Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based choreographer, poet, educator, filmmaker, performer, and the artistic director of tinypistol. Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on Black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to wonderment. Maurya was a member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet for twelve years, an ODC artist-in-residence from 2015 to 2018, and holds an MFA in dance from Hollins University. Maurya’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, is featured or forthcoming in various publications, and was recently chosen by Jericho Brown as runner-up in Southern Humanities Review’s 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Maurya is currently a 2021/22 UC Berkeley ARC (Arts Research Center) Poetry & the Senses Fellow. www.tinypistol.com

Photography by Alan Kimara Dixon

Micaela Taylor is a professional dancer, choreographer, and Artistic Director of The TL Collective. She is the recipient of the Inaugural Springboard EMERGE Choreographic Award and was recently named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” 2019, and appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine in May 2020. She is trailblazing in the city of Los Angeles and beyond. Alongside the launch of The TL Collective, Taylor has been commissioned to choreograph and teach by BODYTRAFFIC, Springboard Danse Montreal, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, B12 Festival Berlin, Carlos Acosta’s Acosta Danza, and more. Taylor’s work has been presented at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Broad Stage, Ford Amphitheatre, The Barclay Center, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and more. Her quirky style of facial expressions and athletic theatricality sets her work apart. SNAP, a commissioned work created for BODYTRAFFIC set her mark as a choreographer that transcends one style of dance. She formed a new movement style called Expand Practice, which allows individuals to expand their mind, body, and narrative.

From ballet training in his native Belgium, Olivier learned the beauty, passion and discipline of the art. On coming to North America at age 19, he discovered the exhilaration of many new dance forms. As a principal dancer, first with Royal Winnipeg Ballet and later, for most of his dancing career, with Pacific Northwest Ballet, he acquired his strong conviction that dancers are the heart and soul of a company. As such they, and artists in general, must live at the very center of the process, their dignity, psychological and creative growth and safety deemed just as essential as their technical accomplishments.

During his years of performing in classical and contemporary works by choreographers from around the world, Olivier also discovered the thrill of making dances and how imaginative story-telling and movement exploration connect to caring about individuality and physicality. Creating dances fed his perennial curiosity. It became “my way to express myself and, during the process, to be able to learn more about the human condition, start dialogues, touch people and share ideas, reflecting on our times and our humanity.”

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