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Moderator bio:
Harmony Bench (www.harmonybench.com) is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University. Her research addresses practices, performances, and circulations of dance in the contexts of digital and screen media. She is author of Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common with University of Minnesota Press in 2020, and is at work on a new book on affect and kinesthesia in screendance spectatorship. For several years, Harmony has collaborated with Kate Elswit on bringing the digital humanities and dance history into greater dialogue, most recently with Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (Ref: AH/R012989/1; www.dunhamsdata.org). From 2014-2019, she was co-editor of The International Journal of Screendance with Simon Ellis, and is excited to be guest editing the special issue This Is Where We Dance Now: COVID-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen with Alex Harlig.
Presenter bios:
Gabri Christa is a dance and filmmaker who hails from Curaçao, Dutch Caribbean and lives in New York. Awards include a Guggenheim for choreography, an ABC television award for Creative Excellence for her short film High School and Pangea Day Festival’s One of the World’s 100 most promising Filmmakers distinction. Both her films KASITA and One Day at a Time, won best short and best short documentary at the Harlem International Film Festival and can be seen at KweliTV. Her latest short film SON (2021) is currently jury selection at several festivals. As a dancer she worked a.o. with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance company and danced choreographed with Danza Contemporanea de Cuba and DanzAbierta and in her own work. Gabri Christa is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Barnard College of Columbia University’s Department of Dance and Affiliate Faculty of Film Studies. She teaches Screendance, Composition, Modern Technique, Yoga and a seminar in Dance in Film and directs the Movement Lab at Barnard. She is the founding director of the Moving Body – Moving image Festival a Biennale Screendance Festival around social and social justice issues. She is also a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Global Brain Health. www.gabrichrista.com
Yolanda M. Guadarrama (Mexican) is mainly dedicated to the creation, exhibition and promotion of screendance. Mov en Mov Fest Director, engineer, dancer, choreographer, curator, creator, coeditor of: MOHO Magazine and Editorial; Motion festival, Berlin, 2008. RIFF-Norway curator. REDIV member. www.yolandamguadarrama.com ; https://movimientoenmovimiento.wordpress.com/ ; http://movenmovenglish.wordpress.com
Cara Hagan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work exists at the intersections of movement, digital space, words, contemplative practice, and community. Most recently, Hagan was awarded the inaugural Community Commissioning Residency by the National Center for Choreography for the purpose of creating new screendance work. Her work has also been supported by the Dance Films Association, the Cucalorus Filmed in NC Fund, and The University Research Council at Appalachian State University, where she serves on faculty in the dance studies program. Hagan is the director of ADF’s Movies by Movers, an annual, international screendance festival dedicated to the celebration of the conversation between the moving body and the camera. Hagan’s scholarly work on screendance has been featured in the International Journal of Screendance, in the anthology, Dance’s Duet with the Camera: Motion Pictures, and in her solo-authored book, Celebrating Screendance: Film Festivals and Curatorial Practice, forthcoming from McFarland Publishing.
Kelly Hargraves is a dance film creator and curator from Canada who currently lives in Los Angeles. In September 2018 she was named the Executive and Artistic Director of Dance Camera West, after co-founding the Los Angeles festival of dance film in 2001. Kelly has a Masters in Dance Film from NYU (with a concentration in Dance and Film History), an Honours BFA in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University and an Honours BA in Communication Studies (with a Minor in Theater History) from the University of Windsor. She danced independently in Montréal and New York and was a member of PoMo CoMo (Postmodern Commotion), an artist and scientist collection. Kelly has produced and directed several dance films that are shown internationally, and has been traveling as an invited speaker to dance film festivals since 2009. Hargraves has also been a board member of the Silver Lake Film Festival and the Downtown Los Angeles Film Festival. Through her work with indie film distributors such as First Run Features, Film Movement, and Icarus Film, Kelly has represented artists such as Michael Apted, Lizzie Borden, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Kopple, Ross McElwee, Monika Truet, Robert Rosenberg and Wayne Wang, amongst many more.
Marisa C. Hayes is a Franco-American artist, scholar and curator working at the crossroads of moving images and the performing arts. Much of her work focuses on explorations of screendance, particularly with regards to its pedagogy and curation. She is the founding co-director of the Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne in France, an annual platform that is currently preparing its 13th edition. She also curates screendance for the National Choreographic Development Center in Paris and Theatre Freiburg in Germany. She teaches screendance practice, theory and history in higher education internationally, as well as for various public outreach organizations. Her screendance publications include the book The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies (ed. Douglas Rosenberg), The International Journal of Screendance, and the book Art in Motion: Current Research in Screendance, which she co-edited for Cambridge Scholars. Her own screendance films have won the Susan Braun Award (New York Dance Films Association) and Pentacle Movement Media’s summer video dance prize.
Please note that this video is currently unlisted; it will be made public once the closed captioning is updated at the conclusion of the conference. An edited version of this roundtable will appear in the special issue of The International Journal of Screendance, This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen, guest-edited by Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig.