music, the monumental orchestral steel pan concerts, classical and contemporary dance, performances in the famous procession traditions of the multi-layered Trinidad/ Nottinghill Carnivals. The Artist currently lives and works in Trinidad traveling worldwide having shown her works in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the US. Presentations at important institutions- National Museum Trinidad and Tobago 2001, Perez Art Museum Miami PAMM 2014, University of Art Bern Switzerland 2016, the Buchheim Museum Germany in 2017. Awards from the Prince Claus Fund and the Commonwealth Foundation.

Everald ‘Redman’ Watson. Drummer /Percussionist / Panman for more than 40 years began his career at a young age – as a part of block drumming, blockoramas and the Best Village competition. He is also an actor, singer, steelpan drill master and a teacher of many aspects of the performing arts. Watson works at various schools as a drumming instructor. Dance Companies: UWI for Caribbean Dance classes; Carlton Francis; Andre Ettiene; Aubrey Adams’s Ambakaila; Carol La Chapelle; Noble Douglas; Caribbean School of Dance. Choirs: Bishop Anstey; Sacred Heart Girls RC; Mucarapo Girls RC; Marionettes Chorale, Lydians Choir. Theatre companies: Trinidad Theatre Workshop under Dereck Walcott; Bagasse; Raymond Choo Kong Productions; Lilliput; and many Best Village performing companies. He played pan with BP Renegades for 36 years and was once captain; Super Novas; also assisted many other bands over the years. Watson has travelled to 32 countries around the world representing T&T as a performer, and has supported many artistes including 3 Canal, Ella Andall, Andre Tanker, Mavis John, David Rudder, Denyse Plummer, Machel Montano. At present, he still works with youths as a teacher of drums, pan and different aspects of our culture. “Redman” has been a part of the ESC’s Emancipation celebrations from its inception. In 2020, he received the ESC's Keeper of the Tradition Award.

Kieron Dwayne Sargeant (NEW WAVES! 2023 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE) is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, drummer and dance researcher emerging out of the African-Caribbean Diaspora tradition. He is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Skidmore College Department of Dance. Over the past 20 years, he has been involved in documenting, assessing, and analyzing dance traditions of the Caribbean and establishing a canon of dance teachings and workshops, informed by his research, to popularize the ancestral survival of movement traditions between the Circum-Caribbean and Western Africa. Kieron’s artistic practice includes translating sacred, cultural and spiritual practices, resulting in dance works for the concert and commercial stage.His choreographic works has been presented throughout the U.S., and internationally in Nigeria at the Festival of African and Caribbean Cultures (FESTACC), Canada at the High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago, Senegal's Ecole de Sables, at Contemporary Choreographers Collective (COCO) Trinidad and Tobago, at Danza Extrema XIII Festival International in Mexico, and London, Barcelona, Portugal, and Malaga with MSC Cruise line. Mr. Sargeant holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Dance Performance and Choreography from Florida State University, a Master of Arts (MA) in Community Dance Practice from Ohio University and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Dance from the University of West Indies.

Adanna Jones (NEW WAVES! 2023 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE) holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and has performed with the Julia Ritter Performance Group and Souloworks with Andrea E. Woods. She has choreographed dance-theater pieces based on her research, such as “Wine & Tales” in Port of Spain, Trinidad, which was presented by New Waves! 2015 and the Dancing While Black Performance Lab. From 2016 to 2018, she performed in NYC with the support of Field Studies, a creative development lab designed for emerging artist/scholars. Her research on the Trinidadian Carnival and intimacy onto the stage with her piece “Navigating the Borders of Silence” was part of the Maine Moves performance series. As a scholar, her research generally focuses on Caribbean dance and identity politics within the Diaspora, paying particular focus to Trini-styled Carnivals and the rolling hip dance known as winin’. From 2017-18, she began working on her latest project as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dance Department for Faculty Diversity at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County - a multi-sited, transnational ethnography that tracked the ways in which Caribbean choreographers play an integral role in the support and preservation of contemporary Caribbean identity politics within the US. As an educator, she remains committed to anti-racist pedagogic praxes through her work a member of the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective and the Coalition of Diasporan Scholars Moving.

