"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.
Kevin Holden, Accountant
Kevin is an artist, composer, and accountant for Emily Johnson and Catalyst. They are based on the traditional lands of the Clackamas, Cowlitz, the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde, and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.
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 originally from Miami, FL. She attended New World School of the Arts and later Florida State University, where she graduated with a BFA in dance. She is currently a dance artist and creator freelancing and exploring choreography in New York City. When making, she asks herself and audiences to imagine what our physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us is, and how we can share them collectively, in order to create a sense of freedom in the mind and body. She currently performs with Shamel Pitts’ multidisciplinary performance collective TRIBE, Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance, and Edisa Weeks’ DELIRIOUS Dances. She is also the Dream Partner & Program Manager for Florida State University’s Arts in NYC program, as well as the Artist Services Associate for Performance Space New York (PS 122). She has worked as the dramaturg for Shamel Pitts | TRIBE's work Touch of RED & the Associate Choreographer for the play Help (2022) by acclaimed poet and playwright Claudia Rankine. She was named one of Gallim’s 2021 Moving Women spring artist-in-residence & received a professional apprenticeship for the Dance Division at the Juilliard School (2020).
Brandi Norton, Performer
Brandi Norton (Iñupiaq) is a curator and dancer based in Rhinebeck, New York. She currently works as curator of public programs at Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies. She holds a BFA in dance from the Juilliard School, and an M.S.Ed in early childhood education from Bank Street Graduate School. She works to bring Indigenous artists, educators and thought leaders to Bard College for public facing events. Before joining the Center for Indigenous Studies, she co-founded the dance company OtherShore, and was a dancer in the Trisha Brown Dance Company for nine seasons. Norton also had the privilege of being an elementary school teacher in New York City.
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, Black multiracial performing artist, choreographer, director and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water (by and for those affected by childhood sexual abuse) whose practice synthesizes various lineages of improvisational forms, somatics, experimental theater and butoh. Dedicated to collaboration, Smith creates, devises, improvises and performs across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists: 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, Jill Sigman, Kathy Westwater, Josephine Decker, Emily Johnson, Peter Born, Okwui Okpokwasili and more. Smith's work has been presented at Movement Research at the Judson Church, Socrates Sculpture Park, 92StY, Performance Mix Festival, Snug Harbor Dance Festival, CAVE, St. Augustine's Church via Abrons Arts Center, Rosekill, Glasshouse and more.
As Psychic Wormhole (with Alex Romania), Smith is creating their abstract memoir, RECKONING, the duo's first feature film. Smith is a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and 2024 Djerassi AIR.
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 (she/they) is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist who is forging new creative pathways as a second generation Filipinx American and future ancestor. She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into making music and performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner and toddler, who she hopes will pursue dance and volleyball but will not force him/them.
Vendil’s work germinates from a kinesthetic and improvisatory approach rooted in lived experiences. Her sense of physicality and artistic autonomy is evident in her work, whether it is music, performance, or visual scores.
Vendil was awarded a 2022 NPN Creation Fund grant and 2021 MAP Fund grant to support Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia, which is being co-commissioned by Living Arts Tulsa, High Concept Labs, and National Sawdust. Antonym is a finalist for NEFA’s NTP Creation and Touring Fund.
Commissions include music for 3.1 Phillip Lim’s F/W 2024 show, Simple Tasks 2 on Jennifer Koh’s Grammy-award winning album Alone Together; a Chamber Music America commission to write for The Nouveau Classical Project; ETHEL’s Homebaked 2019, and ACF | Create. She scored films by Jih-E Peng’s May We Know Our Own Strength (2021) and GATHER (2023), both art films centered on works by visual artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, and The Rite of Spring (2024), written and directed by Nick Nocera. In early 2024, her visual scores were part of the National Arts Club’s 2020 Fellows group exhibition, Light, Line, and Sound. She showed two ink-on-paper scores, and trapunto etude (2024), a beaded and embroidered canvas score inspired by the art of Pacita Abad.
Vendil loves dancing and collaborating with other makers. She is part of choreographer Emily Johnson/CATALYST’s Being Future Being and was a musical collaborator with treya lam for Marie Lloyd Paspe and Almasphere’s bumalik. Vendil composed the music for Phil Chan’s Ballet des Porcelaines in 2021, and premiered composer-saxophonist Darius Jones’ LawNOrder at The Stone and Being Caged in ICE at Roulette in 2018. This year, she is dancing in Adrienne Westwood’s [ ]. Her album, May We Know Our Own Strength, is out on Gold Bolus Recordings.
Vendil is an advocate of the oxford comma, is obsessed with her (late) cat Coco, and has an excellent memory.
Header photo by Maria Baranova