Staff

Bessie’ award winning dancer, choreographer and teacher, Gerald Casel was born in the Philippines and raised in California where he began dancing in public school. He received a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School in 1991 and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2007 assisted by a fellowship from the Advanced Opportunity Program. His choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. As

Weidong Yang is the co-founder and director of Kinetech Arts. He founded Kineviz, creating visual analytics solution for complex data. He received his Ph.D in Physics and Masters in Computer Science from University of Oregon. Weidong was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, conducting research on quantum dots. He has collaborated and created many performances and installations. As a dancer, he has performed with various dance companies including KUNST-STOFF, Paco Gomes and Sara Shelton Mann. He was a Scientific Delirium

Daiane Lopes da Silva is a dancer, choreographer, educator and artistic director of Kinetech Arts. Her work has been performed in Brazil, France, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Italy and the U.S.A. She was a resident artist at CounterPulse and Headlands Center for the Arts, and is currently in residency at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and ODC Theatre from 2018-2021. As a dancer, she has performed with KUNST-STOFF dance company, Labayen Dance, Lisbon Dance Company, little seismic dance company, Robert Moses’ Kin,

Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes is an Oakland, California based performance artist. He is a graduate of The Experimental Performance Institute at New College. It was there he learned to transform spoken-word into solo plays. Dazié’s first full-length performance I Am A Man is a multidisciplinary solo work which focuses on the ways in which gay men of color claim and hold their masculinity. I Am A Man was performed as part of the National Queer Arts Festival in 2010 and 2012.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (b. Damascus, 1990) is a visual artist, performer and curator. Bhutto’s work explores complex histories of colonialism that are exacerbated by contemporary international politics and in the process unpacks the intersections of queerness and Islam through a multi-media practice. He has shown work and performed at SFCamerawork, Kampnagel Theater, The Beirut Art Fair, The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, The Queens Museum and the deYoung Museum . In January 2018 he co-curated The Third

Since 1979 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival

Anne Bluethenthal is founder and Artistic Director of ABD Productions, a multiethnic and multicultural modern dance company, committed to activism in the arts. A woman-centered, collaborative dance ensemble, ABD is dedicated to creating a language of movement that breaks the ordinary paradigm of Western dance and to presenting choreographies that face difficult issues with eloquence and passion. Through her choreography and community collaborations, Bluethenthal has presented work on subjects such as Palestine-Israel, globalization, the environment, genocide, and the gift economy.