Artists Supporting Artists Program (ASAP)
In our Artists Supporting Artists Program, a new effort to support contemporary artists, we provide direct monetary support for individuals and small companies to explore and research their own artistry. In our third year of this program, we provided grants to Souleymane “Solo” Badolo, Kayla Hamilton, and Kris Lee & Lauren Bakst.
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Souleymane “Solo” Badolo is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, performer, and Assistant Professor of Dance at Bard College celebrated for his innovative fusion of traditional African and contemporary dance vocabularies. Born in Burkina Faso, he began his career with DAMA, a traditional African dance company, before founding Kongo Ba Téria in 1993 a troupe that continues to tour globally, redefining African dance aesthetics.
As a performer, Badolo has worked with seminal figures including Burkina Faso’s Salia ni Seydou, French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier, and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso. His collaborative projects span luminaries such as Nora Chipaumire, Ralph Lemon, Reggie Wilson, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Urban Bush Women). His work is featured in the acclaimed documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa and Film Nora, highlighting his role in Africa’s experimental dance movement.
Since relocating to New York City in 2009, Badolo has been commissioned by premier institutions: Dance New Amsterdam space, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, Harlem Stage, BAM, the 92nd Street Y, and Jacob’s Pillow’s River to River Festival, among others. Internationally, he has created works for London’s Adzido Dance Company and Philadelphia’s Philadanco.
Honors include:
Bessie Award for Outstanding Production (2016)
Creative Capital Fellowship (2023)
Elizabeth Coleman Visionary Leadership Award
Grand Prix de la Création Chorégraphique du Burkina
Découverte RFI Award
Double laureate of the Rencontre Chorégraphique Africaine et de l’Océan Indien (1997,
2020)
Creative Capital Award
Community engagement and development Award Burkina Faso (KYA)
Badolo’s ongoing research into African dance traditions is supported by New York Live Arts’ Suitcase Fund and reflects his commitment to cultural exchange and artistic evolution. With the support of Creative Capital, he is developing a technique he calls the science of ancestors, roots in the symbolic sign language of geomancy African divination.
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Kayla Hamilton is a choreographer, educator, and cultural worker working at the intersections of access, Blackness, and disability. Her work artistic has been presented at The Shed, Gibney, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and New York Live Arts, and she has performed with Kinetic Light, Sydnie L. Mosley, Paloma McGregor, and Gesel Mason. A United States Artist Disability Futures Fellow and Bessie Award recipient, Kayla co-lead as co-director of Angela’s Pulse/Dancing While Black and as co-facilitator of How We Move, a summer intensive for disabled artists. She also directs the Access.Movement.Play Residency at Movement Research, a residency to support disabled artist. A former public school special education teacher, Kayla brings care and rigor into her work as a consultant with institutions including the Mellon Foundation and New York Live Arts. Her practice spans choreography, dramaturgy, and verbal description, pushing dance to be expansive, accessible, and just.
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Kris Lee & Lauren Bakst live and work in New York. Their collaborative performance practice is dedicated to the embodied transmission of queer archives and erotics.
Kris Lee (she/they) is a dancer, performer and DJ who is grounded in the Black radical tradition of improvisation and aliveness. They work with dance and sound as audio-tactile-kinesthetic technologies for exercising non-performative liberation. Lee was named by Dance Magazine as one of “25 to Watch” in 2026. They participated in the creation and performance of OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century) at Danspace Project. Currently they are working with Shamel Pitts/TRIBE in Marks of Red (premiered March 2026 at The Walker Art Center), Sweat Variant, and Moriah Evans.
