Queer|Art Announces Judges for Third Annual EVA YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT FOR QUEER WOMEN(+) DANCE ARTISTS

Queer|Art, NYC's home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, has announcedthe judges for the third annual Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists: creative consultant/strategist, choreographer, and producer Torya Beard, dancer, teacher, and choreographer Leah Wilks, multidisciplinary artist, wound and word worker Ni'Ja Whitson.

The $7,000 grant will be awarded US-based artists for making cutting-edge dance and movement-based performance work. Queer|Art highly encourages self-identified women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary artists to apply for this grant. Named in honor of visionary dance curator, critic, and educator Eva Yaa Asantewaa, the grant is administered through Queer|Art by a panel of queer women and nonbinary judges and seeks to highlight the important contributions queer women and nonbinary artists have made to dance throughout history.

"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."

The grant is application-based and will be awarded to benefit specific projects. 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. Prospective applicants should review application requirements and apply directly through the Queer|Art website.

Applications for the third year of the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists will be open August 24th, 2020 - October 4th, 2020. The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists is part of the organization's Queer|Art|Awards initiative, which includes grants, prizes, and awards that provide various kinds of direct support-monetary and otherwise-to LGBTQ+ artists. Other Awards include: The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, The Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers, and the Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement and Recent Work.

About Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Eva Yaa Asantewaa (pronouns: she/her) is Gibney's Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation as well as Editorial Director for Imagining: A Gibney Journal. 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 and interviewed dance artists and advocates as host of two podcasts, Body and Soul and Serious Moonlight. She blogs on the arts, with dance as a specialty, for InfiniteBody.

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. In 2018, Queer|Art named one of its awards in her honor, and Detroit-based choreographer Jennifer Harge won the first Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists. In 2019, Yaa Asantewaa was a recipient of a BAX Arts & Artists in Progress Award.

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

About the 2020 Judges

Torya Beard (New York) is a New York-based director, creative consultant/strategist, choreographer, and producer specializing in dance and theater. Her curvy professional path reflects a deep curiosity about and belief in the boundless possibilities at the intersection of creativity, artistic expression, and social justice. She studied dance at The University of Michigan and toured as a dancer with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, David Rousseve/Reality, The Kevin Wynn Collection, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, Earl Mosley's Diversity of Dance, Deeply Rooted Chicago Dance Theatre, the National Tour of Donald Byrd's The Harlem Nutcracker, and was a featured dancer in the film "Idlewild." She made her Broadway debut in "Disney's The Lion King" (swing, dance captain, understudy Sarabi) and her favorite regional credit is "The Wiz," at Arkansas Repertory Theater. Torya's passion for dance and theatre lead to 15-years in PR & Marketing as Owner/Creative Director of thatgirl006, Inc. Torya is Executive Director at A BroaderWay Foundation, Director of Original Tap House, Co-Founder of tall poPpy, Inc., Managing and Creative Director of Ayodele Casel's AyoLives, Inc., Arts Education Consultant for Excellence Community Schools, and serves on the Board of Directors for Earl Mosley's Diversity of Dance. toryabeard.com

Leah Wilks (Brooklyn/North Carolina) is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer originally hailing from North Carolina. She has taught and shared her work in a variety of locations including the American Dance Festival, Elon University, University of Michigan, Ponderosa Tanzland festival, Gibney Dance, the queer dance intensive Excessive Realness, the Hemispheric Institute's Convergence - Toronto, and PROTEO|media+performance's Post/Futures Festival. Most recently she has performed with real.live.people, BAND|portier, Sara Hook, Tommy DeFrantz/SLIPPAGE, Kristin Clotfelter/Studio C Projects, and in her own duet work with collaborator Mauriah Kraker under the moniker L+M. Leah holds an MFA in Dance and a certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she received the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for her pedagogical and mentorship work. She is also a gardener, musician, community organizer, elder companion, and writer. Leah's current research revolves around thanatology (the study of death and dying practices), memory, queer systems of horizontal care, and the creation of monumental spaces through movement.

Ni'Ja Whitson (California) is a Queer Nonbinary Trans multidisciplinary artist, Creative Capital and two-time "Bessie" Awardee, wound and word worker, referred to as "majestic" by The New York Times, and recognized by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer. They engage transdisciplinarity through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual in Black, Queer, and Transembodiedness, site, science, body and spirit. Whitson is an 18th St. Artist in Residence (Los Angeles), Center for Performance Research artist in residence (NYC), featured choreographer of the 2018 CCA Biennial, 2018-2020 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellow, and invited presenter at the 2019 international Tanzkongress festival in Dresden, Germany. Their award-winning practice extends to conventional and experimental theatre, opera, and performance with recent commissions from Yale Dance Lab, Spoleto Festival (Omar an opera composed by Rhiannon Giddens, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite), EMPAC, and California African American Museum.

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