Sharon Mansur (guest artist)
Sharon Mansur is a contemporary dance artist and the artistic director of mansurdance. Her choreographic and improvisational multimedia dances have been presented throughout the US as well as in England and Argentina at traditional, alternative and site-specific venues, in both urban and not so urban settings. She has had the honor of working with various experimental dance, music, video and visual artists, including Daniel Burkholder, Body Cartography, Brenton Cheng, Megan Flood, Cyrus Khambatta, Toshi Makihara, Caroline Waters, and her mansurdance collaborators Kitty Clark, Todd Clark, Ali Herischi, Mare Hieronimus, Marcy Schlissel, Ginger Wagg and Lucas Zarwell. Sharon has also performed for Sara Rudner and in commissioned work by David Dorfman. Her artistic work has received generous support, including the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Her most recent creation entitled "Off White" was presented at the Goose Route Dance Festival in West Virginia, and the inaugural Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, DC. Sharon is a Certified Laban/Barteneiff Movement Analyst, a reiki practitioner, and currently an Assistant Professor at Winona State University, MN.

Marcy Schlissel
Marcy Schlissel is a choreographer, dance artist, and certified Pilates instructor who recently relocated from Washington, DC to New York. She has shown her work at festivals such as On the Edge: DC Downtown Modern Dance, Goose Route in WVA, and at the Washington DC 8th International Improvisation Plus+ Festival. She has also presented work at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dance Place, Jack Guidone Theater, P.G. Publick Playhouse, and the Dixon Place/New York. Marcy has received funding from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities as a Young Emerging Artist, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Linnowes Foundation. In addition, CrossCurrents Dance Company commissioned her to create a new piece for their repertory. In 2002, the DC Metro Dance Awards nominated her for Emerging Performer for her performance in Sharon Mansur's Still Life. Marcy has worked collaboratively with other artists such as musicians Steve Nash and Sam Turner on Origins, set designer Bill Haris, singer Heidi Martin Johnson on He is She, composer Steve Helmy for Dialoguing, Cantor Saltzman for two children's ballets, and costume designer Billie Myer for Listening Between the Skin. Marcy co-produced the concert BodyStories: A modern dance concert featuring live music and improv with choreographer Kristen Kelley at the Jack Guidone Theater at the Joy of Motion Dance Center. Marcy used her Young Emerging Artist Award to direct, produce and perform in her own concert at the Joy of Motion Dance Center, entitled Convergence: An Evening of Modern Dance with Live Music. Marcy has danced with Quiescence, Ed Tyler, Meriam Rosen, Aydin Tekar, Nancy Havlik Dance Performance Group, Crossroads Movement & Sound and Improvisations Unlimited. She has performed in Spain, Cuba, at Dance Space and Dixon Place/New York City, the Kennedy Center, the American Dance Festival/North Carolina, Rutgers University/New Jersey, The Painted Bride/Pennsylvania, well as in many theatres in the metropolitan area. She currently dances with MansurDance.

Elyse Sparkes
Elyse Sparkes received her early ballet training from Andrei Bossov, a former Ballet Master of the Kirov Ballet. She has performed many starring roles in ballets such as The Nutcracker, Cinderella, Copelia, and Don Quiote with the Bossov Ballet Theater and The Portland Ballet Company. She received her BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase Dance Conservatory. At Purchase College she danced in works choreographed by Stanton Welch, Sean Curran, Bettijane Sills, and Megan Williams. In 2005, she worked closely with Kraig Patterson to create a solo version of his work Margot. Elyse has also received a professional certificate of study in dance from the Rotterdamse Dansacademie in The Netherlands. In Europe, she toured professionally with the Erik Kaiel Dance Company. She is currently a member of Moving Theater, a dance theater company directed by Ryan Kelly and Brennan Gerard. Moving Theater's production of without was featured at the Guggenheim Museum Works & Process Series in September 2005. She also performs with Naomi Luppescu and Danscores by Ofelia Loret de Mola. In Spring 2006, she will be seen in a new work by Stephan Koplowitz. Elyse's choreography has been shown at the Dance Theater Lab in New York, The John Ford Theater in Maine, and at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. Elyse was a rehearsal assistant for The Nutcracker at SUNY Purchase in 2004. She has also taught at Bossov Ballet Theatre in Maine and Leggz Limited in Long Island. Elyse currently teaches private dance lessons and dance fitness classes at Empire Dance and the Park Slope Fitness Collective.

William Catanzaro
William Catanzaro is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in New York. Since arriving from his native Buenos Aires in 1989, Mr. Catanzaro has composed musical scores for renowned choreographers such as Anna Sokolow, Steve Paxton, Viola Farber, and Milton Myers. His work has been presented nationally and internationally with the New Danish Dance Theater, TanzFabrik Berlin, Amsterdam Theatreschool, Cyprus Festival, Teatro San Martin, The Ailey School, Philadanco, Player's Project, Dallas Black Theater and more. Mr. Catanzaro is the Composer and Conductor of MinM Musicians in Masques and Artistic Director of SOULSKIN Performing Arts Group. He has worked as an accompanist and taught music for dancers at The Julliard School, Limon School, Graham School, and New York University. Currently he is on the faculty at The Alvin Ailey School, Sarah Lawrence College and Steps on Broadway.