BongoWattZ (NEW WAVES! 2023 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE) is an experimental multidisciplinary independent artist born in Kingston (Jamaica) raised in Miami, based in Miami and New York City. One of Dance Magazine’s 2019 top 25 performers/choreographers, a 2018 Bessie Nominee, and a 2019 Bessie Awardee for Outstanding Performance, Wattz is driven by the behaviors of black frequencies as they shift energy, space and matter on a quantum level. Wattz seeks to foster new desires in the imaginations of this generation and the generations to come, as these new desires feed back into the ancient.

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and atemporal--leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present and possible afterlives. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. They hold a MFA from University of California, Los Angeles; BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University, and are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Jennifer Ligaya is an AfroPinay sound, movement, and performance practitioner and artist scholar born and raised in Chicago with an interdisciplinary background in visual art, vocal performance, dance, and theater. Mother to a Scorpio son and full time PhD student of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, her original work includes solo and collaborative performance compositions and sound installations. A sponsored artist, grant recipient, and commissioned multimedia artist, her compositions amplify critical conversations around identity, liberatory practices, ancestral indigenous knowledge systems, and moments of communal healing, through the weaving of traditional and contemporary sound, performance, and personal ancestral folk arts practices. Core member of Honey Pot Performance, her current creative practice explores Afro-Asian feminist subjectivities and speculative arts, indigenous healing and survival practices, and the genealogies of anticolonial spiritual-political resistance. Website: www.jenniferligaya.com

Shireen Dickson is a former: NYC DOE teacher; NBA cheerleader; Off-Broadway Equity performer; community engagement director for a MacArthur awardee; Jubilation Foundation and Women of Color in the Arts Fellow; and (founding) executive board member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance based at Duke University. A 20-year collaborator with Thomas F. DeFrantz, Shireen is currently managing his SLIPPAGE: Performance | Culture | Technology laboratory at Northwestern University In addition to directing the community and educational focused OKRA Dance since 2010, and also consults on a wide range of professional development and creative projects for both independent artists and emerging cultural organizations (including regular presentations for National Dance Education Organization and teacher mentoring via the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago).

Latanya d. Tigner performs professionally with Dimensions Dance Theater (DDT), lectures at UC Berkeley, and is certified in the Akimbo level of Talawa Technique™. She has created commissioned works for DDT, Black Choreographers Festival and others. She was nominated in 2017 for a Theater Bay Area Award for choreographing Marcus Gardly’s black odyssey. In addition, Latanya served as Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival from 2018-2021. As the founder and curatorial director of Dancing Cy(i)phers, an annual symposium examining the coded languages within Africana dance, Latanya has presented Hip Hop’s Embodied Expression of Resistance and Resilience (2019), Back to the Root: The Healing and Spiritual Power of the Spine and Pelvis in African Rooted Dance (2020) and subsequent monthly online series, and Back to the Root: Dancing Ancestral Cosmologies (2021). Her current work, 5th-Quarter Bantaba, investigates HBCU marching bands and pre-colonial Malinke and Wolof traditions.

Collette “Coco” Murray of Guyanese heritage is a dance educator and performer invested in teaching, advocacy, community arts engagement, mentorship, and research in Afrodiasporic dance vernacular. Recently awarded for advancing the importance of cultural arts and anti-racism work in dance, Murray is a doctoral student in Dance Studies at York University focusing on dance education process of Canadian African-diasporic dance educators. Murray holds a MEd, an Honours BA in Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity and a Certificate in Anti-racist Research in Practice from York University, and a Sociology BA from the University of Toronto. In Canada, Murray has a mobile, dance education business and is Artistic Director of Coco Collective, an intergenerational arts team offering culturally responsive projects and cultural education in African and Caribbean arts to organizations, schools, and neighbourhoods.

Iman Clark was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, but currently resides in Miami, Florida. In 2020, she graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in dance and a minor in African American and African studies. Iman's research focuses on the arts and culture of the African diaspora within the U.S, South America and the Caribbean. Her specialized dance form is a contemporary fusion of Afro- Caribbean dance and improvisation. Iman has trained and performed in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Michigan, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, and Jamaica. Over the past year, she has been working with Miami City Ballet as a teaching artist and program assistant within their Community Engagement Department. Iman strives daily to advocate for the arts and to bring creative accessibility to all communities.

Timothy Anderson Jr.: I go by TJ. I have a bachelors in modern dance and Masters and Dance education from Lincoln center and Hunter college. BFA from The University of the arts. I’ve been teaching dance for 8 years in public and Charter schools. I have also been performing as a freelance artist. I am look to continuing bringing dance to underserved communities and having the art enrich their lives.

