Jasmine Hearn, born and raised on occupied Akokisa lands (Houston, TX), is an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, doula, performer, and organizer. Jasmine, recently named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” (2025), is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2023), a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize in Design with Athena Kokoronis of DPA (2023), a Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship Award (2019), and two NY Dance and Performance Bessie Awards for Outstanding Performer (2021, 2017* with the cast of skeleton architecture).

Jasmine is committed to performance as an expansive practice that includes a spectrum of dance and somatic traditions and methodologies, sound composition, garment design, and the archiving of matrilineal memories. They have been greatly influenced by teachers and mentors, including Begee, Bekezela Mguni, Barbara Mahler, Pamela Pietro, Kendra Portier, Samita Sinha, Sandra Organ Solis, jhon r. Stronks, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, Bennalldre Williams, Marlies Yearby, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Jasmine gives gratitude to Spirit, their mothers and aunties, and all the mothering people who have supported their moving, remembering body.

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etta cetera is on the Board of Advisors for Let’s Get Free and helps organize its arts committee Creative Resistance, which stages annual shows of work by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists. She is a Pittsburgh-based community organizer and artist who is deeply committed to transformative and racial justice. She was pulled into the issues of mass incarceration through the wisdom and freedom struggle of Mumia Abu-Jamal alongside having a penpal in prison. Beginning in the year 2000 etta has co-founded many Pittsburgh-based organizations, including Book ’Em, Pittsburgh’s Books to Prisoner program; and HRC – FedUp!, the Pittsburgh chapter of Human Rights Coalition that advocates for incarcerated people who are suffering human rights abuses. In 2011 etta co-founded WHAT’S UP (Working and Healing to Abolish Total Supremacy, Undermining Privilege), a group formed to support, encourage, and challenge white people to work for racial justice.

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Harrison Guy is a nationally recognized choreographer whose work merges dance, memory, and social transformation. As the founder and artistic director of Houston’s Urban Souls Dance Company (est. 2004), he has spent over two decades creating bold, movement-driven works that center Black identity, cultural legacy, and liberation. He is also the founder of Black Arts Movement Houston, the African American Dance Festival, and Brave Bodies.

A 2019 Dance/USA Fellow and 2026 Dance Source Houston Artistic Honoree, Guy’s choreography has been presented on prestigious stages nationwide. His acclaimed work Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness premiered at Rice University’s Opera Hall with dancers from Houston Ballet Academy and was later performed at Carnegie Hall with students from The Ailey School. He also co-choreographed Plumshuga: The Rise of Lauren Anderson alongside Stanton Welch, Artistic Director of Houston Ballet, honoring the groundbreaking ballerina’s legacy. Rooted in truth and radical inclusion, Guy creates space for Black dancers to thrive.

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Byronné J. Hearn is a nurse manager, registered nurse, community leader, organizer, and the founder of Pecan Palate Pleasures, LLC. Born and raised in Houston, TX, she has worked as a school nurse between the campuses at Southland Elementary and the Gregory Elementary School (1978 – 1980). During her training, Byronné developed a love for pediatric and neonatal nursing. In her early professional years, she worked in the special care units at Texas Children’s Hospital, Hermann Hospital, Ben Taub Hospital and Jefferson Davis Hospital in Houston TX.

Born of the love and resourcefulness of her paternal Grandmother Orange Mae, Byronné learned the art of making pecan candy. Orange Mae taught her to use a few kitchen ingredients and a huge helping of love to make this legendary Louisiana favorite sweet treat! Influenced by her creative and ingenious maternal grandmother “Minnie”, Byronné expanded a home tradition into a tastefully delicious candy business, Pecan Palate Pleasures. Byronné’s pecan pralines can be purchased at any Frenchy’s Chicken location in Houston, TX.

