When We were Queens… Artists, Collaborators, and Contributors:
Murielle Elizéon is a French choreographer, performer, teaching artist, and an embodied-community-conjurer-in-training. She was born and raised in an Italo-Africano-Indian French family in a project housing neighborhood in Nice, South of France. Informed by her own lived experience, Murielle understood from an early age the transformative power of embodied listening and movement and dance practices to incite radical imagination and resilience. She uses her unique experience of otherness as a biracial immigrant artist to build somatic experiences for collaborators, communities, and audiences. Murielle invites participants to inhabit the spaces between each other and create the conditions to shift culture through being, witnessing, and being witnessed, through moving and being moved. She studied contemporary dance, pedagogy, yoga, somatics, and Eastern internal arts in Paris, France. Murielle has lived, performed, and toured in France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and the US with various choreographers and directors such as Palle Granhoj, Bob Wilson, Thomas Lebrun, and Joachim Schlomer, and has shared her performances with institutions and festivals in Finland, Switzerland, France, Denmark, and the US.
In 2014, Murielle moved to the US and co-founded Culture Mill, a Performing Arts Laboratory in Saxapahaw, NC, along with partner Tommy Noonan.
Culture Mill serves as both a vehicle to support the creation of artistic works, as well as a space in which to enrich and develop a creative ecosystem of experimental embodied art in rural North Carolina. Culture Mill’s mission is to foster a creative and inclusive ecosystem through artist residencies, community-centered initiatives, and groundbreaking immersive artworks from local, national, and international artists. Stationed in Saxapahaw, NC, Culture Mill advances embodied interdisciplinary arts, cultivates community, and expands access to arts experiences. Reaching beyond rural Alamance County, the organization's work is shared across the greater Triangle/Triad region of North Carolina. Culture Mill also engages in national and international collaborations through commissions, residencies, workshops, hosting artists from abroad, and touring Culture Mill works. Culture Mill has won regional awards and has been commissioned by the NC Museum of Art, American Dance Festival, Carolina Performing Arts, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and NC State LIVE. At the intersection of a range of projects is sustained communal practices that center the body and claim the transformational power of art and storytelling.
Visit www.culturemill.org
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Shana Tucker: Cellist. Singer-Songwriter. Arts Advocate. Teaching Artist. Collaborator. Cultural Conduit. In each role, Shana Tucker is a builder-of-connections, whether she’s associating STEM concepts with backbeats or engaging a packed house through candid song-storytelling in performance. Shana's unique genre of ChamberSoul™ weaves jazz, roots, folk, acoustic pop, and a touch of R&B into melodies that echo in your head for days. Of her work, Shana says, “I’m intrinsically drawn to acoustic instruments because of their resonance, warmth, and intimacy. ChamberSoul brings the musicians and their audience close, and makes the music tangible, no matter how large or small the room is."
A Long Island, NY native, Shana studied cello at Howard University in Washington, DC, where she took her first dive into improvisational performance and honed her singer-songwriting skills. She later received her degree in Violoncello Performance from CUNY-Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, where she studied with master cellist Marion Feldman. Shortly after the release of her debut CD, SHiNE in 2011, Cirque du Soleil recruiters heard an NPR interview with Shana about her ChamberSoul songwriting and performance style, they invited her to be cellist/vocalist for their show, KÀ in Las Vegas, where she performed for five years before returning to North Carolina.
A sought-after collaborator, Shana performs and records with legendary jazz saxophonist/composer Bennie Maupin, jazz flutist/composer Nicole Mitchell, Grammy-nominated NuSoul collective The Foreign Exchange and countless others. Recent North Carolina collaborations include performing a cello/vocal duet with soprano Andrea Edith Moore for Singing on the Land, a project presented by the NC Department of Cultural Resources and Come Hear NC that coordinates musicians to perform acoustically at historic sites across the state; They Are All, an exploration of living with Parkinson’s Disease, presented at American Dance Festival 2019 with Culture Mill choreographers Murielle Elizeon and Tommy Noonan; Continuing To Tell, a multidisciplinary public-space performance presented by Proxemic Media that highlights the history of Civil Rights in Durham, NC; and Kamara Thomas' Country Soul Songbook series, also featuring Rissi Palmer, Kym Register and Phil Cook.