Lauren Bakst is an artist, dancer, writer, and curator working in experimental performance. She is currently completing her PhD in English with a focus in Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. An article based on her dissertation project, “Erotic City: Slipping into Clit Club’s Lesbian Surround,” is forthcoming in a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review. Building on queer-feminist lineages, Lauren’s performance work sources material directly from her life to distill and problematize the layers of the self. Her works have been presented by The Kitchen, the Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, Pioneer Works, SculptureCenter, and the Drawing Center, among other spaces. Her chapbook, more problems with form or, desire notes or, still woman, was published by Wendy's Subway. Lauren organizes and curates The School for Temporary Liveness, a para-site for collective study and dissonant communion. She teaches the Seminar in Contemporary Art at Rutgers University.
alumni
2024-2025 ASAP recipients
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A product from around the globe but loudly repping Nigeria, Nosarieme a.k.a Nosa is an Emmy-nominated producer and director. As an activist, she launched Vote or Quench, a youth voter engagement platform in Nigeria. She created the acclaimed documentary series MY AFRICA IS, which received support from Black Public Media's BPM 360 and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was featured in the Vitra Design Museum's MAKING AFRICA exhibit. Nosa has produced and directed television for major networks including HULU, FX, Showtime, and HBO. Her narrative short ACCENT was officially selected for the Tide Film Festival and the New FilmMakers festival. In 2019, she was a fellow of the Gotham Episodic Lab for her narrative series in development, ADVENTURES FROM THE BEDROOMS OF AFRICAN WOMEN. Her work on THE NEW YORK TIMES PRESENTS: THE LEGACY OF J. DILLA earned two News and Documentary Emmy nominations.
The ASAP award supports Last Weekend in October. Last Weekend in October is a character-driven documentary that explores Nigeria's fashion ecosystem through the journeys of designers, tailors, models, and influencers as they prepare for Lagos Fashion Week—while navigating the country’s unavoidable pitfalls. Through the lens of fashion, it offers a layered and nuanced view of Lagos—capturing the realities of those involved in fashion and the intersections of creativity, culture, identity and class.
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Holland Andrews (they/them) and yuniya edi kwon (she/her) are composer-improvisers, vocalists, and interdisciplinary performance makers based in Brooklyn, NY. Their collaborative practice is an emergent and embodied extension of their lives as ritualists, spiritual practitioners, and partners. Holland, a multi-instrumentalist and producer, arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics, harnessing the power of these instruments to address themes of vulnerability, catharsis, and healing. yuniya, in her work, connects sound, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation, transgression, and mythology’s ability to both obscure and reveal. Their co-created opera-in-progress, How does it feel to look at nothing, is a transdisciplinary space of convergence for their shared life, queer-trans family, and beloved creative lineages, grounded in the foundational questions that connect and inspire them. Separately, their work has been presented by The Whitney, REDCAT, PICA, ISSUE Project Room, Dia Art Foundation, Performa Biennial, Roulette Intermedium, Civitella Ranieri, and others. Holland and yuniya are Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardees and United States Artists Fellows.
The ASAP award supports their collaborative project How does it feel to look at nothing. An opera of the elemental, of pre-deities, and illusions of containment, How does it feel to look at nothing is an embodied, interdisciplinary performance emerging through a story of transitional states. Composer-performers, multi-instrumentalists, and vocalists Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon co-create this work of composition, improvisation, dance, physical theater, and ritual. An embodied affirmation of trans futures amidst the disintegrative reality of trans life, How does it feel to look at nothing uses an improvised language of disintegration to tell the pre-origin story of a Deity of Namelessness.
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Cynthia Oliver is a St.Croix, Virgin Island reared dance maker and scholar. Her work incorporates textures of Caribbean performance with African and American aesthetic sensibilities. She has toured the globe as a featured dancer with numerous contemporary dance companies, including David Gordon Pick Up Co., Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, Bebe Miller, Tere O’Connor Dance and in theatre works by Laurie Carlos, Ntozake Shange, and Deke Weaver. She earned a PhD in performance studies from New York University, is widely published, and has won numerous awards including a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award, United States Artists, Doris Duke and Guggenheim Fellowships. Her last evenng length work, Virago-Man Dem, premiered at BAM's Next Wave Festival and toured the country. At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she is the Gutsgell Professor in the Dance Department, an affiliate in African American and Gender & Women’s Studies and served a five year term (2017-2022) as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Humanities, Arts and Related Fields. In 2023 she was appointed Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Arts Integration, an appointment designed to amplify and support the arts in every area of campus life, in collaboration across disciplines and units and with our surrounding communities.