Abadai Zoboi is a rising senior at Amherst College majoring in Black Studies. As a Benjamin Mays Scholar with the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, Zoboi researches how Black women at Amherst College utilizes African dance aesthetics as sites of self preservation and joy under the systems of oppression which surround and penetrate this institution. Using her body as a vessel for comprehension and process, she analyzes the physical space, the physical body, and the internal self, recognizing that each entity converses with one another to inform her dance practice. Her research is heavily inspired by her own experiences as a dancer at Amherst College and beyond. Zoboi has performed in the Five College Dance performance of an excerpt from Urban Bush Woman’s Batty Moves and currently serves as the Artistic Director of Dance and Step at Amherst College (DASAC), where she dances and choreographs pieces that celebrate Black dance.

Kay Bobb (they/she) is a child of Trinidadian and Barbadian parents and a recent graduate from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, USA with a B.A. in Art History. Their research is based on exploring representations of gender queerness in mas, analyzing how queer mas calls back to traditional Carnival while simultaneously breaking boundaries of what Carnival can be. A burgeoning museum educator, Kay is passionate about breaking down the invisible barrier that often exists between the doors of art museums and people of color. She believes that once museums create a dialogue with their surrounding communities, people of color can then see themselves not only in the art but in the programming and leadership. With more people of color both as visitors and senior staff in museums, we have the power to redefine the impact that the museum has on marginalized groups.

Emilie Jabouin, or Zila for stage, is a Haitian (Ayisyen)-folk and contemporary dance artist and researcher, based in Tkaronto, Turtle Island (Toronto, Canada), who uses her story-telling abilities for social transformation, collective liberation and healing. Zila has performed with Ballet Creole, Kashedance, Ronald Taylor Dance, Mafa Dance Village, Esie Mensah and Lua Shayenne, locally and internationally. Her practice is growing towards exploring artistic expressions of defiance, resilience and sexual reclamation. Since 2020, Zila has intentionally immersed herself in her cultural heritage, Ayisyen folk culture, through folk drumming, singing and dancing under the mentorship of the internationally renowned dancer, teacher and choreographer Peniel Guerrier based in New York City. For the first time, she is developing a solo dance piece called “The Release.” The contemporary and folk dance piece explores her and her maternal lineage’s experiences with pregnancy, miscarriages, interrupted pregnancies (abortion). Zila aims to tour the piece throughout the Caribbean.

Rainy Demerson is a dance artist and scholar invested in intersectional feminism and decolonial embodiments. Her pedagogical praxis is informed by many years of teaching youth, and by formal study in the Dance Education MA at New York University. She holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University and a PhD in Critical Dance Studies from University of California Riverside. She taught at Lindenwood University, El Paso Community College, Crafton Hills College, Scripps College, California Polytechnic University Pomona, and California State University San Marcos before joining the University of the West Indies in Barbados, where she co-created a Dance BFA which centers Afro-Caribbean identities. She has performed in the USA, South Africa and Senegal, and her research has been published in several journals and anthologies.

Jillia Cato is known as a lover of the arts, for her compassion toward those she works and associates with and her base-line positive outlook toward progress. "Remembering my experiences from years ago, I look forward to re-grounding in the practices that are being offered this year once more - especially as I can finally return home since the pandemic started." This Trinidad and Tobagonian is a dancer and singer grounded in Caribbean music and techniques, actress and Production Stage Manager. While based in Trinidad until 2019, Jillia’s most notable long term works were an international touring dancer for major soca bands Machel Montano and Kes the Band for 12 years and Production Stage Manager for the National Theatre Arts Company of Trinidad and Tobago for 4 years. Since being in Ontario 2020, she’s been working with KasheDance, Wind In The Leaves Collective, Kaeja d’Dance, Ronald Taylor Dance, Jumblies Theatre, Luminato and Community Arts Guild of Scarborough. She is proud to have transformed her Project Management skills learned from her Engineering degree and experience to support the arts alongside her artistic practice.