Shana was recently named the first-ever Artist in Residence at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts in Asheville, NC for their 2019-2020 concert season. In Spring 2018, Shana was Resident Teaching Artist at Springhouse Community School in Floyd, VA, where she co-presented Courageous Conversations, a semester-long course about racism, intersectionality and how to be an authentic, effective ally with Jenny Finn, Head of School.
A recipient of several grants, Shana was awarded a professional development grant in 2019-20 from United Arts of Raleigh and Wake County, and has received two Nevada Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Artist Fellowship for her exemplary work as a Performing Artist. Additionally, Shana has served on review panels and advisory committees for arts organizations across the country, including United Arts Council (Raleigh, NC), South Arts (Atlanta, GA), Durham Arts Council (Durham, NC) Nevada Arts Council (Carson City, NV), and NCPC ArtsMarket (Durham, NC).
Shana is a board member for Blair Publisher (formerly Carolina Wren Press), a North Carolina-based small-press organization that publishes diverse minority writers of quality fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and children's literature; NCPC - North Carolina Presenters Consortium, a professional organization of artists, agents and presenters; and Floyd Creative Studios in Floyd, VA. Shana also serves on the advisory board for the Washington Women in Jazz Festival, an annual event in Washington, DC that celebrates and promotes women jazz artists through concerts, jam sessions, lectures, panel discussions, masterclasses and a young artist competition.
A front-line advocate for arts education, Shana is an accomplished teaching artist, with over 20 years’ experience with community engagement, workshops, lesson planning and artist residency facilitation. Working with students from Pre-K through college and lifelong learners, Shana is currently an Artist Fellow with A+ Schools of North Carolina, a teaching artist with United Arts Council of Raleigh/Wake County and Durham Arts Council, and has been a teaching artist with Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts since 2015.
Sarah Marguier is an independent French artist, photographer and researcher currently based in the Pacific Northwest while creating and presenting work internationally.
Her work centers around the expressions of the moving body and the ever-evolving stories and encounters that emerge from it. Polyamorous in art, she works within a hybrid artistic approach, which she describes as an archipelago: a myriad of permeable and creative ecosystems that nourish and inform each medium. She is working as a photographer, designer, and artistic collaborator on many creative processes.
She collaborates with movement and the image as a sensitive and sensible material, aiming to do so from a place of emotional vulnerability and creating space(s) to dive into the presences around her, exploring the layered and intermediates territories that arise during the creative processes. These zones of permeability, transcendence, and poesy. Particularly, she is interested in the creative process in itself as a commitment of the body and mind and as the center to which she grounds her artistic approach: a practice of listening to the moment(s) in space and time.
Sarah is the recipient of the CT+CR Program Award and the Arché Award and she has received support from the Regional Culture and Council, Oregon Arts Commission, OFAJ, Portland Emerging Art Leaders, to name a few. Her work has been presented, in residency and supported by: Disjecta (Light Conversation Exhibition), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (TBA Press Corps Photographer), Caldera Residency CT+CR Colloquium (USA), Culture Mill (USA), and Arte Ginestrelle Studio (Italy), among others.
In 2016, she went on tour with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for The River Tour ‘16 as part of the production team. They toured all over Europe, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand in a whirlwind of a year.
Iximché Media: Iximché is a word in Maya Kaqchikel meaning “corn plant”— a plant that unites indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. It is also the name of the sacred site of and ancient capital of the Maya Kaqchikel people. For founder Rode Díaz, Iximché is also a place of ancestors, the origin of generations of family, and his father’s birthplace. Iximché represents sacred elements of food, home and ancestors; it represents the stories that cultivate community. Rode and his partner Emily Rhyne tell stories of Latin America and the US through photojournalism and documentary filmmaking.
The Ngozi Design Group, is the parent company of Ngozi Design Collective, Ngozi Custom Studio and Talking Drum Marketing. Andrea and Leon Carter are owners/partners creating jewelry and clothing and selling online and in small markets and boutiques. The company was launched in Alpharetta, Georgia in 2009 and moved to Durham, North Carolina shortly thereafter. We continued selling in small markets while learning how to run a small boutique. In 2015 we had the opportunity to open our own boutique and we were able to grow a robust custom clothing business, create an in-store consignment shop and collaborate with over 100 artists and designers consigning their hand made products. We were also able to rent space, host receptions and trunk shows, readings and other community events. The Ngozi Design Collective closed its doors in 2019 and continued doing business online with a variety of artists, designers and sewists. Later that same year Ngozi joined the Artists of Golden Belt and created and showcased their first novelty collection named ONI.
Katie B (Bonehead Art), is a painter and creator, currently in the mist of an evolutionary life transition. She paints for freedom, rest and wants to support authenticity. No matter what.
Raven Hughes: Hey, I'm Raven Hughes. Most of the time I wander around in the woods. On occasion I emerge to make various kinds of art or perform.
Matt Bell is a sound designer and audio engineer based in Cary, North Carolina. Tasked with creating the quadraphonic sound system for this production, Matt not only designed the immersive audio setup but also handled the audio mixing. His goal is to offer the audience a completely immersive experience, where every sound contributes to the overall atmosphere. In addition to his work on this production, Matt is also a composer, electric violinist, singer, and songwriter, adding a diverse musical touch to his creative endeavors.
Caitlyn Swett is a dance-maker, sound artist, arts administrator, and young adult cancer survivor from Black Mountain, NC. Her work has meandered throughout North Carolina and led her to co-found Triptych Collective (Charlotte), co-produce On Site/In Sight Dance Festival (Winston-Salem), perform in electropoetry band Streak of Tigers (Durham), and collaborate with the improvisational noise/dance project Paideia (NC/NY/LA). Caitlyn has also performed with choreographers across the state. Caitlyn's artistic collaboration with Culture Mill has developed iterative soundscapes that emerge from deep study, investigation, conversations, and embodied practice and are responsive to and informed by stories. She also supports Culture Mill full-time as their Management and Development Director. Previously she served in administrative positions at the American Dance Festival (Durham), Helen Simoneau Danse (Winston-Salem), and the Neighborhood Theatre (Charlotte).
Tommy Noonan is a director, choreographer, writer, performer, and organizer based in Saxapahaw, NC. His trans-disciplinary performances have been presented extensively throughout the US, Germany, France, Portugal, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Norway, and Mexico. His work engages rich and complex dynamics of power, belonging, and ambivalence that arise in the situation of performance itself. Drawing on a range of practices such as contemporary dance, theater, sound installation, somatics, and community facilitation, Tommy’s work circles around the felt sense of an embodied encounter in a specific place and the questions about commonality and difference that result. Tommy has toured smaller creations, his research and work in public space performance have appeared in the Guidebook of Alternative Nows, and his writings on collectivity and organizing have appeared in Fries Theater Journal (Austria), Revisita Obscena (Portugal), and The Performance Journal (NYC).
Myra Vincenza Scibetta Weise created Proxemic Media in 2016 to produce and collaborate on art projects that place human experience, storytelling and social equity at the center of its work. Whether a public art installation, short film production or live performance, each production seeks to thoughtfully engage with the subject matter as well as the community in which the work is created and presented. Through this outlet, Weise harnesses both her professional dance training as well as more than a dozen years’ experience working in arts management worldwide in dance, music and visual art. Past work includes positions and projects with the American Dance Festival, Black on Black Project, Carolina Performing Arts, Carolina Theatre Durham, Culture Mill, Duke University’s Theater Operations, Empower Dance Foundation, KT Collective, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Pilobolus Inc, Renay Aumiller Dances, Shana Tucker, Semmel Concerts (Germany) and ShaLeigh Dance Works among others.
Graham Dickey: (he/him) is an artist and active community member in Saxapahaw, NC. He contributes his talents to The Collection band, serving as both a Horn Player and Tour Manager on the road. Back home, he works as a Lighting Designer and Barista at The Haw River Ballroom.