Hayden Hubner is a choreographer, performer, photographer, archivist and co-founder of international dance-theater collective Dogs Eat Wind based between Nashville, Tennessee and Rome, Italy. Their work places value in personal history, emotional inquiry, and distraction to explore “big” subjects – Love, War, Death, etc. – as much as the “small” instances and images – drying your hands, tripping over cracks, little bits of fun – in some way, like a grocery list which does not emphasize the need for eggs over the need for love. Hayden’s debut stage work entitled help up, help down premiered in Nashville in March 2024 and has since been invited to stages such as Kindling Arts Festival (Nashville, Tennessee), Alter Ego Festival (Sofia, Bulgaria), and at the Accademia dell’Arte (Arezzo, Italy) earning two international travel grants from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts (USA) and MOVIN’UP PERFORMING ARTS SESSIONE 2023/2024 (Italy).

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Anqwenique Kinsel is a Pittsburgh native and an extremely versatile vocalist and educator specializing in opera, classical music, jazz, and soul. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Voice Performance from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has performed and collaborated with Chamber Music Pittsburgh, Attack Theatre, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, BOOM Concepts, composer Daniel Bernard Romain, Luna Loba Collective/Shey Rivera-Rios, Roger Humphries, Nicole Mitchell, Kenny Peagler, and many others.

As a longtime educator and teaching artist, Anqwenique serves learners of all ages. In addition to her vocal and performance practice, Anqwenique consults frequently as a teaching artist, program designer, and cultural advisor. Her workshop series Just SING! for vocal and personal wellness is supported by Duolingo and The Opportunity Fund.

Currently Anqwenique is proudly serving as the president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Association of Negro Musicians and the interim director of Hope Academy for Music and the Arts at East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

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Melike Vivastine Konur, an Afro-Turk multidisciplinary visual artist, uses performance as her foundation, building bridges between Pittsburgh and Istanbul. Her practice explores erasure in diasporic migration and restores belonging through the lens of motherhood, using song, dance, installation, and writing to build living archives of matriarchal knowledge.

Konur approaches voice and the body as sites of memory, transmission, and resistance. Her recent solo exhibition Women I’ve Been (Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, 2025) translated a lifetime of performance into an immersive installation integrating film, sculpture, and sound.

Konur’s vision is shared across her work as an artist and as an arts leader. She currently serves as Director of Advancement at Kelly Strayhorn Theater bringing insight from working within global cultures to resource and systems design for artistry with care as infrastructure.

She finds profound meaning in the synchronicity to have of the honor and privilege of collaborating in Jasmine’s premiere; to remember, to awaken joy, and to celebrate the ways of survival both felt and needed at the personal and collective level.

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Acquenette LeBlanc was born on December 3, 1951, in Houston, Texas. She grew up and attended schools in Acres Homes, a historic black community in North Houston. She earned degrees from Grambling University and Texas Southern University. She

worked for 36 years in Aldine ISD, as a teacher, Instructional Specialist and Assistant Principal before retiring after serving 10 years as the Principal of her neighborhood school.

Acquenette seems to run on “on divine fuel”. She volunteers for her church where she helps feed the hungry and count and reconcile tithes and donations. She helps with any occasion that requires food. She is the first to serve and the last to leave the kitchen. Acquenette is a top Line Dance instructor and the choreographer for Groove 44, one of the most award-winning line dance groups in Texas. She has been invited to teach line dancing both nationally and internationally.

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Kiki Lucas is currently serving as the chair of commercial dance and an associate professor of dance at Point Park University. She obtained her MFA from Montclair State University. Kiki specializes in jazz technique, contemporary partnering, and entrepreneurship in the arts, as well as dance composition.

An alumna of PPU, Kiki has been a faculty member of the Point Park International Summer Dance faculty since 2002. Her extensive professional experience includes serving as the resident choreographer and company member of dance companies such as Met Dance Co. in Houston, TX, and Mosaic Dance Project in Miami, FL. Kiki’s exceptional choreography has been showcased at prestigious venues, including Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out Stage, The Kennedy Center, Met Dance Co., Wright State University, Western Michigan University, Hawaii Pacific University, San Diego State University and Dreyfoos School for the Arts.

Not limited to the U.S., Kiki has also made a significant impact on the international dance scene, sharing her expertise through teaching engagements in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Uruguay and Mexico.

