"I view our bodies as everything: our bodies are culture, history, present and future, all at once. Out of respect for and trust in our bodies and collective memories, I give equal weight to story and image, to movement and stillness, to what I imagine and to what I do not know."
Emily Johnson,
Choreographer/Director
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based in Lenapehoking / New York City. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment — interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States and Australia. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. She choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018. Her new work Being Future Being, premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022.
Emily’s writing has been published and commissioned by The Open Society University Network’s Center for Human Rights and the Arts, ArtsLink Australia, unMagazine, Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack.
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020, and a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues. She was a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding, was a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and serves as a working consortium member for First Nations Performing Arts.
Catalyst Staff
IV Castellanos, Interkinnector & Production Manager
IV Castellanos is a Queer Trans* Bolivian-Indige/American, and an abstract performance artist and sculptor who creates solo, collaborative, and group-task vignette performances. They construct/deconstruct all their own objects in their performances, and/or in shared process and practice with their collaborators. In addition, they have a studio practice and create stand alone sculptures not meant to be activated by performances.
Korina Emmerich, Exhibitions Steward and Materials Caretaker
Artist and designer Korina Emmerich founded the slow fashion brand EMME Studio in 2015. Her colorful work celebrates her patrilineal Indigenous heritage from The Puyallup tribe while aligning art and design with education. With a strong focus on social and climate justice, Emmerich's artwork strives to expose and dismantle systems of oppression in the fashion industry and challenge colonial ways of thinking.
She has recently co-founded the new atelier, gallery, showroom, and community space Relative Arts NYC. Located in the East Village. The space celebrates sustainable and subversive indigenous art and fashion.
Her work has been featured in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moma PS1, The Denver Art Museum, Vogue, Elle, Instyle, New York Magazine, and more notable publications. She has presented her collections at Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week, Indigenous Fashion and Arts, Santa Fe Indian Market's Couture Runway Show, and New York Fashion Week.
Anangookwe Wolf, Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, Fort Peck Assiniboine & Dakota Descent, Administrative Steward
Anangookwe is a visual artist, poet, and Administrative Steward for Emily Johnson/ Catalyst. They utilize forms of craft and storytelling to interweave familial narratives concerning cultural inheritance and present-day afflictions.
Anangookwe is the recipient of residencies, grants, and awards through Vermont Studio Center, Mas House, First Peoples Fund, and Alaska State Council on the Arts. In 2023, they received an honorable mention for the James Welch Poetry Prize and were a 2019 SITE Santa Fe Scholar. Anangookwe is now based in Manahatta in Lenapehoking where they are excited to immerse themselves in the arts and collaborate on urban food forestry and Indigenous agriculture projects.
George Lugg, Turtle-Island settler, ally-in-service, and creative producer
George Lugg is a producer, curator, and consultant who has been working in the field of contemporary dance and performance for more than 30 years. He serves on the faculty of the California Institute of Arts School of Theater, where he is also consulting producer for CalArts’ Center for New Performance. He works as an independent producer for artists Emily Johnson / Catalyst and Faye Driscoll. Current touring projects include Johnson’s Being Future Being, Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Space, Daniel Alexander Jones’ Altar no. 1, Nataki Garrett and Andrea LeBlanc’s The Carolyn Bryant Project, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s El Camino Donde Nosotros Lloramosm (The Road Where We Weep), among others. He has served twice as Lead Program Consultant in the Performing Arts for the Creative Capital Foundation (2012, 2020), was a Hub Site Representative for the National Dance Project, and on the U.S. curatorial team for the National Performance Network’s Performing Arts Asia, and Performing Americas Projects. He currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors for Dance Camera West.
River Whittle, Branch of Knowledge Community Organizer
River Whittle is a two-spirit Caddo, Lenape, and white artist, youth mentor, and community organizer. Whittle aims to support Indigenous life, care, and revitalization with her work. She is learning to become a shell worker, metal worker, and potter, and is an experienced photographer.
