​DEBORAH CASTILLO (Costumer/Make Up Artist/Set Designer, ​Consider Water) relocated to NYC from Caracas, Venezuela. She works in photography, installation, sculpture, video, costume design, and performance. Her work investigates the configuration of social stereotypes associated with genders and ways of questioning authority figures and their use of power. She has exhibited in Venezuela, Bolivia, USA, UK, Mexico, Argentina and Spain, and has worked as production assistant for Mona Hatoum and Steve McQueen. Castillo was awarded a residency at the London Print Studio, studied at Central Saint Martins and the Instituto de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, in Caracas, where she received her BA in Fine Arts in 2003.

​Careitha Davis (Choreography Assistant, ​Finding Herstory) a Brooklyn native with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, is a professional dancer, choreographer and educator. From an early age Careitha started training as a dancer in Modern, Jazz, Ballet and African while traveling as a young performer. Careitha attended SUNY Purchase College receiving a BA in Media, Society & the Arts and earned an MA in Dance Education K-12 Track from New York University where she practiced methods in instructing non-dancers and young learners as a practice for community building and creating art. She has performed the works of George Faison, Dianne McIntyre, Ronald K. Brown, Mouminatou Camara, Joya Powell/Movement of the People and Jemal Gaines. Careitha began teaching Soca at Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance in  2018 and established BodyRa Movement in 2020.  Her teaching and choreographic philosophy for BodyRa Movement is for dancers to reach a level of freedom in their movement, building community through the rituals and traditions in Caribbean culture. In the year 2020 and 2021, BodyRa Movement has been granted the Downtown Brooklyn Rehearsal Residency Initiative and 2021 premiered ‘Trinidad Noir’, a choreographed piece highlighting the cultural traditions of Trinidad and Tobago, at Spoke The Hub: Local Produce Mini Festival.

Photo by Luisanna Tejada

SARAH HAMILTON (Lighting Designer, Time to Talk) is a Milwaukee-based lighting designer and theatre/dance technology educator who delights in exploring the ever-evolving boundaries between theatre, dance, visual art, and social activism. Since 2019, Sarah has proudly served as the Director of Operations & Production for Ko-Thi Dance Company, Wisconsin's oldest professional Black arts organization. Recent design credits include DFD’s Time To Talk at Highland Community College (Tampa, FL), KTDC's 50th Anniversary Juba-Lee, Leaving & Coming Back (Peter Stathas Dance), Strange Snow (Milwaukee Chamber Theatre), Best of Br!nk Briefs, The Roommate and Top Girls (Renaissance Theaterworks), and countless student, faculty, and guest artist works for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Department of Dance.
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​NIGEL HOSANG (​Dance Film Creator, Consider Water) NYC born and raised, 2014 BRIO winner, photographer Nigel HoSang was introduced to photography at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts. Upon graduation, he began an intensive printing internship with Green Rhino. He later became a photo assistant and was fortunate to meet Martin Schoeller. He is currently an assistant for some of the world’s top photographers. His current bodies of work combine the genres of scientific, art and portrait photography. Nigel’s projects span the art and fashion worlds and have been included in ShowStudio, Contributor Magazine,Trace Magazine, NY Fashion Shorts, London Fashion Shorts, and Dossier Magazine.

Photo: Markian Lozowchuk

​MIKE MCGINNIS (Composer, Musical Director for all DFD projects) Saxophonist, clarinetist and composer Mike McGinnis is a musical explorer unbound by stylistic barriers; unwaveringly individual, curious, and open-minded.  He has released five critically acclaimed albums as a leader during his twenty-two years in the NYC jazz scene.  In April of 2017 and 2018, he performed to sold-out houses at the world famous Jazz Standard in NYC, leading a trio with jazz legends Art Lande and Steve Swallow.  As musical director of the Davalois Fearon Dance Company, he has performed his compositions at the Joyce Theater, New Victory Theater, City Center, Metropolitan Museum, Harlem Stage, Rubin Museum, Bronx Museum and was the recipient of a 2019 MAP Fund Grant.  For four consecutive years he has been listed in the Clarinet “Rising Star” category by the DownBeat Magazine International Critics Poll.

Photo by FLynn Larsen

​MUKHA (L. Mususa Wiesel) (Visual Artist, Ängsudden Song Cycle) attended the Art Students League of New York in the early 1990s and has since exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Asia. MuKha’s process involves techniques similar to the creation of music improvisation wherein the artist finds the direction and the images after the paint has been applied to the canvas. Her main influences are the elements: the sky and earth, the sea and air, and the worlds above, below and within. Born in Zambales, Philippines in 1961, MuKha (the Sanskrit word for "face") spent her childhood between San Francisco and her native province of Rizal, Philippines. She divides her time between Brooklyn and Stockholm, with frequent visits to mainland and Southeast Asia.