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Bebe Miller’s vision of dance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her aesthetic relies on the interplay of a work’s idea, its physicality, and the contributions of Bebe Miller Company members to fashion its singular voice.

Bebe formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985 to pursue her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition. Since then, she has created more than 50 dance works for BMC that have been performed worldwide. BMC has been commissioned and presented by leading venues including 651 ARTS, BAM Next Wave, DTW, Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, PICA, REDCAT, Walker Art Center and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her choreography has been performed by A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Repertory Dance Theater, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company, PACT Dance Company of Johannesburg, South Africa, and others.

Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center in 2005, Bebe is an inaugural Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a Movement Research honoree, and a Danspace Project Gala honoree. Bebe is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance.

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Bekezela Mguni is a queer Trinidadian artist, birthworker, librarian, cultural worker, and organizer. She is a devotee of water and the spine. She has over 20 years of community organizing experience, working with LGBTQIA+ communities, youth, women, and people of the global majority, and was a co-founder of New Voices for Reproductive Justice.

Bekezela previously served as a Client Services Associate at the Midwife Center, which provides reproductive wellness and pregnancy care. She launched the first celebration of Black Breastfeeding Week in Pittsburgh in August of 2014, and co-founded the Pittsburgh Black Breastfeeding Circle. She is a previous student of YogaRoots On Location’s Anti-Racist Raja Yoga School and is a member of the Ujamaa Collective and the Black Socialist Formation.

Bekezela serves as the Artistic Director of Dreams of Hope, which provides the region’s LGBTQIA+ youth a welcoming environment to grow in confidence, express themselves, and develop as leaders through the arts. She is also the founder of the Black Unicorn Library and Archive Project, a community initiative cultivating libraries as sites of possibility and freedom.

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Ursula Payne, PhD, MFA, is Associate Provost for Academic Administration at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania and a scholar, dancer, choreographer, and educator whose work centers Black expressive culture, embodiment, and performance. Her research examines soul line dancing as cultural labor, healing practice, and diasporic knowledge production.

Payne’s creative work has been performed and presented nationally and internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Jacob’s Pillow, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Grimaldi Forum, and the National Taiwan University of Arts. Drawing on Black feminist theory, autoethnography, and performance studies, her scholarship explores groove, memory, spirituality, and community across physical and digital spaces.

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Staycee Pearl, choreographer and artistic director of PearlArts Movement and Sound, produces genre-bending experiences that draw together contemporary dance, immersive soundscapes, and visual artistry. The 2021 winner of The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Established Artist, Staycee continues to generate unexpected works that explore themes of personal expression, race, freedom, and gender.

As the co-founder and co-artistic director of PearlArts with her husband Herman “Soy Sos” Pearl, Staycee maintains an iterative artistic process that pulls from a wide variety of sources. Staycee has honed a uniquely soulful artistic voice that builds on her diverse experiences, from her early dance training with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Center to her leadership of Xpressions Contemporary Dance Company and 20+ years as an influential choreographer.

Staycee is especially passionate about creating space for Black femme artists to experiment. Inspired by her own experiences and challenges as a performer and choreographer, Staycee leads workshops and residencies to sustain a vibrant community for artists in her orbit.

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Myssi Robinson is a Bessie award-winning performer, interdisciplinary maker and ever-evolving steward of care raised on and recently returned to Powhatan lands / Richmond, VA. Myssi has interpreted many dances, and currently explores imaginative archiving, mixed-media marking + design, ritual curiosity and her own improvising body. Her archival practice weaves responsive visual art, photography, writing, video poetry and spirit-centered witnessing into material altars that honor embodiment, collective processing, affirmation of being and the blurring of legibility. She is joyfully rooted in long term archival relationships with Jasmine Hearn’s Memory Fleet and Ogemdi Ude’s MAJOR, and is the Danspace writer-in-residence for Platform 2026: Secret Gardens. In all her working, intuition and empathy play with maximalist instinct to give life to what comes. Gratitude to Carolyn, Darrin and all that is unseen for life and her abilities to create freely within it.

