Aaron Copp
Lighting Design
Aaron Copp’s recent projects include the Broadway productions of The Old Man and the Pool at the Beaumont and The New One at the Cort (now the James Earl Jones), Bernstein’s Mass at the Kennedy Center, Falling Out Of Time at Carnegie Hall, Red State Blue State for Colin Quinn at the Minetta Lane, Candide at Tanglewood Music Center, One Line Drawn by Brian Brooks for Miami City Ballet, and Shaharazad for The Royal Ballet of Flanders. Music projects include designs for The Silk Road Ensemble, Natalie Merchant, Diamanda Galas, Maya Beiser and the Bang On A Can All-Stars. He has worked extensively in the dance world and in 2008 received his second Bessie Award for Jonah Bokaer’s The Invention Of Minus One. Copp had a long association with Merce Cunningham, designing such pieces as Ground Level Overlay, Windows, and Biped, for which he also won a Bessie Award.
Vince di Mura
Resident Composer/Musical Director
Vince di Mura has appeared on concert stages and theaters throughout North America, Canada, Europe and Latin America. He has conducted theater seasons in virtually every region of the United States. He is best known for his arrangements of My Way: A Tribute to the Music of Frank Sinatra, Simply Simone, and I Left My Heart, (with over 1000 productions nationally). He is also the author of A Conversation With The Blues, a 14-part web instructional series on improvisation through the Blues produced by Soundfy, Inc. He holds fellowships from the William Goldman Foundation, Temple University, Meet the Composer, CEPAC, the Union County Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Puffin Cultural Forum, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. He has released seven CDs and has just completed a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa entitled Echos of the Great Migration, which is currently being workshopped for a New York City premiere in 2025. Most recently, he has served as Musical Director/arranger and pianist for Summer Breeze, Chinese Jazz Fusion Ensemble, which has played concerts and festivals throughout the tristate area and released three albums in 2023-24, 6 music videos and an award-winning documentary. He is currently collaborating with Yusef Komunyakaa on an orchestral mega opus confronting the issues of climate change, commissioned by the Capital Philharmonic of New Jersey. The work will be premiered at the Trenton War Memorial in October of 2025.
Davalois Fearon
Stager
Davalois Fearon is a Bessie Award-winning, critically-acclaimed choreographer, dancer, and educator. Her dancing, praised by colleagues as “unapologetic” and by critics as “electrifying,” was honed over 12 years with the Stephen Petronio Company, where she was an audience favorite for her bold performances. Born in Jamaica and raised in the Bronx, Fearon’s choreography is said to embody a “tenacious virtuosity” that is now reflected in her work as founder and director of Davalois Fearon Dance (DFD). Established in 2016, DFD pushes artistic and social boundaries to provoke contemplation and address societal issues. Fearon’s work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at New York City venues such as the Joyce Theatre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Victory Theater. Among many others, she has completed commissions for the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Barnard College. Her abundant honors and awards include Mosaic Network & Fund, DanceNYC’s Dance Advancement Fund Award, and grants from the MAP Fund and the Howard Gilman Foundation, and her company has received continuous support from the Bronx Council of the Arts. Fearon has been featured in publications including The New York Times and Dance Magazine; in poet Ntozake Shange’s book, Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance; in the documentary If the Dancer Dances; and most recently in the book A Year of Black Joy by Jamia Wilson. She holds an MFA in dance and is currently a Brooklyn Arts Exchange Space Grant Resident and a Core Faculty Lecturer in Princeton University’s Program in Dance.
Mary-Susan Gregson
Stage Manager
Mary-Susan Gregson has worked with Princeton University’s Program in Dance since 2012. Credits include Gabriel Kahane’s 8980: Book of Travelers, Lincoln Center’s Global Exchange: Art for Good, A Proust Sonata for Da Camera Chamber Music, Narcissus Now Festival for the Onassis Cultural Center, Sufjan Steven’s Round Up and Gabriel Kahane’s The Ambassador, both at Brooklyn Academy of Music. At the New Victory Theater she has stage-managed over 20 shows in the last 20 years and spent 20 summers production coordinating for Lincoln Center Festival. She has production-managed Divinamente Festival and the New Island Festival on Governor’s Island. New York City shows include Dance Africa, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, The Gate, BQE, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Jazz Nativity, Breaking the Code and Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Regional credits include McCarter Theatre, Yale Rep, Williamstown, The Huntington, and the White House. She has toured with Dance Theatre of Harlem, Elisa Monte, Jennifer Muller, Pilobolus and internationally with Forbidden Christmas starring Baryshnikov.