Jasmine Murrell (Wearable Sculpture / Makeup / Visual Artist, Love Machine, Finding Herstory, For C.J., The Future is Pissed, Power Inside and Between, A Little Power Inside and Between, The Motion of Words and Sounds, As Above As Below) is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist born in Detroit, Michigan. Her practice centers on living sculptures and immersive installations that reimagine environments to inspire radical imagination, healing, and connection with all living things. Working across sculpture, photography, painting, film, wearables, and nonlinear performance, Murrell often incorporates bio art, repurposed materials, traditional weaving, and interactive encounters that invite audience participation. Her work draws inspiration from traditional Black medicine, celestial memory, land art, and technology. Over the past decade, Murrell’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bronx Museum, and African American Museum of Art, and has been featured in The New York Times, Time, Hyperallergic, and MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.

Patricia Nicholson (Dancer, ​Ellington in Mourning, Healing Message from Time and Space) is a dancer, poet, and organizer whose work spans movement, music, and social causes, with a focus on the spiritual and social responsibility of the free jazz and improvised arts. As a multi-disciplinary artist, she has dedicated much of her life to building and sustaining diverse, improvising communities. Nicholson is known for her collaborations, including Shamanic Principle with percussionist Val Jeanty, Knife & Rose with vocalists Ellen Christi and Jean Carla Rodea, and several projects with William Parker such as What It Is and Hope Cries for Justice. She is also the founder of Arts for Art and the Vision Festival, which advocates for free jazz and artists working in the genre. Nicholson’s work as a curator and organizer has influenced both the artistic community and social activism, including leading the Artist for a Free World marching band in 2017. Throughout her career, her choreography and stage productions, including her work on Parker’s opera Trail of Tears, have consistently sought to illuminate and engage audiences through dynamic, creative experiences.

​Myssi Robinson (Visual Artist, Up/right, For C.J., As Above As Below)  is a Bessie Award–winning performer, multidisciplinary visual artist, and caregiver from Powhatan lands/Richmond, VA, now based in Jersey City. A graduate of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, Robinson’s practice lives at the intersections of movement, memory, and care. Her visual work explores mixed media, spatial design, creative archiving, and construction rooted in ritual, empathy, and embodied witnessing. She has performed with Kyle Marshall Choreography, David Dorfman Dance, Baye & Asa, DRIGGproductions, and the ColemanCollective, among others. Her work has been presented by BAM, BRIC, Jersey City Theater Center, Smush Gallery, Le Poisson Rouge, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and her set and visual designs have supported artists including Davalois Fearon and Cain Coleman. Her artistic practice channels spirit-forward intuition and maximalist instinct to hold space, honor memory, and whisper: may we all heal.

​Patricia Smith (Poet, Blood Dazzler, How to Find a Missing Black Woman) is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, and Incendiary Art, recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and NAACP Image Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among many others. Smith is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She is an Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Smith is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Photo by Sandro Miller

​BURKE WILMORE (Lighting Designer, Consider Water) is a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829 and an honors graduate of Wesleyan University. He has designed or adapted seven works for BODYTRAFFIC and has also lit the work of Camille A. Brown (Black Girl: Linguistic Play, Mr. Tol E. Rance, City of Rain). He was the resident designer for Battleworks (2001–2010) and to date has lit five of Robert Battle’s works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. For American Repertory Ballet, he lit Midsummer Night’s Dream  and Romeo and Juliet. He frequently collaborates with Broadway star André de Shields, for whom he lit the Louis Armstrong musical Ambassador Satch, and designed scenery and lighting for de Shields’ production of Ain’t Misbehavin’.  Mr. Wilmore designed scenery and lighting for Apollo Club Harlem, and Ellington at Christmas, both at the Apollo Theater.

​ANDRÉ M. ZACHERY (Projection Artist, ​Consider Water, Time to Talk), Chicago native, is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who creates performances, interactive media installations, film, and sound art. A 2015 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, he earned a BFA from the Ailey/Fordham program in 2005, and MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College in 2014. André is the artistic director of Renegade Performance Group and founding member of the interdisciplinary collective, Wildcat! RPG has received several residencies including the Performance Project Residency @ University Settlement. Zachery was a resident media-artist at Schmiede 2014 in Hallein, Austria and received a 2015 Educational Award to art and media center Harvestworks.