RESIDENCIES
Culture Mill upholds the artistic fabric of our region through supporting artists near and far:
Murielle Elizéon Awarded Dance/USA Fellowship:
Photo by Anna Maynard
Félicitations, Murielle!
Murielle Elizéon, Culture Mill Co-Director, was awarded a 2025 Dance/USA Fellowship, joining a cohort of 25 recipients as part of the Dance/USA Fellowships to Artist Program. This program honors dance and movement-based artists with sustained practices in art for social change.
“The new cohort of Dance/USA Artist Fellows once again demonstrates the breadth of movement practices that address social change,” said Haowen Wang, Dance/USA Director of Regranting, “We hold deep respect for the radical ways these artists nurture and sustain our communities.”
Selected by a national peer-review panel, each Fellowship includes a $31,000 grant that may be used at the artist’s discretion. The DFA program is made possible with generous support from the Doris Duke Foundation.
One of the few regranting programs available to independent artists with an unrestricted financial award, DFA supports dance and movement-based artists from across the U.S. and its territories who work at the intersection of social and embodied practices. DFA recognizes the wide variety of ways in which artists engage in social transformation through dance, which often do not fit into established models of arts funding. This includes community-building and culture-bearing practices, healing and storytelling practices, activism and representational justice practices, and more.
Photo by Anna Maynard
“The artists recognized through these fellowships remind us that change often begins in creative practice,” said Ashley Ferro-Murray, program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Foundation. “Through their movement work, these artists reimagine how we connect, care and build community, and this program honors that vision by meeting them where they are and supporting the full scope of their creativity.”
Spring 2026 Residencies:
Photo by Roderico Y. Diaz/Iximché Media for Carolina Performing Arts
will be in-residence with Culture Mill creating a new autobiographical, multidisciplinary evening-length performance titled 3731.
3731 is an intimate, multimedia solo performance that turns the stage into sacred ground. This show explores how objects become portals to memory--unearthing stories of devotion, sacrifice, humor, and loss through poetry and song. Layering ritual, storytelling, sound, and projection, the piece asks how we carry our mothers with us, and how rememberance itself can be a radical act.
See 3731 at the Haw River Ballroom February 14+15. Tickets available here.
CJ Suitt (he,him/they,them) is a performance poet, arts educator, and community organizer from Chapel Hill, NC, whose work is rooted in storytelling and social justice. CJ was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Chapel Hill, NC.
CJ co-directed, produced, and starred in a historical reenactment of the 1947 Freedom Rides, performed at many national and local music festivals, including Gnarnia, Shakori Hills and Bonnaroo, and acted in a production of Hands Up: 6 Playwrights, 6 Testaments. His career as an educator has allowed him to work with young people awaiting trial at the Durham Youth Home, older inmates whose voices have been silenced within the Orange County Correctional Facility, and high school and college-aged men pushing to redefine masculinity in their schools and communities. Additionally, he has collaborated with organizations such as Transplanting Traditions, Benevolence Farm, and Growing Change on the intersection of storytelling and food justice.
He is committed to speaking truth to power and aims to be a bridge for communities who can't always see themselves in each other.
For more, visit www.suittsyouwrite.com
Photo courtesy of Carolina Performing Arts
Photo courtesy of R. Stein Wexler
R. Stein Wexler
will be in-residence with Culture Mill this spring. The Durham-based, self-taught artist trained as an urban planner works from a research-based practice spanning civic art, social practice, and multimedia installation.
During her three month residency, she has been exploring dominant notions of time, including productivity and efficiency, while developing a new series rooted in humor and the familiar form of the calendar.
As her residency concludes in May, stay tuned for opportunities to experience this evolving body of work!
R Stein Wexler (she/her) is a public- and installation-artist trained as an urban planner.
Her projects are research-based, community-engaged, and critical of dominant structures. She creates place-based work in collaboration with local communities to tell hi/stories. Shaped by empathy, listening, and connection, her work results in gatherings, process documentation, immersive and interactive installations, workshops, exhibitions, and policy change. Her work often offers numerous points of entry, be it through sensory experiences, information-sharing, participation in the creation process, or community- and connection-building. The journey to the end of her work is just as important as the final product which often results in social as well as physical infrastructures.
