Leslie Cuyjet is an award-winning choreographer and performer whose work aims to conjure life-long questions of identity, confuse and disrupt traditional narratives, and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Since 2004, her tenure in the New York dance world is decorated with performances and collaborations, both formal and informal; with contemporaries, legends, and counterparts; on rooftops, good and bad floors, and alleyways; on stage, in film, art, on tour, and on the fly. “A strong, subtle presence unassumingly ground the stage,” says The New York Times. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists (Dance), Princeton Hodder Fellowship, and an Outstanding Choreographer/Creator “Bessie” Award for her 2021 work, Blur.

ASAP funding helped produce For All Your Life,  a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death. Centered around an ambitious seriocomical short film, For All Your Life is staged as a performance seminar, guided by an insurance sales woman, played by choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. Part-screening, part-theater, this solo performance offers a primer on the life insurance industry and its direct connection to slavery; unpacking the ways in which human beings grapple with the inevitable prospect of death and, more importantly, the ways in which lives—especially those of people of color—are monetized.

Wanjiru Kamuyu, native Kenyan based in Paris, France, is associate artist with Theater L’Onde (Vélizy, France) and a Live Feed artist with New York Live Arts (USA). Her career began with its genesis in New York City. As a performer, she has worked with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Bill T. Jones, Molissa Fenley, Anita Gonzales, Okwui Okpokwasili, Nathan Trice, Dean Moss, Tania Isaac…and in Europe with choreographers Robyn Orlin, Emmanuel Eggermont, Nathalie Pubellier, Irène Tassembedo, Bartabas, Stefanie Batten Bland, director/writer Françoise Dô, visual artist Jean-Paul Goude and TV director Christian Faure. Alongside Kamuyu has performed in industrials, television and Broadway musicals, The Lion King (Paris) and FELA ! (UK and Equity European and US tours). Kamuyu founded dance company, WKcollective, which is associate company with creative production agency camin aktion (Montpellier, France). Her choreographic projects include tours in the US, Africa, Asia and Europe. Commissions include musical À la recherché de Joséphine, director Jérôme Savary (Paris and International tours); Love is in the hair, director Jean François Auguste (France tour); Maître Harold, director Hassan Kassi Kouyate (Paris); US esteemed dance departments (Mills College, University of Michigan, Wayne State University, Stephens College); artistic consulting/outside eye for choreographer Bintou Dembele’s ZH; choreographer assistant to Nathan Trice’s Their speech is silver, Their silence is gold; storyteller Nathalie La Boucher’s La Chevauchée du Gange;) and community engagement projects with New WORLD Theater (USA), choreographer Eun-mi Ahn’s project 1:59 (Festival Paris Quartier d’Été), Euroculture and the National Center for Dance project Assemblé (France). Funding from ASAP partially supported the creation of Fragmented Shadows, an exploration of the body as a site of liberation through dance and imagery.

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. Their work has been exhibited at venues such as documenta15, The Kitchen, White Columns, and at film festivals internationally. Previously, they have been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Queer|Art, and the Global Fund for Women. In 2024, they will be in residence at ISCP as well as Headlands Center for the Arts. They have participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Red Bull Arts Detroit and NLS Kingston in Jamaica, among others. They have guest lectured at Emory University, Rutgers University, and the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. Gopee was a Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2024. They hold an MFA from UCLA with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studio and a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency and research platform titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. Support from ASAP will support the development of a new, untitled film and installation to be completed in 2025.

Psychic Wormhole (Stacy Lynn Smith + Alex Romania) is a creative research platform and production company making live multidisciplinary performance work and experimental film. The duo excavates trauma and somatic memory as a means to reclaim embodiment as autobiographical material is filtered through genres of Horror, Sci-Fi, Afro-futurism and Arthouse Cinema. Recent work includes Face Eaters at The Chocolate Factory Theater, an epic, live, multimedia performance work processing Romania's family experiences with grief, mental illness and suicide. With the generous support of Sweat Variant, Psychic Wormhole is working towards completing their debut film, RECKONING, a visceral abstract memoir which grapples with Smith's experiences of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and Complex-PTSD.

Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, Black mixed-race performing artist and improviser, choreographer, director and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water (by and for those affected by childhood sexual abuse). Dedicated to collaboration, Smith creates, devises, improvises and performs across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists including: DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Thaddeus O’Neil, Rakia Seaborn, Vangeline Theater (2008-2017), Michael Freeman, Saints of an Unnamed Country, Salome Asega, GENG, Donna Costello, Bradley Bailey, Michele Beck, Jasmine Hearn, mayfield brooks, Josephine Decker and more. Most recently, Smith has worked with Kathy Westwater, Jill Sigman, Emily Johnson, Joan Jonas, Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili as well as working on their own artistic projects and as one half of the creative duo, Psychic Wormhole (with Alex Romania). Smith's work has been presented at CAVE, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Socrates Sculpture Park, Rosekill, Glasshouse, 92StY, Performance Mix Festival, Snug Harbor Dance Festival, St. Augustine's Church via Abrons Arts Center and more. Smith is a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2024 Djerassi AIR.

Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary filmmaker, performing artist, and improviser, who has held residencies with MacDowell, Djerassi, Movement Research, Old Furnace, Tofte Lake Center, The Center for Performance Research, Chez Bushwick, and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Romania’s recent projects include ‘Face Eaters’ created in collaboration with Stacy Lynn Smith, which premiered at the Chocolate Factory Theater (CF) in May 2024, (co-directorship of) the experimental documentary 'Patch the Sky with Five Colored Stones' conceived by choreographer Daria Faïn, and the collaborative short film 'Mira! Mira! Mira!' with Daniela Fabrizi and the Re Hecho community in the LES. In addition to creating original work which has been presented internationally at spaces such as Grace Exhibition Space, Abrons Arts Center, Encuentro, Casa Viva, UV Estudios, Sub Rosa Space, Romania has performed in various works by Kathy Westwatersince 2013 and has been featured in the work of Simone Forti, Éva Mag, Eddie Peake, Andy de Groat, Catherine Galasso, and danced early on with George Russell and De Facto Dance who extended practices of the improvisational choreographer Richard Bull. Romania has had several video and object designs featured within the works of Antonio Ramos, and has worked in various filmmaking roles with Marin Media Labs, TAAMAS / Sarah Riggs, Trixie Films / Therese Shechter, Christopher “Unpezverde” Nuñez, Martita Abril, and Sarah White-Ayòn. Romania received a B.F.A. from Tisch School of the Arts in 2013.