The Constellation of Artists

SaltWater Road Performance Institute develops original work through an ensemble-driven studio model. Artists collaborate as researchers, performers, composers, and creative partners in the development of new Southernist performance and public humanities projects.

The constellation of artists featured represent brilliant collaborators who have contributed to SaltWater Road’s evolving work spanning across performance, research, and community engagement.

Founder + Artistic Director

Jennifer-Ligaya

Sound/Movement/Performance Practitioner/Installation Artist

Jennifer Ligaya Senecal is a sound, movement, and performance practitioner, artist-scholar, and occupational therapist whose work bridges embodied research, Southernist performance, and creative humanities practice. As Founder and Artistic Director of SaltWater Road Performance Institute, she leads the development of original devised performance and public humanities programming rooted in site-responsive methodology, interoceptive research, and AfroDiasporic artistic lineage.

Her work investigates performance as both artistic composition, cultural inquiry, and wellness praxis, positioning the body as a site of knowledge production and collective memory. Through the SaltWater Road Artist Residency, she cultivates collaborative spaces where artists engage public landscapes as living stages for performance, reflection, and community dialogue.

www.jenniferligaya.com

Performance/Theater Practitioner

Ebony Noelle Golden

“I make art that is wholly about liberation. My liberation, the liberation of oppressed peoples, the liberation of spirit. Liberation is a precarious, dangerous, and awesomely terrifying pursuit, yet I am dedicated to this journey, as so many folks have been before me." Ebony Noelle Golden unflinchingly pursues justice as an artist, scholar, and culture strategist. Hailing from Houston, TX, and currently living and working in Harlem, NY. She is the founder and CEO at Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, LLC. Since 2009, her collaborative has successfully supported organizational transformation and movement building for education, social justice, and cultural wellness campaigns and initiatives with some of the most forward-leaning institutions in the nation. Her creative, coaching and consulting work rely on transparent and equitable partnerships with community members, institutions, and artists actively working for justice and freedom today. Golden’s creative practice is the foundation of her unique approach to devising justice and organizational wellness strategies. She works as a community-based artist and attributes her ability to serve the needs of BDAC’s clients to a rigorous performance practice. As a poet, choreographer, and ritual performance artist, Ebony devises and directs site-specific ceremonies, live art installations, and environmental experiments that activate the throughline of Black liberation. In 2022, Ebony was awarded a fellowship from Princeton University's Entrepreneurship Council and Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2020, she launched Jupiter Performance Studio, which is a hub for the development, exploration, and production of diasporic Black performance traditions. Her work embodies the power of art and collaboration as drivers of a movement for liberation. Please follow https://www.bettysdaughterarts.com/about-ebony for more of her powerful work. We are honored to walk with you Sister Ebony Noelle Golden!

Performance/Musician/Installation Artist

Viktor l.e. Givens

Brother Viktor is a wielder of magical time space now memory craft. Viktor le. Givens is a found object installation performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to activate spaces for site specific public rituals. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with pre and post modern spiritual theologies, le. Givens hopes to extend and reimagine the folk customs of his family . His material archive is comprised of the forgotten and discarded household items found during excavations of East Texas, Louisiana, Havana Cuba and Mexico City. . Through the accumulation of these rich cultural artifacts , le. Givens. seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual memory. Please follow Viktor L. Ewing | Givens SouthernAndroid.com | www.participatorymusiccoalition.org SouthernAndroid00@gmail.com Curatorial, Research and Public Arts Brother Viktor L. Ewing Givens, we are honored to walk with you!!!

