SATURDAY November 23RD
Show 4 - 8:00 pm
Meet the Artists
CHITRA.MOVES (she/her) is an Indian American dancer, choreographer, and educator residing in Washington, DC. A Pittsburgh native and originally from South India, Chitra currently teaches, choreographs, and performs with a collective of artists called chitra.MOVES. Her aesthetic draws from Hip Hop and Indian Classical foundations to tell stories, elevate artists, and meaningfully engage unseen and new audiences. Anchored by her years of education work with young people and their families in DC, Chitra explores themes centered on relationships, community, and institution to expose untapped potential and talents. Her work shares rich, cultural movement traditions that come together in unique and raw ways. Heavily influenced by her immigrant roots and her love for Hip Hop, Chitra has cultivated over 20 years of experience in youth work, teaching, choreography, performance, and learning. Chitra created an evening-length work, “TEMPLE,” presented by Dance Place, which sold-out three shows, including a special matinee performance for DC Public School students. Chitra currently curates and teaches for the Rooting the Dance Hip Hop Dance Series. It spotlights the diverse stories and talents of women and femmes in the DC street dance scene and offers a consistent, high-quality training ground for the community. Chitra’s dance work has also been presented at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival, Joe’s Movement Emporium, Dance Place, PearlPRESENTS at The Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and Three Rivers Arts Festival. Chitra is the recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, and is currently a 2024 Atlas Arts Lab Fellow.
SARA HOOK DANCES
SARA HOOK’S (she/her) diverse performing career includes touring the world with Nikolais Dance Theater, dancing for Martha Graham luminaries Pearl Lang, Stuart Hodes, and Jean Erdman, and being a frequent guest artist/collaborator with David Parker and the Bang Group. Her choreography has been produced in numerous New York City venues (Dance Theater Workshop-now NYLA, Danspace, Dixon Place, Symphony Space, DanceNowNYC’s Series at Joe’s Pub of the Public Theater etc.), in venues across 25 American states, and in the Netherlands, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Ecuador, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Both her work and teaching focus on questions about dance history, gender expression and identity, and the role of somatic exploration in meaning-making. Hook holds a BFA from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, an MFA from New York University, and a certification as a movement analyst from the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She has toured widely as a guest artist and been an adjudicator for numerous American College Dance Conferences. She has taught at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, Princeton University, Paul Taylor Dance Company Summer Intensives, and the Bates Dance Festival. Currently she is Professor and Head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
ANGELINA DIFRANCO (she/her) Angelina DiFranco is a dance artist, writer, and choreographer. She graduated from Kent State University with honors in May 2023 and holds a BFA in dance and a BA in English. Throughout her tenure at Kent State, Angelina has received the May O’Donnell Memorial Dance Award, the Eugenia V. Erdmann Dance Award, and the dance faculty award for outstanding achievement as an emerging artist and dance scholar for three consecutive years. She was commissioned to choreograph for and dance in a film entitled Beauty of Violence, which won best overall at the Kent State Film Festival and best experimental film at the Highland Square Film Festival. Her own dance film Unscripted Puppet: The Staged Resurrection was nominated by Kent State faculty for the American College Dance Association and was selected to be presented for Cleveland Dance Festival’s Virtual Dance Film Gallery and Screening in 2022. Angelina’s piece Letters From a Monster was also selected to be presented for CDF’s Emerging Works Concert in 2022. Most recently, she was commissioned to choreograph for the Dancing Wheels Company. The piece, House of Glass, premiered in October of 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland and was re-staged for OhioDance Festival in April of 2024. Currently, Angelina is a company member and teacher in her third season with Dancing Wheels. Alongside her work as a dance artist, she took part in See Chicago Dance’s 2021 critical writing fellowship and has been published in See Chicago Dance, Luna Negra, and Brainchild.
