ACCELERATOR: A Power Group in Contemporary Performance

Daniel Corral is a mixed heritage Filipino-American composer/performer born and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. Based in Los Angeles since 2005, his creative practice draws inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s definition of art as “exact information of how to rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.” This manifests via combinations of pop culture and experimental music conceptual rigor; unique instrumentation; performances in outdoor and/or public spaces; microtonality; consideration of the relational values of performances; and pieces that address current issues like climate change, race relations, or online anonymity.

Corral taught at CalArts 2016-2020. In 2022, the city of Los Angeles awarded him an Individual Master Artist Project grant, after having declared him a Cultural Trailblazer in 2019. Past residencies include APPEX, Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, I-Park, the Banff Centre, Djerassi, and Loghaven. His music has been released by Populist Records, Orenda Records, Innova Recordings, the wulf. records, MicroFest Records, and independently. His MFA is from CalArts, where his teachers included James Tenney and Anne LeBaron. Corral is also Operations Director of the Grammy-winning PARTCH Ensemble, on the board of MicroFest LA, and Co-Artistic Director of the Now Hear Ensemble.

Alison De La Cruz (DeLa) is a multi-disciplinary theater artist, contemporary ritualist, senior artivist leader, facilitator, cultural organizer, and elder. De La Cruz’s artistic work is part autobiography and part community narratives that explore everything from local Los Angeles  BIPOC Community histories to the personal mappings of the soft squishy way masculinity appears on Filipin@/x bodies, nostalgia and fairy tales.  

DeLa’s solo work includes SUNGKA (1999), NATURALLY GRACEFUL (2005); WHERE YOU STAY? (2006), L.A. MALONG MALONG (2011) and DeLa’s gender non-conforming Flash Theatre LA piece “SMOKE AND MIRRORS” (2012).  DeLa’s artistic work has also been presented at venues across the country including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Asian Arts Initiative, Highways Performance Space, and The David Henry Hwang Theatre at East West Players. As a poet-playwright-dramaturge, De La Cruz has collaborated with youth writers on 10 world premiere productions.

De La Cruz’s directing credits include the world premiere of Nathan Ramos-Park’s AS WE BABBLE ON (2018, East West Players), Claudia Rodriguez’s MIDNIGHT STEEL (2016, Grand Performances / DCA); Post Natyam Collective’s SUPER RUWAXI (2014, Fury Factory), De La Cruz served as Executive Producer of the LA premiere of the Broadway musical ALLEGIANCE (2018, EWP & JACCC) at the historic Aratani Theatre followed by the world premiere of TALES OF CLAMOR (2019, JACCC & NCRR) in the Aratani Theatre Black Box.

As a gathering practitioner, DeLa currently organizes the circle as producer for the LA County multi-community song, drum, dance, circle practices known as FandangObon.  More info at www.alisondelacruz.com

Marsian De Lellis is an interdisciplinary artist and activist who constructs installations and time-based visual narratives in intimate settings. In their practice, they employ puppets, dolls, performing objects, models, miniatures, and humor to memorialize obsessional lives. 

De Lellis celebrates stories of unconventional people. Melding real or imagined biographies with fragments from their own lived experiences has evolved into a survival strategy that transforms personal struggle into comprehensible form. They are developing a nonbinary aesthetic that embraces multiplicity and playfully critiques societal norms in conversation with queer, godless, neurodivergent, and trans/enby viewers.

Their projects have been supported by The Jim Henson Foundation, The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Center for Cultural Innovation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Santa Monica Cultural Affairs.  Recently, the New York City Department of Education included archives from their queer advocacy work in its social studies curriculum.  As Los Angeles Performance Practice’s Development Specialist, De Lellis secures critical resources for L.A.’s independent artists. They serve on the Silverlake Neighborhood Council.

marsiandelellis.com/

DaEun Jung is a Los Angeles-based choreographer/dancer who interlaces forms, principles, and methods of her ancestral and contemporary performance practices. Jung’s work has been supported by Los Angeles Performance Practice, REDCAT, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CultureHub LA, Pieter Performance Space, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Korea Foundation. She had residencies at the Loghaven Artist Residency, L.A. Dance Project, Brockus Project Dance, Camera Obscura Art Lab, and Show Box LA, as well as Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Forward Dialogues 2019.