Actress/Singer

Azusa SHESHE Dance

Azusa SHESHE Dance is a TV/Film/Theater actress and gospel/blues singer from Chattanooga, TN. Belting her rendition of classic R&B, she performs weekly with MTA MUSIC UNDER NEW YORK (MUNY) at five elite subway stations where she’s been crowned DIVA UNDERGROUND for WOMEN’s HISTORY MONTH CELEBRATIONS (2019-2022). SHESHE serves as a panel judge at annual MUNY auditions, was featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES and in the 2023 MUNY marketing campaign, as one of the top subway entertainers, resulting in a live performance recently on ABC GOOD MORNING AMERICA. She sings lead vocals with two local NYC blues/jazz bands, as well as solo bookings. Her solo show (written, produced & features SHESHE) HOUN’ DAWG: LIFE & TIMES OF BIG MAMA THORNTON debuted in the NYC UNITED SOLO FESTIVAL 2018, winning the BEST CONCERT AWARD and was featured as the season opener for UNIVERSITY CHAPEL HILL NORTH CAROLINA STONE CENTER FOR BLACK HISTORY & CULTURE in 2019. SHESHE has graced the APOLLO THEATER, HARLEM SUMMER & the HARLEM TREE LIGHTING stages. Her accolades include: Delta (DOUBLE EDGE THEATRE - IN THE NAME OF), Big Queen (NATIONAL BLACK THEATRE - 125TH & FREEDOM), Dionne (COLUMBIA - HAIR the Rock Musical), & Evillene (HARLEM BLACKARTS - THE WIZ). She believes the most highly favorable ancestors have truly guided her spiritually to be the best she can be and is spellbound by the love and acceptance of her true southern being & talent. Please Follow www.sheshedance.com Sister SheShe, we are honored to walk with you!

Dance/Choreography

Marsae Lynette

Marsae Lynette is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, educator, and scholar currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Marsae has earned an M.F.A. in dance at the University of Michigan in 2023 and a B.F.A. in dance at Marygrove College. Her graduate portfolio includes certificates in Arts, Entrepreneurship & Leadership, World Performance Studies, and a fellowship to study Afro diasporic dance in Cuba. Choreographing and teaching at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the University of Michigan has allowed her to develop a pedagogical mission of cultural and personal expression through theatrical and screened renderings of ritual. Marsae’s interdisciplinary choreographic series "Reconnecting Currents” merges scholarly research, environmental activism, and artistic practice focusing on themes of cultural identity and ecological consciousness. Most recently she is the recipient of the Global Water Dances Site Leader award (2023). For more information please visit her website https://www.marsae-eleda.com

Visual Art/Hair Based Installation

Kristina Beaty

Kristina Beaty, known as “The Glam Tech” for elevating hair styling in the city of Detroit for over 25 years. She has taken her hair styling expertise and leveraged it into a new genre of art using sculpted hair fibers as a medium on canvas and 3-D sculpture. The Glam Tech's mission is for hair sculpting to be respected as a fine art. Her work is inspired by the currency of water. She incorporates some element of her signature glam wave pattern in each piece to reflect movement and rebellion to stagnate energy while carrying vintage codes in our life force prompting her tag line… #makewaves. She has demonstrated "The Art of Hair Sculpting" live at the prestigious Detroit Institute of Arts, and was featured at the Charles H. Wright Museum, The Scarab Club, Playground Detroit, Art Mile, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit & Season 2 of BMF! The Glam Tech's work has also been published in the Vogue, Metro Times, Galore Magazine, Michigan Chronicle, Hour Detroit Magazine, WWD, Buzz Feed and various other media outlets. She is now residing in Los Angeles as a catalyst to a global platform to broaden exposure for her innovative art form and her bespoke hairspray @glamsculpt.

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Visual/Performance/Community Healing Arts/Cultural Worker

Crystle LiWaway Dino

Crystle LiWaway Dino is a Pinay Chicago native guided by her passions in the visual, performance, and healing arts rooted in community and her cultural upbringings. She unearths herstory and investigates time, place, and relation by incorporating elements of the body, participation, and memory and by creating movement using repetition in patterns immersed in personal stories, collective experiences, and folklore. She practices as a folk art therapist, performance and visual artist, mover & dancer, cultural worker, educator, bodyworker, and Filipino martial artist. She is the founder of Freedom.Movemeant.Alignment. FMA Chicago and integrates all of these practices that serve as a movement honoring ancestral embodied knowledge and ritual as paths in fortifying warriorship, personal power, agency, healing, growth, and connection. Crystle is a 3Arts Chicago Make a Wave 2019 Award winner and recipient of Chicago DCASE 2024 Individual Artists Program grant.