Rennie Harris
Choreographer
Voted one of the most influential people in the last hundred years of Philadelphia history, Rennie Harris, a son of North Philadelphia, toured with the first rap tour in American history, The Fresh Festival (1984), featuring renowned artists such as Run DMC, Fat Boys, Kurtis Blow, Newcleus, Jermaine Dupri, and more. He has opened for Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three, Super Nature, Madonna, Brandy, The Roots, and many other noted rap and R&B pioneers. In 1992, Harris founded Rennie Harris Puremovement—American Street Dance Theater, dedicated to preserving and disseminating hip-hop culture. Credited with coining the terms “Street Dance Theater” and “Hip-hop Concert Dance,” Rennie Harris Puremovement remains one of the longest touring street dance theater companies in American history, with three Bessie Awards, four Black Theater Alvin Ailey Awards, a Herb Alpert award, and a nomination for a Laurence Olivier Award in the United Kingdom. Known for creating a cohesive dance style that finds a cogent voice in the theater, Rennie Harris Puremovement has performed for the Queen of England and the Princess of Monaco and was awarded a Master of African American Choreography Medal from the Kennedy Center, drawing comparisons to twentieth-century legends Basquiat, Alvin Ailey, and Bob Fosse.
Harris is a United States Artists Rose Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, PEW Charitable Trust Fellow, and a USA Artist of the Year Fellow. He served as an ambassador of hip-hop for President Ronald Reagan during the American Embassy tour in 1986 and for President Barack Obama’s Dance Motion USA in Egypt, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Palestine, Jordan, Ramallah, and surrounding territories in 2012. To our knowledge, he is the first street dancer to receive two honorary doctorates in the field of dance from Columbia College and Bates College. Harris is also a recipient of Dance Magazine‘s Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), the Palm Desert Lifetime Achievement Award (2019), the Doris Duke Artist Award (2020), the American Dance Festival’s Samuel H. Scripps Award (2023), and the Hermitage Greenfield Award (2023). Rennie Harris is widely regarded as the most respected and brilliant hip-hop choreographer in America, according to The New Yorker‘s Joan Acocella.
Raja Feather Kelly
Choreographer
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory–a Brooklyn-based dance-theater-media company that he founded in 2009. Over the past decade he has created 16 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim, including The Absolute Future at NYU Skirball; Ugly Part 3: Blue (Chelsea Factory); Bunny, Bunny (Potiker Theatre San Diego); and Scenes For an Ending in collaboration with musician Emily Wells (commissioned by Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company). Kelly choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon). Frequent collaborators include Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06, Sarah Benson, Rachel Chavkin, and Michael R. Jackson. He is a 2023-25 Princeton Arts Fellow.
Rebecca Lazier
Choreographer
Rebecca Lazier, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, is a choreographer and educator known for her collaborative work, with over eighty pieces performed across six countries. Her current project, Noli Timere, is an aerial performance created with visual artist Janet Echelman, featuring a custom Echelman net sculpture that explores how we navigate an unstable world. Recently awarded a National Dance Project Production Grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, Noli Timere premieres at McCarter Theatre Center on February 7 & 8, 2025.