Robert Young is an artist and designer from Trinidad and Tobago. Founding, ‘The Cloth’, a lifestyle and fashion design company, in 1986, Robert has utilised clothing as a medium for expression; capturing the social landscapes and emotions that hail from his immersive Afro-Caribbean upbringing, and working in communities to dress and empower the troupes and personalities that make it their life’s work to represent us. Robert’s work deals with Caribbean Memory, focusing on places of resistance within the past and attempting to extract and transmute that energy, into the consciousness of The Now. Ever the Mas Man, Robert is long-known for his band, 'A Vulgar Fraction’; conceptualising and designing yearly roving performance art which finds the light on the streets of Port-of-Spain, during the Carnival ritual. Each year's concept is duly analysed by experts, elders and the wider community, through panel discussions and active outreach. On the technical side, Robert's process is much like that of a teacher, encouraging performers and public alike, to engage with and connect this with energy through working with one’s own hands; reclaiming creativity as a central part of what it means to exist as one’s present-self. The framework, foundation, guidance and material is provided by Robert but also the encouragement and agency to have the costumes be built from the vantage point of each participant's personal relating, making the art, the wearer’s very own. Robert pays attention to how slavery, indentureship and colonisation continues to impact our lives and tirelessly looks at all the ways one can work under, over, around and through the side effects of these centuries-long injustices in the interest of reuniting shards and healing fractures of The Self, which in turn, may impact, strengthen and reclaim community life, for the better.

Kevin Ormsby Dancer, Choreographer and Artistic Director of KasheDance, Kevin A. Ormsby has performed in Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. Nominee for the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize 2023 and finalist for the Arts Prize 2021, he is a recipient of Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch – Staunton Award, a Chalmers Fellowship, and was a Toronto Arts Council Cultural Leaders Fellow. He has been featured in works by Marie-Josée Chartier, Allison Cummings, Patrick Parson, Ronald Taylor, Ron K. Brown, Menaka Thakkar, Garth Fagan, Liz Lerman, Bageshree Vaze, Lemi Ponifasio, Christopher Walker, Denise Fujiwara among others. Faculty member of Centennial College’s Dance Performance Program, he has been a Guest Artist at Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts - University of the West Indies (Mona), University of Wisconsin – Madison, Northwestern University, and the University of Texas - Austin. His research and creative practice exist in constant interrogation and navigation of Caribbean and African Diasporic cultural practices towards a methodology of investigation in research, creation and presentation.

Mazaré Trim is a queer black artist hailing from Barbados. Mazaré's work explores the complexities of being openly queer and effeminate while navigating through a country that has a rich history of queerphobia, while addressing the sexual promiscuity and stigma that is unfairly put onto the queer community. Queer representation and imagery is something that Mazaré's queer counterparts are pushing for, especially in the Caribbean space. Mazaré's work is to push the 'agenda' while still breaking down and criticizing the negatives that could eventually in the long run start many conversations to address what makes the Caribbean so uncomfortable with the idea of queerness.

Luis Rincón Alba teaches at the Art and Public Policy Department, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds a B.A. from Universidad del Atlántico (Colombia), two M.A. from Stony Brook University and New York University, and a Ph.D. from New York University. Rincón Alba teaches courses and conducts research on performance studies, festive and political practices in the Americas, Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics and criticism, contemporary art from the Americas, race and ethnicity, sound, and musical performance. His work explores the modes in which popular culture animates political movements and contemporary artistic practices. His artistic and academic work centers on the performativity of festive and carnival performance. His scholarship traces the aesthetic and political genealogy of carnival practices in contemporary literature, performance art, and music as it pays attention to how this emergence troubles historical understandings of race, gender, and class. Rincón Alba has been a fellow at NYU’s Center for the Humanities and the Urban Democracy Lab. He has also received public humanities fellowships at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and Humanities New York. In 2010, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship.

Zavernel Grant (NEW WAVES! 2023 SCHOLARSHIP AWARDEE) is a student in dance at the University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy for Performing Arts.

Shachia Strachan (NEW WAVES! 2023 SCHOLARSHIP AWARDEE) holds a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from the University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy for Performing Arts. This is Shachia's third time participating in New Waves! Institute.

Burton Sankeralli (New Waves! Institute Philosopher-in-Residence) is a Theologian, Philosopher, writer, poet, cultural anthropologist and political and cultural activist. He is a founder of the Philosophical Society of Trinidad & Tobago and a keen observer and thinker on Caribbean matters past, present and future. A former newspaper columnist, his pieces have also appeared in a number of scholarly and academic publications, including Enterprise of the Indies edited by George Lamming. Sankeralli is the editor of the book, “At the Crossroads: African Caribbean Religion and Christianity” (1995) and author of “Of Obeah & Modernity” (2008).

Wayne "Lion" Osuna | Crystal Dino | Ayinde Jean-Baptiste | Youthen Joseph | Ailey Adams