Dance Residencies

Dance Residencies at the Arts Center at Governors Island

LMCC’s Dance Residency is a nomination-based program that provides artists with dedicated time, space, and resources at a critical stage between a project commission and full-scale production, while the work itself is still being developed. This year’s artists were nominated by a network of New York City presenting and producing organizations, including Danspace Project, Baryshnikov Arts Center, HERE Arts Center, New Georges, Pomegranate Arts, and Works & Process.

These three-week long residencies provide artists with dedicated time and space to experiment, rehearse, and dive deeply into their creative process. In addition, each artist receives a $6,000 grant to support the development of their work.

At LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island, artists have a distinct environment to experiment, rehearse, take risks, and advance their work. The residency also creates opportunities to share that process through informal works-in-progress, open rehearsals, and studio showings, inviting the public into the development of new work and creating space for learning, dialogue, and community around dance.

The Dance Residency program is made possible with generous support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, with grant support provided by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

2026-2027

Artists-in-Residence

Nikki Calonge

Nikki Calonge is an educator and artist. Past credits include performing in the Tony-award winning “Life of Pi” on Broadway, the Obie-award winning “Psychic Self Defense” at HERE Arts Center, “Lincoln in the Bardo” at The Metropolitan Opera, and “Clown Show” by Geoff Sobelle. Her work has been developed by Object Movement Puppetry Festival and in the New Georges Audrey Residency. Nikki teaches movement at Playwrights Horizons Theater School at NYU Tisch. B.F.A. from NYU Tisch; M.S. from Pratt Institute in Dance/Movement Therapy.

Sean Donovan

Sean Donovan is an actor, dancer, writer, choreographer, and director. He creates theater and dance performances that challenge the boundaries and intersections of both mediums. His most recent work, Cabin, premiered in 2019 at The Bushwick Starr (NYC) to critical acclaim. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called it “darkly lyrical and exquisitely rendered.” Other works include The Reception at HERE Arts (NYC), and 18 1/2 Minutes at JACK (NYC), both in collaboration with Sebastián Calderón Bentin. His work has also been presented in The Under the Radar Festival (NYC), CUNY’s Prelude Festival (NYC), Incubator Arts Project (NYC), FAE Festival in Panama, Stanford University (CA), New York University (NYC), and others. Beyond his own work he has choreographed works for acclaimed theater companies, The Talking Band, The Civilians, Taylor Mac, and others.

He is currently on David Byrne’s Who is The Sky World Tour as a singer and dancer. As a performer, Sean won a 2022 Lortel Award for his performance in Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. He’s worked with David Byrne, Taylor Mac, Jason Robert Brown, Lee Sunday Evans, Tina Satter, Heather Christian, Faye Driscoll, Miguel Gutierrez, Jane Comfort, The Builders Association, Witness Relocation, and many others. Recent theater and dance credits: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (The Goodman), Bark of Millions (BAM and World Tour), The Trees (Playwrights Horizons), Elements of OZ (Skirball Center), Thank You for Coming (BAM and World Tour).

In 2018 he co-wrote Morning Chardonnay, a new web series with Hannah Heller. Other film and television credits include Law and Order: Organized Crime, Feast of the Epiphany directed by Oscar winning director Jeff Reichert, Laurence, and others. He has also danced in multiple music videos.

He received his BFA in Theatre from New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing. He has performed internationally in over 35 countries worldwide and has also performed at theaters and venues throughout the U.S. He currently teaches movement and choreography at NYU. seanpdonovan.com

Marie Lloyd Paspe

Marie Lloyd Paspe is a Filipina‑American choreographer, dancer, singer, and research artist merging ancestral memory and futurity in building worlds. The daughter of parents from Batangas and Iloilo, Marie’s family migrated from Singapore, Manila, Toronto, to Boston. She now calls lenapehoking/Brooklyn home. Her interdisciplinary work studies queer resistance and lost stories in our body’s fascia, expansing collaborations in dance, voice, theater, and sacred spaces. Her solo and collaborative work have been presented at CPR, Harlem Stage, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Movement Research@Judson Church, and Joe’s Pub; and internationally at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Umea Jazz Festival (Sweden), and UGNAYAN (Manila). She is a former performer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from 2018-2024, and as a freelancer has worked with inspiring artists Faye Driscoll, BAYE & ASA, YinMei, Ching-I Chang, Sugar Vendil, treya lam, Sirintip, among others. As a performer with BTJ/AZ, the company received a Bessie for Outstanding Choreography for contributions to "Deep Blue Sea." As collaborator, she has worked on BODY^N by Ayoung Kim at Performa Biennial 2025 (Consulting Choreographer, NY). Paspe is a 2026-27 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2026-28 Pioneers Go East Collective NEXT! mentee, and 2026 NEFA National Dance Project Grantee. She has been a NYSCA Grantee, Harlem Stage Fellow, and Asian American Arts Alliance Jadin Wong Fellow.
marielloydpaspe.com

Jie-Hung Connie Shiau

Jie-Hung Connie Shiau is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher based in New York City. Raised in Tainan, Taiwan. Shiau has presented works at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s 43rd virtual season, New Choreographer Project in Taipei, Taiwan, Loyola University, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago summer intensives, SUNY Purchase College, Little Island Dance Festival, Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, Arts On Site, Abrons Arts Center, and Summer For The City at Lincoln Center.

Shiau has worked as a collaborator with an array of companies, including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, AIM by Kyle Abraham, Gallim Dance, Helen Simoneau Danse, MeenMoves, Adam Barruch/Anatomiae Occultii, Kevin Wynn Works, and Obremski/Works. She has performed works by Crystal Pite, Ohad Naharin, Lou Conte, Kyle Abraham, Johan Inger, Twyla Tharp, Brian Brooks, Peter Chu, Robyn Mineko Williams, Sharone Eyal, Fernando Melo, Alejandro Cerrudo, Helen Simoneau, Sameena Mitta, Rena Butler, Spencer Theberge, Jermaine Spivey, Out Innerspace Dance Theatre, Alice Klock, Hanna Kiel, Osnel Delgado, Adam Barruch, Jesse Obremski and the late Kevin Wynn.

In addition, Shiau was a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, and one of the Fall 2025 Residency Artists at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Shiau’s dance film “Facing” was an Official Selection of Dance On Camera, and Official Selection and Best Choreographer of Cyprus Dance Film Festival in 2025. Her dance film Greener Grass was a semi-finalist in the London International Web & Shorts Film Festival in 2021. Shiau was a recipient of Chicago Dancemaker Forum Greenhouse Artist in 2019, Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch” in 2018, Honorable Mention for Jadin Wong Award for Emerging Asian American Dancer in 2014, and Reverb Dance Festival Dancer Award in 2014. More info at https://jiehungconnieshiau.com/

Anh Vo

Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work emerges from the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez's unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evan's speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Julie Tolentino's durational poetics of intimacy, Juliana May's improvisational wizardry, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently an Adjunct Instructor at Cooper Union.

Adia Tamar Whitaker & Àṣẹ Dance Theater

Adia Tamar Whitaker, Artistic Director of Àṣẹ Dance Theater, has performed contemporary dance, vernacular movement, and Afro-Haitian and Haitian dance in the United States and abroad for 24 years, studying, performing, and teaching across Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and eight countries in Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean. She holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University and a BA in Dance from SFSU, and her honors include a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Award in Choreography, a residency at the Kennedy Center, a 2022 Kenneth Rainin Grant, and a 2025 CUNY Dance Initiative Residency at Medgar Evers College.

Works-in-Progress Showings

Picture 4 - THE RECEPTION - photo by Maria Baranova

This Isn't Working
Sean Donovan

November 2, 2026, 7pm-8pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island

This Isn't Working is a surreal pseudo-comedy following a listless, unreliable narrator (Donovan himself) who arrives on stage the night of the performance without a clear sense of why he's there, set in an unspecified future where the idea of a "job" has been rendered obsolete. Across the piece, Donovan moves through memories of forgotten occupations, lumberjack, farmer, office worker, professional mourner, using text, physical embodiment, dance, and song to ask whether an occupation defines a person's value or is simply a brutal necessity. The work features original lyrics by Donovan, music by Matt Ray, and direction by Keenan Tyler Oliphant.

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Toad Mountain
Jie-Hung Connie Shiau

November 14, 2026, 2pm-3pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island

Jie-Hung Connie Shiau's Toad Mountain draws on Taiwanese folklore to explore the hidden interior spaces where we store memory, silence, instinct, and grief, the pieces of ourselves we preserve, protect, or abandon in the name of self-preservation, some by conscious choice and others slowly, invisibly, over time. Folklore has long served as a vessel for what a society cannot always speak aloud, and Shiau's process returns to those mythic landscapes not as nostalgia but as mirrors, an attempt to uncover where we hide, what we bury, and what we might finally be ready to release and reconcile.

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Developed in part at the Baryshnikov Arts Center

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The Mushroom
Nikki Calonge

January 15-17, 22-24 & 29-31, 2027
The Arts Center at Governors Island

Created by Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge, The Mushroom is a radial play with spokes pointing outward that transforms the Arts Center at Governors Island into a world of growth, decay, wonder, and transformation. Blending pageantry, dance, incantation, and surreal theatrical spectacle, the piece explores fungal movement and the porous boundaries between bodies, landscapes, and forms of life, with costumes that become scenery through successions of lacy meshes. The Mushroom invites audiences into an enchanted, hand-built experience in one of New York City's most distinctive cultural settings, while asking a pair of provocative questions: how do we reenchant the world, and what knows it is alive?

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Part of the Under the Radar Festival

Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.

A sign, a signal, a delivery, a deliverance

Anh Vo

September 26, 2026*

A sign, a signal, a delivery, a deliverance brings Ca Trù, a rare northern Vietnamese chamber music tradition, into dialogue with possession rituals. Drawing from Ca Trù’s austere, trance-like soundscape and its precise rhythmic structures, the project explores quieter states of losing oneself. Here, possession emerges through discipline and devotion rather than abandon and catharsis, where control itself becomes the condition for being overtaken.

*Canceled due to severe weather.

Past Artists-in-Residence

2025-2026

Baye & Asa

Baye & Asa is a company creating movement art projects directed & choreographed by Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington & Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt. They’ve presented their work at The Joyce Theater, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Pioneer Works, Guggenheim Works & Process, The American Dance Festival, and more. They were one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2022, and were recipients of Dance Magazine’s 2023 Harkness Promise Award. They’ve created works for repertory companies including The Martha Graham Dance Company, BODYTRAFFIC, and Alvin Ailey II. bayeandasa.com

Nichole Canuso | Branching Paths

Nichole Canuso is a choreographer and performer working with movement, film, spatial design, and words. A dedicated improviser, Canuso’s career is grounded in ensemble processes that invite the bodies and memories of the audience into the heart of the projects. Her work’s passion is creating moments of connection across distances of geography, perspective, and emotion, and the intimacy of simple exchanges. The branching paths of collaboration bring her into contact with artists, activists, and community members of all kinds. They facilitate, perform, dialogue, and grow together. Her evolution through new training and perspectives is nourished by her roots in inquiry and collaboration. She believes both in the power of the local, and in the ethical obligation to reach beyond the familiar towards what challenges her.

Canuso founded a nonprofit performance company as a home for these endeavors in 2004. Her path is fueled by residencies, fellowships, and project presentations that allow her to interact with national and international audiences, expanding her understanding of and connections with communities globally. These include residencies at MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Millay Arts, and the Bogliasco Center; a 2017 Pew Fellowship and a 2021 NEXUS/New York Stage & Film Fellowship; and project presentations at New York Live Arts, American Repertory Theater, Los Angeles Performance Practice as well as across Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Japan, Scotland, and the Czech Republic. nicholecanusodance.org

Moriah Evans

Moriah Evans positions choreography as an expansive social process. Drawing on somatic choreographic practices and feminist critiques of dance and visual culture, her work expands dance beyond the visible, to explore different ways of sensing both ourselves and our relationships to one another. Evans develops movement from the unseen interior of the body, by activating the emotional, somatic, and sensory systems to question the default hierarchies between notions of flesh, body, self, and subject. For Evans, choreography is a social political project that means far more than arranging bodies and movement in space; it is a serious and wide-ranging exploration of ideological beliefs–including feminist, sociological, and anthropological considerations. In Evans’ practice, one work leads to the next, each project forming a chapter in her ongoing process to inspire transformation–both physically and psychosocially–through action. Evans creates site-specific performances, theater-based productions, gallery and museum-based participatory installations, symposiums, theoretical texts, and curatorial projects.

2024-2025

Juliana F. May

Juliana F. May has been making work in New York City for the past 17 years. May creates dances that interrogate the relationship between trauma and abstraction or, broadly speaking, between content and form. Her experimentation with structural dissonance often pushes narrative to the point where language falls apart, where meaning emerges not as the result of formulaic dramatic logics, but as tactile texture and visceral feeling. A Guggenheim and NYFA Fellow, Juliana F. May has created nine works since 2002, including eight evening-length pieces with commissions and encore performances from Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Barnard College, The New School, Joyce SoHo and The American Realness Festival. May has been awarded grants and residencies through The Map Fund, The Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Gibney Dance In Process. In 2002, May received her BA in Dance and Art History from Oberlin College and, in 2012, she received an MFA in Choreography from the University Wisconsin-Milwaukee. May is the Artistic Advisor for New York Live Arts‘ Fresh Tracks Residency Program as well as guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. In 2017, May became the Chair of the Dance Department at Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts. maydance.org