Stein’s art has been supported by Raleigh Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Berlin Senate for Culture and Social Cohesion, Mitte Museum, Kultur Mitte, CEC ArtsLink, as well as the Duke-Durham Partnership and the Mellon and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundations, among others. Stein was an artist in residence at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany and a German Chancellor’s Fellow at Berlin’s Center for Art and Urbanistics (ZK/U). Stein has taught public art at the Hayti Heritage Center and has guest lectured at colleges and universities.
Stein holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where she received the Parker Fellowship and served as the co-editor in chief of the Carolina Planning Journal. Stein holds a BA with honors in English from University of California, Berkeley. www.rsteinwexler.com
Photo (c) Lauren Nichols, 2025
Photo courtesy of Kamara Thomas
Kamara Thomas
will be in-residence with Culture Mill this spring. The Durham-based songspeller and storyteller reports from the lands she has been working on:
“Spending time in the wilds of Hyde County— salt marshes and unsullied beaches have been nourishing me. I’ve been going back to basics: breath, voice, land. I’m exploring how the non-human world, especially the Avianr kingdom, communicates, in search of a musical language derived from the Earth’s rhythms.”
This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Kamara Thomas (she/her) is a Durham, NC-based songspeller, ritualist, and multidisciplinary storyteller working at the intersection of social practice, music, theater and film. In pursuit of surprising storytelling forms and the re/invention of collective mythologies, Kamara's site-specific performances activate galleries, stages, and public spaces and are multi-faceted– weaving together music/theatre performance, land-based ritual, communal artmaking and oral history, as well as documentary, narrative, and experimental film.
A seasoned performer in rock and country music, Kamara is also a vocal experimentalist who approaches and teaches singing as an embodiment practice—a portal between the personal and collective, the visible and invisible. Her ritual practice emphasizes stillness, deep listening, and an intentional relationship with the land and non-human presence.
As a recent Princeton Arts Fellow and lecturer, Kamara taught songwriting and multidisciplinary storytelling and presented her storyworks Xulgaria and Tularosa: An American Dreamtime, which received a 2022 MAPFund grant. She also spearheads Country Soul Songbook, a curation/production team rooted in the mission to amplify and archive BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices in American roots music and culture.
Photo by Derrick Beasley
Fall 2025 Residencies:
Photo by Anna Maynard
Clint Lutes
will be in-residence with Culture Mill this fall to work with Murielle Elizéon, Annie Dwyer, collaborators, and community to develop the forthcoming performance Anatomy of Care.
Clint, a long-time collaborator of Culture Mill, is the artistic director of Danse Pour Parkinson’s (DaPoPa) in Paris. DaPoPa strives to use artstic and physical practices as a medium to open verbal and nonverbal dialogue around community, research, and community disorder, creating explorations and exchanges based on genrosity, curiosity, and intention to help inform physical social, cognitive, and identity development.
Following the completion of his BFA in Dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Clint performed with the French choreographer Yann Lheureux as well as the Korean choreographer Eun Me Ahn. From 2003-2010, Clint was founder and co-director of the LUCKY TRIMMER platform in Berlin.
His choreography, often interactive and created to be adaptable to various spaces, is as inspired by human fragility as it is by joy and laughter. His choreography has been presented around Europe, in the USA and in Asia. He has created performances with professionals as well as non-professionals in dance studios, psychological care facilities, prisons, hospitals, elderly care homes and elsewhere.
Beginning in 2012, he began working more intently on research and creative projects with non-professionals using improvisation methods, in particular with people living with movement disorders. In 2018 he created the company DaPoPa, collaborating with other artists who are also interested in inclusive dance practices.
Clint joined the Troupe de l’Imaginaire at the Théâtre de la Ville de Paris in 2020. He is associated artist of the European project Dance Well at La Briqueterie CDCN since 2022.
As a pedagogue, he has taught for the Akram Khan Company, Australian Dance Theater, Centre National de la Danse, Festival ImPulsTanz, CCN de Grenoble and Rillieux-la-Pape, Tanzhaus Zurich, and the universities Cal St. Fullerton, NYU and the Univ. of South Florida. www.clintlutes.com
Photo by courtesy of Clint Lutes
Culture Mill at Tipperary Dance Festival
Photo by Pascal Boudet
Murielle Elizéon will return to Tipperary Dance Festival in Ireland in September-October 2025. While at the festival, Murielle will teach a masterclass as part of SPLASH Lab sharing embodied tools to practice presence in dance performance. The class will use somatics, movement improvisations, and scores to inhabit and trust more fully the moment-to-moment act of being witnessed that we call perform-ing.