A master artist of the 2019 Alliance for California Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program and 2019-2020 Cultural Trailblazer of City of Los Angeles Department Cultural Affairs, Jung has redefined the practice and repertoire of Korean dance in inter/multi-cultural settings as a continuation of her MFA in choreography at UCLA where she was a Westfield Emerging Artist.

Jung toured cities and countries in Asia and Europe as a full-time dancer of Gyeonggido Dance Company which is internationally renowned for its large-scale classical and contemporary Korean dance repertoire. Having six years of early conservatory training in dance at the National Gugak School as a recipient of the National Theater of Korea Award, she obtained a BA in dance from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea.

Jung has taught at Santa Monica College, Loyola Marymount University, and University of Nevada Reno and currently is a lecturer at UC Riverside.

Daria Kaufman is a performer/choreographer working at the intersection of movement, text, and action. From phone-based audio oration to domestic object scores, to task-based performance installation, her practice is rooted in the body – its mutability and capacity for (un)making meaning. Daria’s work has been presented internationally at: Curtas de Dança, in scope of Festival Dias de Dança (Porto); Rua das Gaivotas 6, in scope of Encontro Bianual de Artes Performativas – (Re)union 2018 (Lisbon); Biblioteca de Marvila (Lisbon); Zaratan Contemporary Art Gallery (Lisbon); FAKI Festival (Zagreb); Pomona and Scripps Colleges; ODC Theater (SF), Cutting Ball Theater (SF), Joe Goode Annex (SF), NOHspace (SF), Mills College (Oakland), The Milkbar (Oakland), and on KQED Spark TV (SF Bay Area). With StratoFyzika – the Berlin-based intermedia performance collective – Kaufman has co-created and performed original works at B-Seite Festival (Mannheim), UferStudios (Berlin), Festival Atalaia Artes Performativas (Aljustrel), and CounterPulse (San Francisco). In 2015, Kaufman was nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award (the “Izzie”) for Individual Performance. Her work has been supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, GDA Foundation, European Cultural Foundation, and Zellerbach Family Foundation. In addition, her projects have been awarded Artist-in-Residencies by Los Angeles Performance Practice, Atelier Concorde (Lisbon), DeVIR CApa (Faro), ÇATI Dans (Istanbul), Shawl-Anderson Dance Center (Oakland), and the Milkbar (Oakland). Daria holds a MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Mills College.

Mireya Lucio (born in Puerto Rico and living in Los Angeles by way of New York) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, and performer. After training as an actor (BFA Tisch/NYU; Moscow Art Theatre; MFA CalArts), Mireya developed a performance-making practice stemming from a love of dramaturgy and intuitive assembling. Mireya’s work has taken the form of dinners, lectures, walking tours, videos, stage shows, and game nights. Her full-length solo performances unravel timelines embedded with precise historical reenactment into musical extravaganzas: “Brandenburg Gate: The American Hits” (an episodic timeline of US presidential visits and foreign celebrity presence in Berlin, along with renditions of number-one Billboard Chart hits of the day), and “¡Con la boca es un mamey!” (a non-authoritative lecture-cum-personal revisionist history of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony). Her collaborative practice with Sallie Merkel, Emotional Labor Co., weaves popular culture and academic inquiry into non-linear, transgressive studies of girlhood (as in Our-So-Called Sleepover, or, Freud and Jung Crash 1995 Through a Ouija Board), and creates transformative ritual via playful entertainment (as in The Commons digital series and the iterative Witches’ Cabaret). Her current project, Conversations with my Descendants via Sci-Fi Space Odyssey: a screenplay for the stage, is a live multimedia performance that fuses speculative fiction, memoir, and post-colonial essay as an embodied future archive of inheritance (performed at LAX festival in 2022). mireyalucio.com