David Linton
Original Music
David Linton is a time-based multiple-media artist traveling the vectors of sound, subculture, and signal flow. He has been active in the downtown New York City experimental arts community for 30 years. Originally a percussionist, David has created sound, music, and something in between, for many collaborative dance, theater, and performance settings since his arrival in New York at the end of 1970s. By the later 1980s—after a good deal of percussion work alongside other musicians—Lee Ranaldo, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Elliott Sharp among others—he was equally known for his live, wired solo electro-acoustic drum-kit performances as well as his soundscore productions. His 1986 solo LP Orchesography was an unlikely collusion of street beats, early sampling tek, and theatrical postmodernism. By the early 1990s he had retired from performing in the live electro-acoustic vein to concentrate on the vocabulary of entirely electronic music and the resultant paradigm shift in performance priorities that this new ‘compressed’ format suggested. Throughout the 1990s Linton became a dedicated advocate for the expansion and appreciation of realtime performance in electronic media through the design and/or production of event/environments such as SoundLab (1996) and eventually UnityGain (1997-present). From 2001, Linton’s fascination with instantaneous collaborative audio-visual communication among select units of electronic sound and visual artists assumed the form of a live experimental television Manhattan cable/webcast project, UGTV, Unitygain Television (2001-2004), for which he was producer/director and occasional performer. In 2004 David embarked upon his present course with the launch of his solo audio-visual project, the Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System. With his Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System (2004), Linton aims to make vibrational wave induced perceptual energy states manifest by deploying interconnected measures of electric sound and pulsing light in live action with hand manipulated objects in physical (live camera) space. He employs an integrated recursive audio & video feedback system of his own perversely simple design modulated by freehand intervention to deliver vigorous eye, ear, and, sometimes, body shaking realtime audio-visual performances from which a kind of retro-tech animist ritual “medicine show” emerges where subject and object blur. Thematically Linton likes to consider that, within the 20th century, 60 Hz alternating electrical current gradually came to function as a primary subliminal Prana in the mass bio-energetic body/culture of human life in North America.
Manolo
Costume Design
Manolo, a native of Cuba, was born to a family in which men made cigars and every woman was a seamstress, embroiderer, or tailor. In the early seventies, Manolo abandoned his original career as a Special Education Professor to dedicate himself entirely to designing. During the early eighties, millinery became the primary focus of Manolo’s design and vision. This period provided Manolo with an open and receptive market leading him to produce hat collections outside of his own for other designers, including Adrienne Vittadini, Hanae Mori, Isaac Mizrahi, Donna Karen, and others. Later, Manolo joined forces with Amaldo Ferrara. Together, the team produced a series of varied projects: from an enchanting nightspot in Manhattan’s lower east side, called Silencio; to the creation of a vacation retreat in the rainforests of Venezuela. In the nineties, Manolo was the director of Manolo Ready Couture, based in SoHo, New York City.
Mary Jo Mecca
Costume Designer
Upcoming: Rebecca Lazier’s Noli Timere, in collaboration with Janet Echelman. Nicole Wolcotts’ Luggage Lost at Triskelion Arts; Ellen Cornfelds’ Raw Footage; Aaron Landsman’s Empathy School and Love Story at Abrons Art Center; Joanna Kotze’s Find Yourself Here at Baryshnikov Arts Center (2015); Liz Magic Laser’s Like You (2014); Laura Peterson’s Forever at The Kennedy Center (2013); Rashaun Mitchell’s Tesseract, Interface at Baryshnikov Arts Center and Nox at Danspace Project; Rebecca Lazier’s There Might Be Others at New York Live Arts (2016), Coming Together/Attica (2012/13) at the Invisible Dog and I Just Like This Music, Terminal (2009); Zvi Gotheiner’s Bear’s Ear, Detoura (2018), Escher/Bacon/Rothko, Surveillance (2014) at New York Live Arts; Sky and Water (2013) at the MUSA! Festival; Jody Sperling’s Time Lapse-Fantasy at Danspace Project; Laura Peterson Dance’s Atomic Orbital and traceroute; Barkin/Sellisen Project’s Differential Cohomology (2011); Susan Marshall’s Atelier project (2010); Brian Brooks’ Landing; Deganit Shemy’s Narrowline; Jill Johnson’s Folding Articulation; Graham Lustig’s Vault; and Raja Kelly’s Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Mecca has designed for the Programs in Theater & Music Theater and Program in Dance at Princeton University since 2009. She studied Couture Design with Miss Alice Sapho of Paris and New York.