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Cultural Theater Artist/Vocalist/Educator

Je Nepomuceno

Je Nepomuceno is a Pinay artist, educator, and mother of two wild-hearted boys. Born of the islands—where the wind carries memory and myth—she was raised in the embrace of the Philippines and now moves between the soul cities of Chicago and New Orleans. She is a daughter of migration and ceremony, walking the edge where art, spirit, and social transformation meet. For decades, she has stirred the fire of change through socio-political theater and music, drawing from the liberatory power of Theater of the Oppressed. As a facilitator, she shapes brave spaces where voices once silenced can rise, where stories once hidden can transform the room. Through expressive art, she invites radical engagement, courageous conversation, and healing that dares to feel deeply. Grounded in Depth Psychology her work delves into the psychic wounds left by colonialism, injustice, and violence—wounds we carry in our dreams, our bodies, and our children. She believes in the sacred task of remembering: of returning to ancestral knowledge, of reclaiming ceremony, of reweaving the broken threads between earth, spirit, and self. A Hilot practitioner with River Movement, she honors the rites of transition—the birth, the death, the unraveling, the becoming. She has walked the path of Lucumí for four years, held by the winds of Oyá, the Orisha of change. With every breath, she whispers: Dive deeper. Feel wider. Imagine more. Hekua Hey! Yansa!

Movement Artist/Writer/Curator

Aaliyah Christina

Born in Ruston, Louisiana and raised across Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas, Aaliyah Christina creates and supports performance work as an administrator, curator, movement artist, and writer. She makes dances and writes poetic stories about relationship/power dynamics, mental health, and Blackness as a resident on the Southside of Chicago. She co-organizes with Performance Response Journal (PRJ) and collaborates with community organizations and fellow artists across the city of Chicago. In 2021, Aaliyah received the 3Arts Make-A-Wave grant. Then in 2024, she was selected as a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist and the Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio Residency cohort. She has volunteered with Southside organizations like Assata’s Daughters and Southside Together in order to provide mutual aid and basic needs to her neighbors, canvass and petition for changes to political policy, and commune with neighbors and comrades to dismantle oppressivesystems and befriend like-minded folks. She created PRAISE MOTHER SQUAD to highlight the multifaceted possibilities of Black majorette dance (aka j-sette) and platform stories about mental health, reproductive rights, and queer/chosen family dynamics.

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Resident Artist Marsae Lynette at Great Falls, Alabama

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Process + Archive

SaltWater Road’s artistic practice unfolds through field research, site-responsive exploration, and collective movement investigation. Documentation of rehearsals, performances, and environmental encounters forms part of the Institute’s growing public humanities archive.

Through video, sound, and embodied documentation, artists engage landscapes across the American South as living research environments — spaces where performance emerges through walking, listening, and witnessing together.

Impact + Artistic Research Outcomes

In just three years of operation, SaltWater Road Performance Institute has:

Supported Black and Brown women and artists from historically marginalized communities in developing new performance work grounded in ethnographic and embodied research
Facilitated public performances and workshops engaging local audiences across Alabama and the Gulf South
Generated original devised works that continue to tour and evolve beyond the residency period
Initiated the documentation and preservation of oral histories through performance-based methodologies
Built sustained artistic partnerships connecting communities across Montgomery, New Orleans, Detroit, and beyond
Advanced an interdisciplinary framework for performance research that bridges dance, public humanities, and community engagement

Join the Work

SaltWater Road Performance Institute is building toward a world-class institution created by a living constellation of artists committed to shaping new performance futures in the Deep South.

We welcome collaborators, partners, and supporters who believe in the transformative power of embodied research and collective artistic practice.

Apply to Collaborate

Support the Artists

Saltwater Road Artist Residency + Performance Institute

The Constellation of Artists

Process + Archive

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Impact + Artistic Research Outcomes

Join the Work

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