Paul Outlaw is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based multidisciplinary performing artist whose award-winning projects have been presented across the United States and in Europe. The central themes of his artistic practice are the constructs of race and sexual identity, and how violence has haunted them throughout Euro-American history. Paul is the recipient of a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Individual Artist Fellowship (2012), two Lincoln City Fellowships (2020, 2021), two Ucross Foundation artist residencies (2020, 2021), and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Center for Cultural Innovation and the Dramatists Guild Foundation, among others.

Trained as an actor at the Phillips Exeter Academy and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Paul played the title role in Pepe Danquart’s Schwarzfahrer, winner of the 1994 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

Paul was the lyricist and lead vocalist for the Berliner bands Snow Blind Twilight Ferries and Fortified Static; backing vocalist for Mad Romeo; and guest vocalist and lyricist for the dance project General Motor and legendary post-punk constellation Die Haut. He is a featured vocalist on Splendor and Misery (2016), clipping.’s second full-length album release on Sub Pop Records/Deathbomb Arc.

Under the banner of OutlawPlay, Paul is the creator/performer of Here Be Dragons (1995), Berserker (2003), What Did I Do to Be So Black and… (2011), The Late, Late Show (2013), “Becoming Angeleno” (2017), BIRTHDAY SUITe (2017) and Shine (2018).  In addition to numerous performances in Los Angeles, Paul has also appeared at national and international festivals such as TBA-Time-Based Art Festival (Portland, OR), LAX Festival (Los Angeles, CA), Madness and the Arts World Festival (Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, Canada), Sternzeichen II (Theater am Turm, Frankfurt am Main, Germany), Blacktino Queer Performance (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL), Out on the Edge (Theater Offensive, Boston, MA) and the Fringe Festivals of San Francisco and New York.

Currently in development and ACCELERATing: DUET, a performance collaboration with Joe Seely; TENTH, a documentary film in collaboration with the Ladies Dewald; WALL BERLINER, WAHLBERLINER, a play; and the one-person play BBC (Big Black Cockroach), which will premiere next season at Los Angeles’ REDCAT (Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theater). 

Nina Sarnelle (she/they) is an artist and musician living on stolen Tongva/Kizh land that is often referred to as Los Angeles. Their artwork includes participatory performances, music composition, video and sculpture, and interfaces with sites of neocolonialism(s), ecological destruction and labor exploitation in strange and intimate ways. She earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. They recently had a solo video exhibition at the New Museum. Her work has also shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Istanbul Modern (Turkey), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin),  Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (Lisbon), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Black Cube (Denver), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Recess (NY), UNSW Galleries (Sydney), Project 88 (Mumbai), Kevin Space (Vienna), Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum (Genova), Mwoods (Beijing), Human Resources (LA) and others; and been featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, Creators Project, FlashArt, and Hyperallergic.

Selwa Sweidan (she/her) is a media artist, designer, educator and researcher living on Tongva/Kizh land. Her work probes mediated ways of thinking/feeling through collaborative, embodied, and movement-based approaches. She creates haptic experiments, biodegradable sculptures, movement scores, digital prototypes, open tools, and speculative films.  

Her research has been published in the Internet Policy Review Journal, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Journal and the Design Research Society. Selwa has co-curated exhibitions and symposia including DECOLONIALATHON, Beyond Embodiment, Clustering, Performative Computation, STACKED Expo, and Super Radiance. She has been a collaborative R&D Resident through Los Angeles Performance Practice (LAPP), a SLOMOCO Virtual Resident, a Collective Resident at NAVEL, a Postgraduate Fellow at ArtCenter College of Design, an Interactive Design Fellow at Fabrica, and was awarded “Best Overall” at the Microsoft Design Expo ’15. She has exhibited at Artificial Knowing, Bevilacqua Gallery, Center Du Pompidou, HomeLA, Spring/Break Los Angeles, TheOther.online, and University Arts Gallery, UC Irvine. Selwa holds a BA from Smith College, an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design, and is a Doctoral student in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California.

