Arts Assembly Participants
Name: Ankur Malhotra
Organization: Amarrass Society for Performing Arts / Amarrass Records
Position: Director/Cofounder
Location: Madison, Wis, USA / New Dehli, India
Website: amarrass.com
Email: a@amarrass.com
Discipline(s) of Interest: Music Various Genres – Contemporary, Folk, Traditional, Electronic
Social Media: facebook.com/amarrass
Personal Info: Ankur Malhotra is an entrepreneur and musicologist with experiences in Information Technology, Music, Production, Education and Broadcastin. He is currently working on several projects in the music space including Amarrass Records, of which he is co-founder and director, and Amarrass Society for Performing Arts, developing music travel and tours with Sadhana Travels, and specialty music events (Musique Electronique, Willy Street Beats, Amarrass Nights/Music Festival). He is a DJ and radio show host on WORT 89.9FM Madison, principal at Madison Music Review, and a Photographer. He obtained his MBA at Wisconsin School of Business.
Ankur works out of Madison Wisconsin and New Delhi, India and manages various aspects of the label including artist management, international bookings, touring, and production. He has served as a Jury Member at WOMEX and the Russian World Music Awards (RWMA), music advisor to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), and on the Board of the Madison Area Music Association and Backporch Radio Broadcasting Inc. His work in the revival of folk music and vinyl culture in India has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, WPR, Rolling Stone India, BBC, The Independent and more. Speaking engagements have included the CIAM Congress in Mexico City (International Content Creators Association), Peabody Essex Museum, and Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark.
Organization Info: Amarrass Records is a New Delhi, India and Madison, Wisconsin (US) based multi-faceted independent D-I-Y record label, artist management, booking and events production company. Established in 2009, Amarrass is guided by the principles of fair trade and committed to the production of quality music in a sustainable way. With 14 albums released, the label and artists we represent have been featured in the UNESCO 2013 Creative Economies Report, The New York Times, NPR, BBC, received the prestigious ‘Top of the World’ Songlines Album Award and outstanding reviews. Our initiatives include the culturally significant Amarrass Nights events in New Delhi, cross-cultural artist collaborations, and the revival of vinyl production in India. Our non-profit initiative, Amarrass Society for Performing Arts, works with artisans to revive the traditional art of instrument making and provide workshops/music lessons with master musicians.
Name: Marama Lloyd
Organization: Atamira Dance Company
Position: Excecutive Director and Producer
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Website: www.atamiradance.co.nz
Email: executivedirector@atamiradance.co.nz
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance – Contemporary Indigenous
Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/atamiradance/
Youtube: Atamira Dance Company
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atamiradancecompany/?hl=en
Personal Info: Marama Lloyd belongs to the Māori tribes of Ngati Kahu and Te Rarawa from the far north of Aotearoa /New Zealand. She was born and raised and lives in Auckland and is a mother of 2 young men.
Marama became Executive Director of Atamira in June 2018 bringing 30 years of experience in the Māori contemporary dance sector to the role.
Her dance career began in training with Te Kanikani o Te Rangatahi in 1987 then she became an original company member of Taiao Dance Theatre, the company which pioneered the indigenous expression of the art form of dance in Aotearoa.
She was fortunate to attend 3 residencies in the Aboriginal Arts Programme at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2000, 2001 and 2002 and as a result of this has a strong and valued Turtle Island Dance Network fo collegaues and friends.
Marama also brings a strong understanding of the wider dance industry and governance in the arts sector following 13 years on the board of the NZ Dance Festival Trust (Tempo Dance Festival) including serving as Chair/Co-Chair from 2011 – 2016. She was a core member of the Auckland Arts Festival Programme Team from 2012-2018 as Education and Community Programme Manager.
Together with Artistic Director Jack Gray, Marama is committed to serving and sustaining the artform of contemporary Māori dance in Aotearoa and the global indigenous dance network.
Organization Info: ATAMIRA is Aoteroa/New Zealand’s leading national contemporary dance company soon to celebrate 20th year of resilient existence. Their choreographers and dance artists draw from their unique cultural landscape to share stories and Matauranga Māori (knowledge) with local, national and global audiences.
Their art form draws from personal stories, whakapapa/ geneology and local and global indigenous issues. Renowned for highly artistic and inventive work, ATAMIRA has toured extensively within Aotearoa and internationally, including to Australia, Hawaii, Noumea, USA, Hawaii and Asia (Taiwan, Korea, China).