Matthew Neenan
Choreographer
Hailed by The New York Times as “One of America’s best dance poets,” Matthew Neenan began his dance training at the Boston Ballet School and with noted teachers Jacqueline Cronsberg and Nan Keating. He later attended LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and the School of American Ballet in New York City. Matthew danced with Pennsylvania Ballet (now Philadelphia Ballet) from 1994-2007 where he danced numerous Principal roles in the Balanchine and contemporary repertoire. He was also their resident choreographer from 2007-2020, where he created 20 ballets. In 2006, Neenan co-founded BalletX with Christine Cox. BalletX has toured Neenan’s choreography globally and to prestigious venues such as NY City Center, The Joyce Theater, The Kennedy Center, Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, The Vail International Dance Festival (where he has created six world premieres), and Jacobs Pillow Festival, among many others. He has created world premieres for the New York City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, The Washington Ballet, Ballet West, Nashville Ballet, BodyTraffic, USC Kaufman School of Dance, and The Juilliard School, among several other companies and institutions. He has received numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, The Pew Charitable Trust, The Choo San Goh Foundation, The Independence Foundation, and four fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Stephen Petronio
Choreographer
Stephen Petronio is known for his boundary-pushing innovation in American dance. His unmistakable language challenges traditional notions of movement and explores themes of sexuality, gender, and identity. A graduate of Hampshire College, he founded Stephen Petronio Company in 1985. The company toured and performed throughout the world, and became famous for its bold and visually stunning performances in collaboration with some of the most innovative composers, visual artists and fashion designers of our time. These collaborators include Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Narciso Rodriquez, to name a few.
In 2014 he conceived Bloodlines, to honor the experimental post-modern pioneers that inspired him, and Bloodlines(future) to support a new generation of dancers and choreographers more equitably in his artistic lineage. He founded Petronio Residency Center (2017-2023), a research and development facility to provide support for artists and their creative growth, immersed in nature and without restriction. Petronio has received Numerous awards including a New York Performance Award (Bessie), the American Chorographer’s Award, the Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the McCormack Artists-in-Residence at Skidmore College. Petronio’s memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict, is available through Amazon.
Ken Tabachnick
Lighting Designer
Ken Tabachnick is currently the Executive Director of the Merce Cunningham Trust, where he oversees all operations and long-term planning. Prior to that, Ken worked as a Senior Associate at AEA Consulting. From 2013-2016, he was Deputy Dean at the Tisch School of the Arts (NYU) and prior to joining Tisch, he was the first Dean of the School of the Arts at Purchase College. Before joining academia, Ken was the General Manager for New York City Ballet, where, in addition to overseeing administrative aspects of operations, he supervised the renovation of the David H. Koch Theater. He began his career as a lighting designer and is a Bessie Award winner for his work with Stephen Petronio. He has worked with artists such as Trisha Brown, Robert Wilson, and the Met, the Kirov, and Bolshoi organizations. Ken earned his J. D. from Fordham Law School in 1996. Ken is a 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
Yue Yin
Choreographer
Yue Yin is founder and artistic director of YY Dance Company and the creator of FoCo Technique™. She began her training in Chinese classical and folk dance in Shanghai, China, at the prestigious Shanghai Dance Academy and completed her MFA in dance at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2008. In 2018, Yin founded YYDC, a non-profit contemporary dance company dedicated to the teaching, production and performance of her original choreographic work. Yin is the creator of her signature FoCo Technique™, which is a unique contemporary form of dance movement rooted in Chinese classical and folk dance melded with the complex and diverse influences of the immigrant experience. The form grows from Yin’s own blended international background and a deep appreciation for precision, contrast, fluidity and musicality.
Yue Yin was the recipient of the 2021 Harkness Promise Award. This prestigious award recognizes her innovation in choreography and education. She was the winner of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago 2015 International Commissioning Project, winner of the 2015 BalletX Choreographic Fellowship, and winner of Northwest Dance Project’s 5th Annual Pretty Creatives International Choreographic Competition in 2013. Yin’s work has been commissioned from acclaimed organizations such as Gibney Company, Martha Graham Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, NW Dance Project, BalletMet, Boston Ballet, Philadelphia Ballet, Limón Dance Company, Alberta Ballet, Balletto Teatro di Torino, Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, Juilliard School for Dance, USC Kaufman School of Dance, Tisch School of The Arts, Princeton, and more.