The ASAP award supports Turn. Turning. TURNT. Turn. Turning. TURNT is a tryptic made up of three movement experiments explored before, during, and “after” (if there is one) the global pandemic. Tether - an AfroFuturistic aspirational experiment and meditation on black girls’ creativity, drawn from double dutch as life skill training; Fallow – run ragged by ever changing threats, pivoting quickly and persistently; and Summon. Sow. Reap – we relish what we have summoned, what seeds are sown, and just or unjust rewards are reaped. We reflect and return, more fiercely, to moving, remembering, hoping, and recovering ourselves for a world anew.
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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 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 are 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.
2023-2024 ASAP recipients
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Leslie Cuyjet is an award-winning choreographer and performer whose work aims to conjure life-long questions of identity, confuse and disrupt traditional narratives, and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Since 2004, her tenure in the New York dance world is decorated with performances and collaborations, both formal and informal; with contemporaries, legends, and counterparts; on rooftops, good and bad floors, and alleyways; on stage, in film, art, on tour, and on the fly. “A strong, subtle presence unassumingly ground the stage,” says The New York Times. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists (Dance), Princeton Hodder Fellowship, and an Outstanding Choreographer/Creator “Bessie” Award for her 2021 work, Blur.
ASAP funding helped produce For All Your Life, a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death. Centered around an ambitious seriocomical short film, For All Your Life is staged as a performance seminar, guided by an insurance sales woman, played by choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. Part-screening, part-theater, this solo performance offers a primer on the life insurance industry and its direct connection to slavery; unpacking the ways in which human beings grapple with the inevitable prospect of death and, more importantly, the ways in which lives—especially those of people of color—are monetized. -
Wanjiru Kamuyu, born in Nairobi/Kenya, obtained a Master of Fine Arts at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA). Based in Paris since 2007, she started her career in New York with such notable dance companies as Urban Bush Women and Molissa Fenley and Company. As a dancer, she developed a rich and diverse background that fostered her choreographic development and teaching. Between New York and Paris, on international stages, she has worked with contemporary choreographers including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar/Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones, Irène Tassembedo, Robyn Orlin, Nathalie Pubellier, Stefanie Batten Bland, Bartabas, Dean Moss and more. Wanjiru collaborated with Jérôme Savary (À la recherche de Joséphine), Bill T. Jones (Broadway show FELA!) as well as the film director Christian Faure (Fais danser la poussière) and visual artist Jean-Paul Goude. She was in the original cast of the Paris Production of Julie Taymor’s Broadway show, The Lion King. Since 2017, Kamuyu has created three major works (two solos and a trio) plus adaptations for alternative spaces and young audiences. Additionally, in 2020 she created her first dance film, La visite, directed by Tommy Pascal. Her works have been internationally acclaimed in the USA, Europe, Africa and Asia. Kamuyu has also worked as a choreographer with directors Jérôme Savary (France), Hassane Kassi Kouyaté (Burkina Faso), Jean-François Auguste (France); several US based universities; dance company InkBoat (USA) and has developed projects for refugees with New World Theatre (USA) and Euroculture. Additionally, she has also served as artistic consultant for choreographer Bintou Dembele’s (France) work, Z.H.
