We are excited to introduce you to the four Los Angeles-based artists participating in our 2021 Research + Development Residency program: Marsian De Lellis, Lindsey Lollie, Chelsea Zeffiro with Summer Dunsmore, and Xiaoyue Zhang.
We received 50 proposals from artists this year, and all proposals were reviewed by previous residency artists DaEun Jung ad Sara Lyons, along with our outgoing producer Brian Sea, producing intern Selina Ho, and executive director Miranda Wright.
Residency artists will each receive $1,600 in cash support for early research and development toward a new project, plus additional resources ranging from access to rehearsal space, collaborator stipends, equipment, and producing consultations. Each residency is self-guided, and can take place in the artist’s home, outdoors, or in a rehearsal studio with safety measures in place.
Each artist will share a taste of their process and new work in development in the coming weeks.
Marsian De Lellis’ installations and tactile spectacles memorialize obsessional lives at the precarious border between beauty and terror. De Lellis collects fragments from biographies of unconventional people whose private manias become fodder for tabloids. Melding in contours of their own struggles, they shape the personal into comprehensible form: narrative-driven objects that reconsider embodiment, desire, and neurodivergence. De Lellis recontextualizes puppets and dolls as power objects, encouraging viewers to relate to the inanimate as if it were alive. Primal and disarming, these crude representations of humans at once reinforce the otherness of the complicated messy lives they represent, while enabling viewers to identify with them in ways they otherwise couldn’t. marsiandelellis.com/
Lindsey Lollie is a Mexican/African American dancer, teacher and choreographer from Altadena, CA. She enjoys teaching and practicing movement as a way to connect to the community and exchange energy. Over the years she has found refuge in movement through various forms and styles, from house to contemporary dance to yoga to chicago footwork. Lollie’s pieces have been selected for festivals and art happenings in Los Angeles such as LA Dance Festival, Celebrate Dance, REDCAT Studio, The Lightning Series, Hi Solo, Home LA, CalArts Commuter Fest, and Face the Music Dance Festival. Lollie has worked closely with artists Stephanie Zaletel/szalt and Jordan Saenz, dancing and teaching together for many years. She has also performed for Liz Hoefner, Sarah Elgart, Rebecca Bruno, Jay Carlon, Nguyen Nguyen and Mollie Wolf. lollieworks.org/
Xiaoyue Zhang is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist and creative producer working at the intersection of performance, dance, photography and film. Her works center on exploring the porosity of ideological constructs through the lens of the body and bodily experience. She collaborates with bodies, others and her own, to access archived experience of tension present in identities that exist in-between history and narrative, the collective and personal, language and bodies. In her process, Xiaoyue seeks the transforming and transgressing potential born from the hybridity of mediums, disciplines and cultures. Xiaoyue’s theater works have been shown at REDCAT New Original Works Festival and Hollywood Fringe Festival. Her film and video works have been presented at the Guangdong Museum of Art (China) and Short Film Corner of 2018 Cannes International Film Festival. Her film producing works have been shown internationally in France, Germany, Athens, Vietnam, Ireland. She has worked as an associate producer for Ergao Dance Group and CalArts Center for New Performance. She is currently the associate producer at The Orchard Project (New York). She received her MFA in Creative Producing and Management at California Institute of the Arts and is currently living on the Tongva Land (also known as Los Angeles).
Chelsea Zeffiro is a dance artist specializing in experimental and collaborative performance between theater, dance, and film. Her current practice is rooted in character-driven improvisational research and writing/making plays to be danced. She received her BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California and her MFA with a Fellowship in Dance from the University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) where she also served as adjunct faculty in the School of Dance.
Summer Dunsmore is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. A recent graduate of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary program at Duke University, her installations focus on expanding collaborative and immersive transmedia storytelling practices through video, text, performance and collage. She is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Summer Dunsmore and Chelsea Zeffiro have been working collaboratively since 2017, making performance by using an interdisciplinary and transmedia storytelling approach, which includes dance, text, video, and digital platforms.