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Jo Stewart (they/them) is a poet, educator, and theater maker.

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jhon r. stronks is a queer identifying gender non-conforming singer, dancer, and choreographer. Through their voice and movement emerges a genderqueer expression that remembers lost existences and imagines new trajectories toward the home and rest they are chasing after.

As a performer jhon has worked with Winifred R. Harris’ Between Lines (Los Angeles), Keith Johnson and Dancers (Los Angeles), Duende Dance Theater (Atlanta), Coriolis Dance Project (Atlanta), Sandra Organ Dance Company (Houston), Travesty Dance Group (Houston), and Spent Five Seasons as a Member of Core Performance Company (Atlanta).

jhon served as a resident guest Artist (2001 -2006) for Spelman Dance Theater at Spelman College in Atlanta Ga, and as Director of the Houston Met Dance’s pre- professional dance program and youth company (2006 – 2009). jhon is the Artistic Director of there…in the sunlight, a project heading that functions as a vehicle for independent choreographic projects.

jhon was the Spring 2019 Visiting Dance Artist in Residence for the BFA Conservatory Dance program at The Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and currently serves as the Director of Programming for Houston Met Dance and Production Manager for Dance Source Houston.

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Alisha B Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science, and technology through the Black matriarchal lens, challenging contemporary views of modern American life through whichever medium she feels is the best form of expression.

Wormsley’s ongoing project, There Are Black People In The Future recently exhibited at the Oakland Museum, VCUArts Qatar, Speed Museum, Southbank Arts London, Times Square Arts. The project gives mini-grants to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification, and was awarded a fellowship with Monument Lab.

In 2020, Wormsley launched an art residency for Black artist who mother called Sibyls Shrine. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts with longtime collaborator Li Harris, an Awardee of the Sundance Interdisciplinary grant, the Carol Brown Achievement award among others. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College and is an Assistant Professor of Art and Social Practice in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Performance:
Jasmine Hearn, Anqwenique Kinsel, Melike Vivastine Konur, Ursula Payne, Staycee Pearl, and Alisha B. Wormsley

Choreography:
Jasmine Hearn, Melike Vivastine Konur, Ursula Payne, and Staycee Pearl

Additional Choreographic Commissions:
Harrison Guy, Byronné J. Hearn, Acquenette LeBlanc, Kijuanta Lucas, Bebe Miller, and jhon r. stronks

Direction: Jasmine Hearn

Live Vocal Performance and Composition:
Jasmine Hearn, Anqwenique Kinsel, and Melike Vivastine Konur

Navigation: Byronné J. Hearn

Poem: Bekezela Mguni

Text: Jo Stewart

Prayer: Alisha B. Wormsley

Sound Design: Jasmine Hearn

Additional Sound Design & Mixing: Ashley Teamer

Lyrics: Jasmine Hearn

Additional Sound Composition for a long side: AFUA DARKO and Jasmine Hearn

Video Projection Design: Nica Ross

Videography:
Jasmine Hearn, Hayden Hubner, and Myssi Robinson

Video Performance:
Brittany Bass, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn, Sydnee Houlette, Zuri Humphrey, Natasha Manley, Sandra Organ Solis, Jo Stewart, Myssi Robinson, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers

Video Editing: Jasmine Hearn and Myssi Robinson

Lighting Design: jhon r. stronks

KST Co-Production Manager: Piper Clement

Stage Manager: Jason Kmetic

Lighting Operator: Matthew Russell

Sound Operator: Britt Pierce

Deck Crew: Devon Young

Production Collaboration: jhon r. stronks

Banner Design and Construction: etta cetera

Styling:
Jasmine Hearn in collaboration with performance collaborators

Garments, brown dress and white dress found by Jasmine Hearn and additionally re-designed by Jasmine Hearn and Athena Kokoronis of DPA

Creative Administration: Jasmine Hearn

Tour Management: Jasmine Hearn

Archival Management: Jasmine Hearn