Bessies Podcast Series

Eva Yaa Asantewaa (2017 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance) is a 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 and served as Editor in Chief of Dancer's Turn, a blog devoted to longform profiles of dance artists, created by students of her "Writing on Dance" workshop series at New York Live Arts. 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, featuring 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers for an evening of group improvisation. Her cast was awarded a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. As EYA Projects, she has begun partnerships with organizations such as Gibney Dance Center, 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. She 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 Moving Forward Dialogues Dance Lab for Emerging Choreographers. Ms. Yaa Asantewaa served as a member of the New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards committee for three years and as a consultant or panelist for numerous arts funding or awards organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. A native New Yorker of Black Caribbean heritage, Eva makes her home in the East Village with her wife, Deborah, and cat, Crystal. https://infinitebody.blogspot.com

This episode of The Bessies Podcast Series, we interview Larissa Velez-Jackson - choreographer and hybrid artist who uses improvisation as a main tool for research and creation, focusing on personhood and the dancing/sound-making body. www.larissavelez.com Music by: Yackez - an art pop/multimedia collaboration of Larissa and Jon Velez-Jackson, aka Twitta and Papi Jon. www.Yackez.com Song Title: Accolades Edited by: Jamie Amadruto

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the recipient of the 2017 Bessie for Lifetime Achievement. Thank you Jawole! Music by: Dorian Wallace www.dorianwallace.com This was an excerpt of "We Are Anonymous", movement 2 of Dorian Wallace's magnum opus "We Are Legion", about the hacktivist collective Anonymous, performed and recorded by Tenth Intervention.