Dance Residencies

Dance Residencies at the Arts Center at Governors Island

Month-long performing arts residencies at the Arts Center at Governors Island give artists dedicated time and space to experiment, rehearse, and dive deep into their creative process. With open access to the Arts Center’s dance studios and resources, choreographers and their collaborators can workshop and rehearse at their own pace, in their own way. Each residency culminates with a free, public work-in-progress showing.

These residencies are one of the many ways LMCC supports NYC artists while activating the Arts Center at Governors Island as an incubator for research, experimentation, and artistic development.

Upcoming | Work-in-Progress Showings

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A sign, a signal, a delivery, a deliverance
Anh Vo

September 26, 2026
The Arts Center at Governors Island

A sign, a signal, a delivery, a deliverance brings Ca Trù, a rare northern Vietnamese chamber music tradition, into dialogue with possession rituals. This work will premiere at Danspace in Fall 2026.

More information coming soon. Sign up here to be the first to learn when reservations are open.

Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.

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.

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

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.

2025

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

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

Past | Work-in-Progress Showings

9-7-2025 Nichole Canuso at Kaatsbaan by Theo Cote-72

Lunar Retreat
Nichole Canuso | Branching Paths

June 20, 2026
The Arts Center at Governors Island

Lunar Retreat is a multi-sensory performance inspired by the gradual distance growing between the Moon and Earth.

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Moriah Evans

May 16, 2026
The Arts Center at Governors Island

[…/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] is an immersive performance that confronts the body as an ambivalent place of political and existential conundrums.

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At the Altar by Baye & Asa

December 20, 2025
The Arts Center at Governors Island

At the Altar is an exploration of cultural, religious, and political deities.

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Optimistic Voices by Juliana F. May

June 28, 2025
The Arts Center at Governors Island

Optimistic Voices probes the intractable contradictions of family, eroticism, and motherhood.

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The Arts Center Dance Residencies are funded with support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.

Dance Residencies