Branch of Scholarship
Karyn Recollet, Urban Cree scholar of a pedagogy of care
Joseph M. Pierce, ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ Cherokee Nation citizen, writer, curator, lines on fingers, sun circles waiting, water slipping through
Camille Usher, Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene writer, administrator, and artist using running to feel kinship of spatialities
Dylan Robinson, xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) writer and curator, tl'épstexw tel sqwálewel (making deep or low my thought-feelings / trying to be patient)
Branch of Making
Raven Chacon, Diné, Composer
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Korina Emmerich, Garment Design
Korina Emmerich has built her Brooklyn-based brand, EMME Studio, on the backbone of Expression, Art and Culture, where items are made-to-order in their studio located on occupied Canarsee territories. She is leading the charge to embrace art and design as one, and weaving it into her brand story. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, her colorful work is known to reflect her patrilineal Indigenous heritage from The Coast Salish Territory, Puyallup tribe. Items are made from upcycled, recycled, and all-natural materials giving respect to the life cycle of a garment from creation to biodegradation. With a strong focus on social and climate justice while speaking out about industry responsibility and accountability: Emmerich works actively to expose and dismantle systems of oppression and challenge colonial ways of thinking. www.emmestudios.com
Ashley Pierre-Louis, Performer
Ashley Pierre-Louis is a Miami native. With education from New World School of the Arts and later from Florida State University, Pierre-Louis began to discover her passion for movement, the human form, and arts administration. Ashley is currently artistic administrative assistant for Shamel Pitts’ multidisciplinary performance collective TRIBE. Pierre-Louis has premiered the play Thoughts of a Colored Man by playwright Keenan Scott II and director Steve Broadnax III at Syracuse Stage and Baltimore Center Stage. She has performed for the premiere of Donna Uchizono’s work March Under an Empty reign at The Joyce: NY Quadrille Festival, and has also been apart of Alvin Ailey’s inaugural Choreography Unlocked Festival under the direction of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Urban Bush Women, and Robert Battle. Ashley has attended the School at Jacob’s Pillow, San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, as well as Gaga intensives in Tel Aviv and New York.
Jasmine Shorty, Performer
Jasmine Shorty is a dancer and visual artist from, and based in, New Mexico. She is a member of the Navajo Nation. She was a performer and company member of Meow Wolf, Santa Fe’s celebrated immersive and interactive arts collective, from 2019–20. In 2018, she performed as a movement soloist in the Santa Fe Opera’s production of Doctor Atomic, choreographed by Emily Johnson and directed by Peter Sellars.
Joseph Silovsky, Scenic Design
Joseph Silovsky / Silovsky Studios has been constructing props, sets, and mechanical devices for the downtown performance art world since it was founded in 2015. They have worked with a variety of groups, including Catalyst Dance, Palissimo, Radiohole, The Wooster Group, AIM, Richard Maxwell, The Builders Association, and others. Latest projects include the set for AIM’s Mozart Project, the motorized ring/ disc sculpture for Palissimo’s LUX PHANTASMATIS, the set for the Wooster Group’s The Mother, and the secret sound thankyous inside the donation cowboy boot for Gideon Irving’s Cowboy Tour.
Stacy Lynn Smith, Performer
Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, mixed race/Black dance/performance artist with an extensive background in butoh, improvisational forms and experimental theater, creating work through a unique lens of “Other”. Smith was recently awarded a Djerassi Residency to further develop their abstract memoir, RECKONING, a film being made in collaboration with Alex Romania. Smith enjoys collaborating as performer/improviser, director and choreographer across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists including: DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Saints of an Unnamed Country, Thaddeus O’Neil, Josephine Decker, Jill Sigman/thinkdance, Kathy Westwater and Jasmine Hearn. Member of artist/activist cohort, Body Politic. Principal butoh dancer with Vangeline Theater from 2008-2017. Main muse/collaborator of writer/director Michael Freeman from 2010-2016. Selected by Eva Yaa Asantewaa as part of the curatorial board for Black Womxn Summit. Smith is a Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water, an organization working to heal those affected by childhood sexual abuse.
Maggie Thompson, Fond du Lac Ojibwe, Textile Artist and Designer
Maggie Thompson was born and raised in Minneapolis, MN. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2013. As a textile artist and designer she derives her inspiration from the history of her Ojibwe heritage, exploring family history as well as themes and subject matter of the broader Native American experience. Thompson’s work calls attention to its materiality pushing the viewer’s traditional understanding of textiles. She explores materials in her work by incorporating multimedia elements such as photographs, beer caps and 3D-printed objects. In addition to her fine arts practice, Thompson runs a knitwear business known as Makwa Studio and is also an emerging curator of contemporary Native art, and has worked on curating special exhibits for Two Rivers Gallery, the McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota Museum of American Art.
Sugar Vendil, Performer
Sugar Vendil is a composer, pianist, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn. She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into performances that integrates sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She writes and performs her own solo music for piano and electronics and has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is a proud second generation Filipinx American. Vendil was awarded a 2021 MAPFund grant to support Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia. Recent commissions include Chamber Music America to write a new work for her ensemble, The Nouveau Classical Project, which she founded in 2008; ETHEL’s Homebaked 2019 for Unsacred Geometry, and ACF | Create to write for Box Not Found.
Header photo by Maria Baranova