CARIBE CONEXION is a Cleveland based Afro Caribbean dance company founded by Dr. Munirah Bomani (she/her) and Inali Pichardo. Together, they have taught hundreds of authentic, low cost dance classes to a variety of ages and nationalities. The company’s artistic mission to amplify the voices and stories of our Caribbean ancestors, and honor them in the mainstream dance community. Company repertoire includes works in western classical styles, fused with latin dance, orisha work and west african dance. Caribe Conexion’s work has been showcased at events such as Station Hope, Cleveland Dance Festival and “Celebremos”.
EMILY DUGGINS EHLING (she/her) is a St. Louis based dance artist, educator, and dramaturg. Her choreographic processes strive to prioritize the humans involved, seeking to build genuine care and empathy among the collaborators that might be felt by the viewer. Emily earned her MFA in Dance as a Chancellor’s Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. She has independently produced five full-length premieres since 2019, most recently …and everything stays the same… Emily has choreographed commissioned works for RESILIENCE Dance Company, The Big Muddy Dance Company Convergence Trainees, Modern American Dance Company 2, Consuming Kinetics Dance Company, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Washington University Dance Collective. Her work has been shown broadly at festivals across the country. After dancing with Modern American Dance Company 2, The Slaughter Project, and Black Irish Contemporary Hip Hop Company, Emily was a founding company member with RESILIENCE Dance Company. She now serves as the company’s dramaturg and regularly teaches company class. As a teacher, Emily primarily draws from Horton, Release Technique, somatic practices, and improvisation to encourage grounded, expansive, curious, independent dancing. This fall, Emily will be joining the faculty at the University of Missouri as Assistant Teaching Professor of Stage Movement and Dance.
TAKE ROOT just returned from their residency at the Tanz Tangente in Berlin, Germany where they taught classes, created a new work and performed a full-length concert. The company has performed at the New Dance for Asia International Festival/Seoul, South Korea, Incheon Yeonsu International Dance Festival/Incheon, Korea, Uferstudios/Berlin, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Detroit Institute of Arts, National Theater of Costa Rica, Red Bull House of Art/Detroit, TEDx, Detroit Dance City Festival, RADfest, Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, The Music Hall Center for Performing Arts Detroit, Hamlin Field House Theater/Chicago, Northwestern University, Ohio University and at The University of Costa Rica. Ali Woerner (She/Her), Founder/Artistic Director, is Associate Professor of Dance at Oakland University. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and BFA from Oklahoma City University. Woerner has performed, choreographed and taught all over the world; including Colombia, Costa Rica, Japan, Berlin and Korea. Woerner created two outreach programs Take Root offers in the community; Dance for Parkinson’s Disease Program (DPD) and Arts Education Impact. The company offers weekly DPD classes in five locations, guest lectures for the Graduate Neuro Interventions course at Oakland University. Woerner was a guest host for the National Parkinson’s Movement Disorder webinar, speaker for the Parkinson’s Disease Symposium, Michigan Parkinson’s Facilitator’s Conference, Women in Dance Conference and the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. The Arts Education Impact program works with k-5 children in partnership with Center for Success on the discovery of non-codified movement/music, providing problem solving, confidence and focus.
ANTHONY ALTERIO (he/his) is on faculty at Ohio University. He works in the School of Dance and the School of Theatre as Assistant Professor of Instruction, Musical Theatre and Dance. His research explores how representations of identities in the LGBTQIA+ community in pop culture reflect in academic settings as part of a larger interest in how dancers present themselves. Anthony is a native of Pittsburgh, and he began his professional dance training at The University of Colorado-Boulder, where he received a BA double-majoring in Dance and Psychology and went on to attain an MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan. Upon graduation, he has won multiple choreography awards including the Maggie Allesee Choreography award and since has been showing work across the US. Alterio is a member of the Boulder Jazz Dance Company, (formerly Interweave Dance Theatre), the resident company of the Boulder Jazz Dance Workshop as well as Director of a summer dance intensive geared toward the LGBTQIA+ community called Excessive Realness.