Kenney Mencher

QUEER|ART INTRODUCES THE EVA YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT FOR QUEER WOMEN(+) DANCE ARTISTS

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Photo by Scott Shaw

Queer|Art, NYC’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ artists, is proud to introduce the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists. The new $10,000 grant will be awarded US-based artists for making cutting-edge dance and movement-based performance work. Women(+): The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant employs an expansive definition of the word “woman." Queer|Art strongly encourages self-identified women, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary artists to apply.

The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists is a new grant awarded to artists for making cutting-edge dance and/or movement-based performance work.

The 2018 grant is administered through Queer|Art by women(+) for women(+), including an intergenerational panel of judges from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Named in honor of visionary dance curator, critic, and educator Eva Yaa Asantewaa, the grant seeks to highlight the important contributions queer women have made to dance throughout history.

Applications for the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists are open September 6th – October 21th, 2018. Funds can be requested to support work at any stage of development, from concept to presentation. Qualifying work may be dance and/or movement-based performance work of any format. The awardee will be announced in November.

“Folks who care about the art of dance—an art of the moving body in time and space—try to preserve its wonders against disappearance,” Yaa Asentewaa writes. “In a society ambivalent about, and sometimes hostile to, both the body and its artistry, lovers of dance honor the body in all of its variations, its rich stories, its wisdom and creative expression. With this award, we seek to record and honor the creative innovation and labor of queer women dance artists. To acknowledge them as full humans and artists informed and nourished by love, by experience, and by culture. To support and revere our artists for exactly and completely who they are; so they know a fierce community of peers, elders, and ancestors has got their back; and to make our world a safer, more empowering place for queer artists and, in truth, for all artists and for all people.”

Eva Yaa Asantewaa is Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney, New York’s acclaimed center for dance and social activism. She won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance as a veteran writer, curator and community educator. Since 1976, she has contributed writing on dance to Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, Gay City News, The Dance Enthusiast, Time Out New York, and other publications.

Ms. Yaa Asantewaa joined the curatorial team for Danspace Project’s “Platform 2016: Lost and Found” and created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of group improvisation featuring 21 black women and gender-nonconforming performers. Her cast was awarded a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. As EYA Projects, she has begun partnerships with organizations such as Gibney, Abrons Arts Center, Dance/NYC, BAX, and Dancing While Black to curate and facilitate Long Table conversations on topics of concern in the dance/performance community.

She was a member of the inaugural faculty of Montclair State University’s MFA in Dance program and has also served on the faculty for New England Foundation for the Arts' Regional Dance Development Initiative Dance Lab 2016 for emerging Chicago-area dance artists. In May 2017, she served on the faculty for the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography's inaugural Forward Dialogues Dance Lab for Emerging Choreographers.

A native New Yorker of Black Caribbean heritage, Eva makes her home in the East Village with her wife, Deborah, and cat, Crystal.

GRANT JUDGES

Nora Sharp (Chicago) is a writer and performer whose work uses dance, sound, cultural analysis, and comedy, among other tools to reflect lived experience as a queer white Midwestern millennial. Nora has recently been a Co-MISSIONS Artist-in-Residence at Links Hall as well as a participant in LANDING 2.0 with Miguel Gutierrez, and has performed with and for Udita Upadhyaya, the Fly Honey Show, Bill Young, and Ayako Kato, among others. Along with offering individual process support for artists, Nora has facilitated Research Project, a works-in-progress performance and response series, since 2014. Nora has written for Full Stop and Performance Response Journal and holds a BA from Oberlin College.

Julie Tolentino (Los Angeles) is a performance installation maker whose work draws from visual, archival, and movement strategies. Her work has been presented by the New Museum, The Kitchen, Participant Inc., Danspace Project, Volume, LACE, Commonwealth & Council, The Lab, Joe Goode Annex, PSi Stanford, Performa '05 and '13, The Wexner Center and others as well as across Europe, the UK, Philippines, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Greece. She co-authored the group essay, "The Sum of All Questions" published in GLQ Journal (Gay & Lesbian Quarterly) focused on the legendary queer space she originated in New York City’s Meatpacking District: Clit Club (1990-2002). She recently received the Pieter Women Over-40 Grant and a Boffo Fire Island Residency.

Marýa Wethers (New York City) is a “Bessie” award winning performer (Outstanding Performance with skeleton architecture, 2017) and works as an independent creative producer and curator. As a curator she conceived and created the three-week performance series “Gathering Place: Black Queer Land(ing)” at Gibney and curated for Queer NY International Arts Festival (2015 & 2016) and Out of Space @ BRIC Studio series for Danspace Project (2003-2007). Her writings have been published in the Configurations in Motion: Curating and Communities of Color Symposium publications, organized by Thomas DeFrantz at Duke University (2016 & 2015) and UnCHARTed Legacies: women of color in post-modern dance in the 25th Anniversary Movement Research Performance Journal #27/28 (2004).

APPLY

APPLICATIONS OPEN - SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

COMPLETE APPLICATION - DUE OCTOBER 21, 2018

Who can apply and other application criteria:

Self-identified women, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary artists who are U.S. based.
Qualifying work may be dance and/or movement-based performance work of any format.
Funds can be requested to support work at any stage of development, from concept to presentation.

Information required in the application: