Threading residency
Our other pilot program, the Threading residency, honors the late Georgiana Pickett, a pioneer and steadfast contributor to the arts’ scene in New York. Through an annual nomination process, we recognize artists who are pushing boundaries and whose work is deeply rooted in rigorous movement-based practice or in live performance. The goal of this program is to support artists who are not based in New York City; through this residency program, the artists stay in NYC for three to four weeks while developing a specific project. Travel, housing, and studio space are provided. We selected SERAFINE1369 and Angel Shanel Edwards as the 2026 Threading residents.
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SERAFINE1369 is a London born and based artist, dancer and body-focused researcher working with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology. They work with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence. Dancing is a work of cycles and fragmentary returns that speaks to energy work, divination, meditative and devotional practices.
SERAFINE1369 is busy with propositions and practices - of dancing, spatial arrangement, sonics and modes of receiving - that counter the tendency towards bodily compression, inflammation and alienation. Their practice is concerned with the integrity and efficacy of structures (bodily and social), collaboration, hosting and an interest in somatics, semiotics and symbiotics from a body-led, experiential position. Their work prioritises listening and is responsive to the specificities of context, using movement as a tool for flattening hierarchies of perception between visible and invisible (felt/sensed/remembered) presences. Their work with others is concerned with opening up embodied channels of connection and flow, practices to access and utilise body/sensing/emotion as oracular resource, locating desire and refining and understanding positionality.
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Angel Shanel Edwards utilizes the creative modalities of movement, poetics, braiding, textiles, filmmaking, and photography to witness and re/member blackness as it moves through daily life, love, intimacy, and transitions [*gendered and otherwise]. angel studies across disciplines to explore the complexity and connectedness of liveness. angel has collaborated with Makini, Jonathan gonzalez, Marguerite Hemmings, Black Quantum Futurism, Yolanda Wisher, Arielle Julia Brown, Pamela hooks, and Maria Bauman through choreographic, performance, and visual mediums.
Vox Populi, The Center for Performance Research, Urban Movement Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Icebox Performance Space, and Judson Memorial Church’s Black Aesthetics have featured their choreographic, curatorial, and visual works. The Leeway Foundation, West Philadelphia Arts Initiative, Creative Philadelphia, Cannonball Festival, Mural Arts Philly, and Queer Art’s Eva Yaa Asantewaa grant have supported their creative practice.
In 2021, Angel was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Angel received a BA in Psychology and African American studies from Temple University and, in 2024, received their MFA in Dance at the University of the Arts. in 2025 angel was awarded an artist2artist grant through the Art Matters Foundation.
Currently, Angel is a lecturer of dance in the theatre department at the University of Pennsylvania, an artist in residence at the Arts League and a media artist in residence with The Leeway Foundation in collaboration with Black Spatial Relics.
During this residency I'll explore themes of Black explosivity, Caribbean spatiotemporalities, and rhizomatic collaboration. I'll be studying with Volcanic Eruptions and Black collaborators to develop embodied scores, poetics, and songs.
alumni
2025 Threading resident, Djibril Sall
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Djibril Sall, is a queer Senegalese performer, choreographer, and writer. Born in Dakar, he grew up in a working-class family in the Deep South of the United States of America and was educated at the ‘elite’ Wesleyan University. He describes himself in these terms to illustrate the range of privilege he holds as someone who worked from the peripheries of the Global South to someone who can now move unencumbered within and outside of the borders of the Global North. His work is situated at the intersection of (racialized) migration and belonging, where he questions the reasons that compel people to leave.
Djibril was selected for inclusion in Tanz im August’s Interconnecting Ecology and Dance Series in 2023 and was furthermore an invited artist for Tanznacht’s 25-year anniversary. His most recent evening-length work, evening.haiku, premiered at Sophiensaele as a part of the 31st Tanztage Festival and was chosen for inclusion in the 2022 [8:Tension] Young Choreographers Series at ImPulsTanz International Vienna Dance Festival. Djibril has presented his own work and collaborations at SAVVY Contemporary and radialsystem in Berlin and in various international festivals and institutions including Stedelijk, DARK MOFO, Centre Pompidou, Mumok and Dansens Hus. He was the 2024 Berlin Cultural Exchange Fellow at Cite International des Arts in Paris and the inaugural resident at Emerging Change Festival where he worked on a new solo premiering at Sophiensaele in 2025.
During the residency, Sall plans to continue developing his next solo piece in collaboration with experimental musician YATTA.
2024 Threading resident, Jasmine Hearn
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Jasmine Hearn, born and raised on occupied lands now known as Houston, TX, studied dance and embodied sound from a multitude of teachers, including their sister, cousins, aunties, instructors, and friends at family gatherings, church services, and weekly classes at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center. Jasmine has been greatly influenced by teachers, mentors, and collaborators, including Byronné J Hearn, Claudette Nickens Johnson, Joy KMT, Barbara Mahler, Pamela Pietro, Kendra Portier, Samita Sinha, Sandra Organ Solis, jhon r. stronks, Sherie van den Wijngaard, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Bennalldre Williams, Marlies Yearby, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Hearn received a B.A. in Dance from Point Park University.
They are a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2023), Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize in Design with collaborator Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency (2023), a Creative Capital Award (2022), New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for Outstanding Performer (2021, 2017), a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019), and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants (2022, 2017). They have been awarded residencies through Movement Research, New York, NY; Pittsburgh Foundation, Pittsburgh, PA; and the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France.
Jasmine has creatively collaborated with artists, Solange Knowles, Alisha B. Wormsley, Vanessa German, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Maria Bauman, Lovie Olivia, Ayanah Moor, Sandra Organ Solis, Holly Bass, Li Harris, and companies, Urban Bush Women, David Dorfman Dance, and Helen Simoneau Danse, which have produced solo and collective dance choreography for performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Center, the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Ford Foundation, Danspace Project, BAAD!, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and other internationally acclaimed art spaces such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Jasmine is committed to performance as an expansive practice that includes a spectrum of dance traditions and techniques, technologies of care, sound design, garment design, and the archiving of matrilineal memories. They give gratitude to Spirit, their mothers and aunties, and all the mothering Black people who have supported their moving, traveling, remembering body.