The current leadership team of Artistic Director Jack Gray and Executive Director Marama Lloydd are set to continue the 20 year legacy of Atamira’s artform at home and on the international stage.
Name: Dolina Wehipeihana
Organization: Auckland Arts Festival
Position: Head of Programming
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Website: www.aaf.co.nz
Email: dolina.wehipeihana@aaf.co.nz
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance – Contemporary
Music – Classical, contemporary,
Theatre
Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Aklfestival
https://www.facebook.com/people/Dolina-Wehipeihana/100010537482019
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aklfestival
Personal Info: Dolina Wehipeihana is Head of Programming at Auckland Arts Festival, an annual arts and cultural festival held in New Zealand’s largest city. Of New Zealand Maori descent (Ngati Raukawa and Ngati Tukorehe), Dolina is also an independent producer through her company Betsy & Mana Productions and an advocate for contemporary indigenous theatre and dance. She has toured New Zealand work to Australia, Hawaii, New Caledonia, and Edinburgh. Dolina was a founding member of Atamira Dance Company and current Chair of Atamira Dance Collective Charitable Trust, and she is a member of National Maori Theatre Steering Committee He Waka Urungi. In 2018 Dolina was a member of the the Tri-Nations Curatorial Advisory group at the Australian Performing Arts Market alongside producers from Australia and Canada.
Organization Info: Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland Arts Festival is a place for ambitious ideas by storytellers, provocateurs and creators.
The Festival reflects our contemporary, cosmopolitan city with its many communities. It challenges artists and audiences to be bold and take a risk. Through the work of artists of Aotearoa and across the world, we aim to unify, enlighten and inspire the people of Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau and our many visitors.
A globally recognised celebration of art and culture taking place each March in New Zealand’s largest city, AAF will be presented for the 11th time in 2019. The Festival has attracted more than two million visitors to date.
Name: Mariya Moneva
Organization: Sinha Danse
Position: General Manager
Location: Montreal / Quebec (Canada)
Email: administration@sinhadanse.com
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance – Contemporary
Personal Info: Mariya Moneva is a cultural management specialist who works mainly in the field of performing arts in Montreal and internationally since 2007. She holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Sofia and a Diploma in Arts & Cultural Industries Management from HEC Montreal. Her expertise is substantial – she has led 33 international tour projects in 23 different countries for the worldwide-renowned company Cirque Eloize, and through the years, has participated in the production of many shows, exhibitions and other artistic events in the Montreal area. Being herself a big supporter and admirer of dance, she is General Manager of the Montreal-based company Sinha Danse since 2017. Mariya is also member of the Board of another Montreal-based company – Zab Maboungou/Compagnie de danse Nyata Nyata since 2014.
Name: Frank Hull
Organization: Stage Left Productions
Position: Commissioned Artist
Location: Toronto / Ontario (Canada)
Email: frankghull@gmail.com
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance – Adaptive/Modern/Burlesque
Theatre – Drama/Comedy
Choreography/Movement creation for any Body.
Personal Info: Frank Hull is an established, professional artist who proudly lives with cerebral palsy and madness, embraces his Mi’kmaq heritage, and celebrates his gay identity. Hull’s dance works have been presented several times at ART WITH ATTITUDE (Toronto). His most recent work includes contributing a commissioned digital narrative, OCCUPY THIS, to Stage Left Production’s national co-creation, HIGH ART: DRUGS, DISABILITY AND DASTARDLY DEEDS. He’s now expanding his performance repertoire into physical theatre, in Stage Left’s upcoming QueerCrip production, HOMO/EROTIC. His artistic vision is to reveal the impacts of trauma and oppression on the body while positioning “deviant” bodies as a source of aesthetic appreciation, beauty and enrichment.
Name: Alan Shain
Organization: Stage Left Productions
Location: Ottawa / Ontario (Canada)
Email: alanshain@yahoo.ca
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance, Theatre
Personal Info: Alan Shain is a multidisciplinary, independent disability artist based in Ottawa. He began his career in stand-up comedy, but rapidly expanded his performance repertoire to also include dance, theatre and storytelling. He has performed across Canada and the US, as well as in England, Australia and Taiwan. He has been performing for more than 20 years.