Ivy Baldwin

Ivy Baldwin is a NY-based choreographer, performer, educator, and founder of Ivy Baldwin Dance, Inc. (est. 1999). Commissions include BAM Next Wave, DTW, NYLA, Chocolate Factory, Abrons Arts Center, Joyce Theater (Joyce Unleashed), American Dance Institute, The Philip Johnson Glass House, The Wooden Floor, Russel Wright Design Center, and LaMaMa. Select awards include Guggenheim, Bogliasco and Jerome Foundation Fellowships, Gibney DiP, NYFA, LMCC, 92Y, MacDowell, Yaddo, Movement Research, JCAL, and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Her work has been presented by The New Museum, MASS MoCA, REDCAT, and Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago, and internationally in Germany, Romania, and Italy. ivybaldwindance.org

Past Showings

Nichole Canuso | Branching Paths

Lunar Retreat

June 20, 2026

Lunar Retreat is a multi-sensory performance inspired by the gradual distance growing between the Moon and Earth. This immersive journey invites audiences to wander, witness, and reflect on how we move through care, loss, and transformation—both individually and collectively. Created by choreographer Nichole Canuso in collaboration with a visionary team of designers, Lunar Retreat opens a space for poetic, playful, and communal connection with the shifting rhythms of our planetary bodies. Lunar Retreat reflects on our deep evolutionary ties to the ocean and the moon, reminding us that we are all interconnected with the natural world.

Via pre-recorded prompts on headset, audiences are guided through a performance installation that includes live feed video, individualized activities and moments of group ceremony. While in residence with LMCC, Nichole and her collaborators will be in the research and development phase for Lunar Retreat.

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Moriah Evans

**[…/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^]**

May 16, 2026

An in-process showing of […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^], an immersive performance by Moriah Evans that confronts the body as an ambivalent place of political and existential conundrums. Through a sequence of evolving circumstances—internal and external, individual and collective—the piece asks what it means to give, take, receive, and be taken through a compositional structure. It circulates bodies, meaning, and value through repetition and a par corps of changing relationships between the performers and the public. The work unfolds in a manner that prioritizes non-linear thinking and embodied ways of knowing. The showing will feature collaborators Malcolm-x Betts, Chloë Engel, João dos Santos Martins, and Varinia Canto Vila.

[…/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] will premiere June 5-13, 2026 at The Chocolate Factory Theater.

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Baye & Asa

At the Altar

December 20, 2025

Baye & Asa’s new duet, At the Altar, is an exploration of cultural, religious, and political deities.

We ask these central questions: Who/what do we worship? How do we worship? Who are the righteous? Who are the blasphemers? At the Altar reckons with the pitfalls of extreme idolatry and interrogates our collective struggle for survival and salvation.

Commissioned and development support provided by The Democracy Cycle, a program of Perelman Performing Arts Center | PAC NYC and Civis Foundation. At the Altar is co-commissioned by ADF with support from the Doris Duke/SHS Foundations Award for New Works. At the Altar is also made possible through generous support from Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York State Council on the Arts, and Jody and John Arnhold.

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Juliana F. May

Optimistic Voices (work-in-progress)

June 28, 2025

Optimistic Voices probes the intractable contradictions of family, eroticism, and motherhood. Influenced by Postmodern dance, musical theater, and Bob Fosse’s sexed-yet-sexless movement idiom, May continues to refine her signature song/text cycles, using repetition and off-kilter rhythms in hot pursuit of a new kind of performative language. The world premiere of Optimistic Voices will be in the fall of 2025.

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Ivy Baldwin

Mammal Mountain (work-in-progress)

June 14, 2025

Mammal Mountain, a multidisciplinary dance commissioned by NYU Skirball (premiere April ‘26), includes long-time collaborators: performers Eleanor Smith, Anna Adams Stark, Darrin Wright, Saúl Ulerio, and choreographer Ivy Baldwin; composition by Justin Jones with an original song by Ryan Tracy; lighting by Amanda Ringger; and visual design in collaboration with artist Inna Babaeva.

Mammal Mountain takes inspiration from Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation of D.H Lawrence’s Women In Love, specifically Gudrun’s “dance with highland cattle”—a ritual between woman and animal, of seduction, submission, fear, sensuality, aggression. Visually, the dance incorporates mammalian hides, specifically cows—used as second skins, physical terrains, paintings, weapons, and objects of desire.

Mammal Mountain is commissioned by NYU Skirball, with additional development support provided by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Marble House Project, Groundworks, The Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation, Dugas Family Foundation, and Ivy Baldwin Dance Commissioning Circle Members.

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The Dance Residency program is made possible with generous support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, with grant support provided by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

Dance Residencies