Bee Elvy
Bee Elvy is a musician, songwriter and a painter. During the past several years, he has been writing music and touring the US with ANTELOPE. ANTELOPE features Mike Andre and Bee Elvy formerly of Vertebrates, and Justin Moyer formerly of Supersystem (Touch and Go Records). The trio plays meditative, stripped-down, punk music and has been together since 2001. They are currently touring and recording a full length record for release in early 2007 on Washington DC's Dischord Records.

Derek Morton
Derek Morton has generated and manipulated sound since the early 1990's. From his days as a rock guitarist and record label owner to more recent forays into performance curating and gallery installation, he has relentlessly investigated the possibilities of audio in all contexts. He is equally interested in live improvisation, studio research, exploratory composition, and electronic reconfiguration. Morton's sound experiments have attacked everything from cutting-edge technologies like surround-sound to reinvented tools like Gameboy video game consoles. His work with violinist John Coursey in the duo Mikroknytes has resulted in numerous performances around the U.S. as well as three full-length CDs. His organization of a variety of performance series, most recently the ongoing TechClub, has given a forum to D.C.-area sound artists and explored the relationships between performance, improvisation, and collaboration. Morton's previous installation projects include "Protective Goggle Room," a 2002 sound environment at Art-o-Matic centered around the chance interplay of 6 CD players, and "Bombyx Mori Acoustic Interweave," which manipulated the sound of silkworms to accompany Elsabe Dixon's silk sculptures.

Lucas Zarwell
Lucas Zarwell is a Washington area composer who has created original scores for numerous choreographers, performance artists, and theatre pieces. Commissions include scores for works by Brian Buck, Peter DiMuro/Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and Sharon Mansur, Jane Jerardi and Mare Hieronimus, in addition to sound scores for the work of Cherry Red Productions. His score for Naoko Maeshiba's Communitas at Theatre Project in Baltimore was created with the support of a grant from the American Composers Forum. In addition, he produces DC's neo-burlesque vaudeville show, the Lobster Boy Revue.

Kevin Doyle
Kevin Doyle is a playwright and director and video experimenter from Brooklyn. In the last two years, he has fulfilled his "promise as one of the smart new playwrights on the New York theatre scene" (NYTheatre). This has made him pretty tired and he wants a long vacation in Montauk. His works as a playwright include: Compression of a Casualty (Golden Thread, San Francisco, CA / Mosaic Theatre Group, San Jose, CA / The Gallery Players, Brooklyn, NY);?Styrofoam (The Trilogy Theatre, New York, NY); and?W.M.D. (just the low points) (BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, NY) and Fox (y) Friends (HERE Arts Center, NYC). In addition to the publication of The Position in the annual New York anthology Plays and Playwrights 2006, Doyle's play Compression of a Casualty will be published in The Best American Short Plays 2004-2005 (Applause Books) and an excerpt from The Position has been selected for The Best Men's Stage Monologues 2005 (Smith & Kraus). He is the author of three other plays: The Amputated Years, ATM and Not From Canada. In 2003, Doyle directed the first American performance of 11 September 2001 by the acclaimed French dramatist Michel Vinaver. In January 2006, he delivered a lecture at The Public Theater on the 2005 Act French theatre festival; the text will be published in Entre'Actes. An alumnus of the Drama Studies program at Purchase College (SUNY), he teaches at Long Island University in Brooklyn.

Edna Emmet
Edna Kurtz Emmet was born in Poland, grew up in Israel. Ms. Emmet received a BA in Graphic Design from Hornsey College of Art in London. For the next several years she traveled extensively, living in Japan and Greece. Subsequently, Ms Emmet studied the dynamic qualities of colors with the Italian painter Beppe Assenza in Dornach, Switzerland. Ms, Emmet resides in Baltimore. She teaches painting to adults and children. She exhibits her work in USA, Germany, Japan, India, Canada and Israel and her paintings can be found in numerous private collections.

Tony Schultz
Tony Schultz was born, raised and currently resides in the borough of the Bronx, in New York City. He is a physicist researching computer vision for applications in human movement analysis and dance notation at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Tony is fascinated with the art/science interface and the development of dance technologies. He currently teaches Dance and Technology in the Department of Dance at Sarah Lawrence College. As a physical scientist he provides a valuable resource to dancers and media makers interested in developing experimental and computationally based methodologies. Tony started getting down at the age of 7, learning breaking styles at the YMCA after school program. His formal dance training began as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College where he studied with the late Viola Farber. Since then he has continued to seek out and study dance with practitioners outside of the academy. His most influential teachers in this regard have been Luis Demalsy aka Mach3 and Angele M'Paria aka B-Girl Angel of Flowzaic UK.