His artistic vision is to disrupt the normalization of impairment through daring artistic innovation in both content and form. His artistic practice promotes counter-cultural perspectives of “the disability experience”. His artistic reputation is built on pushing artistic, cultural and political boundaries.
Name: Sara Meurling
Organization: Stage Left Productions
Position: Artistic Director
Location: Ottawa / Ontario (Canada)
Email: sara@culturethink.ca
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance, Theatre
Personal Info: Sara has had a thirty year career in theatre as an arts manager, advocate, publicist and sometimes playwright at such organization as the Theatre Centre, the Dance Umbrella of Ontario, the Young Centre for the Performing Arts and Factory Theatre. Her community work has included: juror, advisor and committee member, and as Member of the Board of a number of organizations. Sara was most recently Executive Director of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatre from 2014 to 2019. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Canadian Arts Coalition. Sara now is an active arts consultant and works with Stage Left Productions, the Deaf, Disability and Made Art Alliance, ARTse United and the Cultural Human Resources Council.
Name: Jenna Reid
Organization: Stage Left Productions
Position: Artistic Director
Location: Toronto / Ontario (Canada)
Email: reid.jenna@gmail.com
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance/Theatre/Film – Decolonized & non-normalized
Personal Info: Jenna Reid is a fibre based artist who works primarily with the practices of quilting and natural dyes as a way to engage with activist based aesthetics. Jenna’s studio work explores inter-institutional violence informed by the histories of queer, feminist, and mad movement organizing. Her written work is published in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Canadian Art, Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Policy, and Practice, and the Journal of Progressive Human Services, Studies in Social Justice. Jenna’s fibre art has been exhibited both locally and internationally. As a professor in Mad and Disability Studies at Ryerson University Jenna works with students to use art in the classroom to create ruptures, open up new lines of inquiry, and to help students turn away from the need to resolve and instead open up the transformative possibilities that happen when we render things problematic.
Name: Michele Decottignies
Organization: Stage Left Productions
Position: Artistic Director
Location: Canmore / Alberta (Canada)
Email: michele@stage-left.org
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance/Theatre/Film – Decolonized & non-normalized
Personal Info: Michele is an multiple winning interdisciplinary artist, advocate and educator with 30 years experience in Canada’s arts sector. She’s focused the last 20 years of year career prioritizing equity & diversity in the arts through a company she created in 1999, Stage Left Productions – a collective of diverse artists who create culturally-informed Political Art works and advocate for equity in the arts. She spent the last 15 years exclusively prioritizing equity & diversity in the arts through her own company, Stage Left Productions – a collective of diverse artists on the margins, who create politically-informed artworks and advocate for anti-oppressoin, decolonization and non-normalization throughout the professional arts sector. Stage Left is now a global Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed, the leading contributor to Canada’s Deaf, Disability & Mad Arts Domain and Calgary’s only Political Art company
Name: Judy Harquail
Organization: Ontario Presents
Position: Director of Programs
Location: Toronto, Ontario (Canada)
Website: https://ontariopresents.ca/
Email:info@ontariopresents.ca
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance, Music, Theatre
Social Media:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/ontariopresents
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OntarioPresents
LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/cci—ontario-presenting-network
Personal Info: Judy Harquail has over 30 years of experience working in the performing arts. Over this time, Judy has gained a deep and extensive knowledge of the presenting and touring field as well as a substantive knowledge of marketing, audience development and community engagement. Her previous accomplishments include directing and executing touring activity for some of Canada’s most highly respected dance and opera companies, developing and executing strategic marketing campaigns and working in collaboration with an extensive range of arts organizations and arts professionals across Canada, the United States, and throughout the world. Judy is now the Director of Programs for Ontario Presents, and a sought-after market development consultant. In 2007, Judy received the National Arts Centre award for distinguished contribution to touring in Canada and in 2011, the Sandra Tulloch Award for Innovation in Arts and Culture in Ontario. Judy currently sits on the Board of Directors of ISPA (The International Society for the Performing Arts).
Organizational Info: Ontario Presents is a province-wide network of performing arts touring and presenting organizations that work collaboratively to facilitate the distribution of live, performing arts shows – and their engagement with citizens – into communities across Ontario. Its members include municipal performing arts centres; not-for-profit, volunteer, community presenters; touring artists/arts organizations, artists’ agents, and industry service consultants. Ontario Presents operates a number of participatory programs and services that help members build capacity, develop leadership and create opportunities to grow and diversify their audiences.