Kamuyu teaches workshops in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa. Kamuyu’s company, WKcollective, is an associate company with the creative agency camin aktion (Montpellier). Since the end of the 2023/24 season, she has been the associate artist at the National Choreographic Center, CCN Nantes. As a 2023 artist in residence with the Villa Albertine, Kamuyu continues to receive their support in the touring her work in the US. She is also a Live Feed Artist with New York Live Arts (2023-2025). From 2020-2024, she was associate artist with L’Onde Théâtre (Vélizy, France). -
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). 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. Their work has been exhibited at venues such as documenta15, The Kitchen, White Columns, and at film festivals internationally. Previously, they have been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Queer|Art, and the Global Fund for Women. In 2024, they will be in residence at ISCP as well as Headlands Center for the Arts. They have participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Red Bull Arts Detroit and NLS Kingston in Jamaica, among others. They have guest lectured at Emory University, Rutgers University, and the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. Gopee was a Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2024. They hold an MFA from UCLA with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studio and a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency and research platform titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. Support from ASAP will support the development of a new, untitled film and installation to be completed in 2025.
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Psychic Wormhole (Stacy Lynn Smith + Alex Romania) is a creative research platform and production company making live multidisciplinary performance work and experimental film. The duo excavates trauma and somatic memory as a means to reclaim embodiment as autobiographical material is filtered through genres of Horror, Sci-Fi, Afro-futurism and Arthouse Cinema. Recent work includes Face Eaters at The Chocolate Factory Theater, an epic, live, multimedia performance work processing Romania's family experiences with grief, mental illness and suicide. With the generous support of Sweat Variant, Psychic Wormhole is working towards completing their debut film, RECKONING, a visceral abstract memoir which grapples with Smith's experiences of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and Complex-PTSD.
Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, Black mixed-race performing artist and improviser, choreographer, director and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water (by and for those affected by childhood sexual abuse). Dedicated to collaboration, Smith creates, devises, improvises and performs across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists including: DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Thaddeus O’Neil, Rakia Seaborn, Vangeline Theater (2008-2017), Michael Freeman, Saints of an Unnamed Country, Salome Asega, GENG, Donna Costello, Bradley Bailey, Michele Beck, Jasmine Hearn, mayfield brooks, Josephine Decker and more. Most recently, Smith has worked with Kathy Westwater, Jill Sigman, Emily Johnson, Joan Jonas, Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili as well as working on their own artistic projects and as one half of the creative duo, Psychic Wormhole (with Alex Romania). Smith's work has been presented at CAVE, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Socrates Sculpture Park, Rosekill, Glasshouse, 92StY, Performance Mix Festival, Snug Harbor Dance Festival, St. Augustine's Church via Abrons Arts Center and more. Smith is a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2024 Djerassi AIR.
Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary filmmaker, performing artist, and improviser, who has held residencies with MacDowell, Djerassi, Movement Research, Old Furnace, Tofte Lake Center, The Center for Performance Research, Chez Bushwick, and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Romania’s recent projects include ‘Face Eaters’ created in collaboration with Stacy Lynn Smith, which premiered at the Chocolate Factory Theater (CF) in May 2024, (co-directorship of) the experimental documentary 'Patch the Sky with Five Colored Stones' conceived by choreographer Daria Faïn, and the collaborative short film 'Mira! Mira! Mira!' with Daniela Fabrizi and the Re Hecho community in the LES. In addition to creating original work which has been presented internationally at spaces such as Grace Exhibition Space, Abrons Arts Center, Encuentro, Casa Viva, UV Estudios, Sub Rosa Space, Romania has performed in various works by Kathy Westwatersince 2013 and has been featured in the work of Simone Forti, Éva Mag, Eddie Peake, Andy de Groat, Catherine Galasso, and danced early on with George Russell and De Facto Dance who extended practices of the improvisational choreographer Richard Bull. Romania has had several video and object designs featured within the works of Antonio Ramos, and has worked in various filmmaking roles with Marin Media Labs, TAAMAS / Sarah Riggs, Trixie Films / Therese Shechter, Christopher “Unpezverde” Nuñez, Martita Abril, and Sarah White-Ayòn. Romania received a B.F.A. from Tisch School of the Arts in 2013.