Anu Yadav is a critically acclaimed actress, writer and theater-based educator dedicated to amplifying the stories of working people.  As a solo performer, Anu shapeshifts into characters from everyday life with both humor and drama. Her devised theater work sparks a powerful forum for people to reflect and listen to each other’s stories across social and economic divides.

As an actress, Yadav has performed with the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Imagination Stage, Theatre Alliance,  and African Continuum Theatre, as well as at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Strathmore Mansion and the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing. 

As a teaching artist she worked with Young Playwrights’ Theatre, Capital Fringe Festival Youth Producers, Sasha Bruce Youth Works, Imagination Stage and facilitated workshops at various colleges, universities and high schools on themes ranging from identity, diversity, autobiographical-based performance and improvisation.

She co-founded the storytelling project Classlines, and wrote and performed her solo plays ‘Capers and Meena’s Dream that debuted to sold-out houses and toured nationally.  She was featured in the documentaries Walk with Me and Chocolate City.  She was a 2014 Western Arts Alliance ‘Launchpad’ Artist, DC Artist Fellow, Mercersburg Academy Fowle Scholar-in-Residence, Wellesley College Artist-in-Residence and Arts Midwest Spotlight Showcase Artist.  She was a 2015 Center for Performance and Civic Practice Catalyst Grant recipient partnering with the Institute for Policy Studies. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and holds an M.F.A. in Performance from the University of Maryland at College Park.  She wrote the children’s play, The Princess and the Pauper: A Bollywood Tale, a feminist adaptation of the Mark Twain tale produced by Imagination Stage.  She was a 2018 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellow, DC Public Library Artist-in-Residence and Alternate ROOTS grantee.  She was the 2019-2020 Creative Strategist Artist-In-Residence with the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, in partnership with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH). Currently she is Co-Director of the WE RISE 2021 Community Arts and Culture Projects, produced by LACDMH and Cause Communications. She is a member of Actor’s Equity Association, Dramatist’s Guild, Alternate ROOTS, Network of Ensemble Theaters and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.

Chelsea Zeffiro is a performer, choreographer, educator, and organizer based in Southern California. Her work is rooted in dance – expanded outward through experimental and collaborative practices which incorporate digital media, theater, design, and writing. At the core of her work is a desire to slow down time and interrogate the details of a moment; reframing scale and sequence to destabilize and transform something habitual or familiar.

Chelsea received her BA in Comparative Literature and French from the University of Southern California and an MFA as a Dance Fellow at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield and the mentorship of Jesse Zaritt and Beth Gill. 

Chelsea has developed and shown work at Human Resources LA, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla, CA), University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA), Institut Chorégraphique Internationale (Montpellier, FR), Theorist Fest (Austin, TX) and WoW Festival (San Diego, CA). Her recent evening-length works have been produced and presented by San Diego Dance Theater’s 2019 Live Arts Festival and by Los Angeles Performance Practice at the 2022 LAX Festival (Los Angeles, CA).

As an educator, she has worked with Coronado School for the Arts (dance and theater faculty), DISCO RIOT (teaching artist), University of the Arts (lecturer, capstone curriculum), Cal State San Marcos (Guest Lecturer), WoW Festival (Workshop Organizer/Teacher) and Lycée Louise Michel (TAPIF). 

She will be developing her duet, Abstract Human Support Positions (which premiered at the 2022 LAX Festival) with support from Los Angeles Performance Practice over the course of the 2023 ACCELERATOR program.