Name: Mariaa Randall
Organization: DubaiKungkaMiyalk
Position: Artistic Director
Location: Ascot / Australia
Website: www.dubaikungkamiyalk.com.au
Email: indigenque@hotmail.com
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance, Theatre, Film
Social Media:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mariaa.randall
Twitter: @Mariaa_Randall
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mariaa-randall-a006232a
Personal Info: Mariaa Randall belongs to the Bundjalung and Yaegl people of the Far North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. She is a graduate of NAISDA Dance College and Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts with Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Arts Management, a Graduate Diploma in Performance Creation and a Master in Animateuring (by Research). Mariaa loves to dance and uses it as a tool to highlight Indigenous women’s voices and presence. She instils this in each of the works she creates, to inform, inspire and generate diversity through movement.
Organizational Info: DubaiKungkaMiyalk (DKM) was created by independent choreographer, Mariaa Randall as a platform to share her practice and philosophy when creating movement with others. Her practice focuses on the indigenous female perspective when creating works. To bring to the forefront that experience and inject it into the creative process. To inform, inspire and generate diversity through one’s movement.
The works that DubaiKungkaMiyalk continues to create shares this practice as a means to inform the present, to instil the past and to redirect the future. This methodology continues to build my practice as it moulds the process when I teach, create and make movement with others.
Name: Marilyn Miller
Organization: BlakDance
Position: Founder / Cultural Council member
Location: Cairns / Australia
Website: www.blakdance.org.au
Email: miller.cairns@gmail.com
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance – Contemporary Indigenous Dance
Personal Info: From Kuku Yalanji and Wanji heritage Marilyn was Australia’s National Indigenous Dance Coordinator of the national strategy Treading The Pathways 2007 – 2009, which then became BlakDance Australia Ltd, of which she became the inaugural CEO 2010 – 2011, and Founder.
Marilyn has worked in a variety of capacities since being sole female co-founder, Dancer/Choreographer of Australia’s first Indigenous mainstream Company, Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre – the Company, ranging from Actor, Dancer, Dance teacher, Choreographer, Artistic Director, Arts Administrator, and Facilitator. She has choreographed for Dance, Theatre, and Television, had a video installation of Contemporary Indigenous Welcome Dances residing in the First Peoples Gallery, Australian National Museum, and along with the rest of her family has been honoured in the Queensland Museum – Dandiiri Maiwar exhibition.
Organizational Info: For over a decade, BlakDance has consistently delivered generative and transformative sector events and advocates for the development of the small to medium Indigenous dance sector.
BlakDance prioritizes independent artists and emerging small to medium companies.
BlakDance works nationally and has a dedicated multiyear program.
We provide managing and producing artist and presenter services and sector advocacy. We design, produce and deliver; Dana Waranara, National Indigenous Dance Forum, BlakDance Presenter Series, Producer Development Program, First Nations Dialogues New York, Global First Nations Exchange and BlakDance Residency Program.
Name: Merindah Donnelly
Organization: BlakDance
Position: Executive Producer
Location: Cairns / Australia
Website: www.blakdance.org.au
Email: merindah.donnelly@blakdance.org.au
Discipline(s) of Interest: Dance – Contemporary Indigenous Dance
Personal Info: Merindah is a Koori woman based in Brisbane. She has worked in market development for a decade, specialising in sector transformation. During this time, she has collaboratively developed research, design and strategy to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and companies to cultivate new markets nationally and internationally. Merindah has worked for the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Performing Arts Market, she has been an International Society of Performing Arts global fellow, collaboratively led a number of major
Organizational Info: For over a decade, BlakDance has consistently delivered generative and transformative sector events and advocates for the development of the small to medium Indigenous dance sector.
BlakDance prioritizes independent artists and emerging small to medium companies.
BlakDance works nationally and has a dedicated multiyear program.
We provide managing and producing artist and presenter services and sector advocacy. We design, produce and deliver; Dana Waranara, National Indigenous Dance Forum, BlakDance Presenter Series, Producer Development Program, First Nations Dialogues New York, Global First Nations Exchange and BlakDance Residency Program.
