Kyle Abraham is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and a 2016 Doris Duke recipient. Abraham is the founding Artistic Director of A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, an internationally acclaimed New York-based contemporary dance company that is galvanized by Black culture and history. He was recently named to the Claude and Alfred Mann Endowed Professorship in Dance at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, succeeding pioneering dancemaker William Forsythe.

amara tabor smith is the Artist in Residence at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts and Artistic Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford. Amara is an Oakland based choreographer/performance maker who describes her work as Afro Futurist Conjure Art. She is a 2021 inaugural recipient of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Fellowship for artists, a 2019 Dance/USA Fellow, and a 2018 United States Artist Fellow.

Thomas F. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Congress of Research in Dance.  He is Professor of Dance, African and African American Studies, Theater Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. He directs SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications.

A-lan Holt is Director at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. There she trains undergraduates in the areas of diversity and culture; arts leadership and social justice. She is a mother and practicing artist whose work includes theater, poetry and film. She is a 2018 Sundance Fellow, a 2018 SF Film Screenwriting Fellow, and a frequent contributor on-air at KQED Arts.

This event will take place on Thursday, December 2 at 7:15 PM in the Pigott Theater.

This event is supported by the Arts + Justice Research Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, as co-sponsored by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, and the Stanford Arts Institute.