TEAM
Is a visual artist, dance-improvisor and dance-arts curator primarily interested in ideas of wilderness, multiplicity, emergent structure and futurity. He has been focused exclusively on programming and curating dance since 2014 with a focus on experimental performance and somatic dance practices.
He was the co-founder, director and lead curator for Lion’s Jaw Festival, a boston-based annual performance and dance festival, housed at both Green Street Studios and MIT, that ran from 2016-2020.
Jared is a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts-unceded territory of the Nonantum and Massachusett. He is a father and a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design.
Is a painter, interdisciplinary artist and teacher. On staff intermittently since the Field Center began, Anya has been instrumental in initiating and developing many of the house systems and structures still in use today. Anya helped develop and currently manages our Long Term Work Exchange Program.
Anya also painted the mural that sits above the dining room and conceptualized and developed the Field Center logo.
Is a professional dancer and movement artist, a Certified Rolfer and practicing manual therapist, a graduated student and contramestra of Capoeira, and a Certified Teacher of the Axis Syllabus.
She carries over 25 years of research and practice in therapeutic, martial, and performing arts, music, yoga, western somatics, contact improvisation, experiential anatomy, functional biomechanics, and more. She is also a mother of two.
Currently based in both Vermont and the San Francisco Bay Area, Nuria teaches and performs internationally and works locally with clients and students.
Is a dancer and chef, currently invested in Contact Improvisation and Collective Improvisation. She is committed to improvisation as a physical practice of asking questions, paying attention, patience and peace. She is curious about the disruption of normative culture through dancing and gathering. She values the interplay of rigor, rest, discipline and play. She teaches and shares her practices nationally and internationally, along with coordinating and producing the CI events at the Field Center.
She is currently the head chef and Kitchen Manager at The Field Center. Her food is inspired by a plethora of cooks, books, recipes, artists, experiences and memories. For more on Lily’s cooking and dance practices, visit her website here.
Is a queer multimedia artist and performer, born and raised within Canarsie and Munsee Lenape lands. They have had the privilege of calling many lands their home, and they remain critically+somatically inquisitive about what it means to occupy stolen land. Cariño’s practice is tuned through improvisation with a focus on Contact Improvisation, chronic pleasure, connecting to the more-than-human world, and the dance of self-preservation.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Jared Williams is a visual artist, dance-improvisor and dance-arts curator primarily interested in ideas of wilderness, multiplicity, emergent structure and futurity. He has been focused exclusively on programming and curating dance since 2014 with a focus on experimental performance and somatic dance practices. He was the co-founder, director and lead curator for Lion’s Jaw Festival, a Boston-based annual performance and dance festival, housed at both Green Street Studios and MIT, that ran from 2016-2020 and is a board member of The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton Massachusetts.
In 2021 he co-founded The Field Center in southern Vermont where he acts as lead curator and Executive Director.
Jared was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts -unceded territory of the Nonantum and Massachusett. He is a father and a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design.
Kevin O’Connor is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a choreographer, performer, improviser, circus and installation artist. Born in London, Ontario, Kevin has been participating for over a decade in a small decolonial, participatory performance art collective that works in polluted watersheds in Ontario. He has worked with NAKA Dance in Oakland, Shakiri and Skywatchers in San Francisco, the feminist collective Oncogrrrls in Spain and collaborated with designer and Inuit hunter Paulette Metuq on a project in Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic. For over ten years, he has followed the teachings of the Axis Syllabus community and is a practitioner of biodynamic craniosacral therapy. He holds a master's degree in choreography and is currently completing a doctorate in performance studies at the University of California, Davis. Kevin's research examines the autonomy, performance capacities of the body and interventions and imaginations in relation to scientific studies, including the biocultural material called fascia.
Michael Bodel is an interdisciplinary dance artist, performer, scholar and arts administrator living in Westminster, Vermont. Currently working as Director of External Affairs at the Hopkins Art Center at Dartmouth College, where he manages marketing and communications. Through his work in communications, marketing and design, he has championed multiple organizations including The Putney School, HERE, St. Ann's Warehouse, Dance Studies Association and other small-but-punchy performing arts orgs. He holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Dance from Hollins University/American Dance Festival.
Nuria Latifa Bowart is a professional dancer and movement artist; a student, practitioner, and teacher of Capoeira with the rank of Mestra; a practicing manual therapist and Certified Rolfer®; a movement educator authorized as a Teacher and Certifier within the Axis Syllabus© international research community; and a mother of two. Nuria holds over 25 years of vocational research and practice across multiple therapeutic, martial, and artistic disciplines rooted in the expressive, relational, and healing capacities of the human body. She is deeply engaged with traditional forms of yoga, Western somatics, choreographic and improvisational movement arts, functional anatomy research, and more.
She is co-founder of the Field Center in southern Vermont, a residency and pedagogical center for contemporary heterodox arts practices where she currently lives, works, and manages the garden. Nuria teaches across the US and internationally.
Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
He is currently Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and has been on faculty at Duke, Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU and University of Nice. Creative projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEWcommissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017.
His books include Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004).
He currently convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in writing and has acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture.
