ARTIST RESIDENTS
Our institute offers performance residencies to BIPOC artists and scholars who are dedicated to exploring the intersection of performance, practice, and research. Our recipients are encouraged to delve deep into their craft and engage with the local community. Contact us to be one of our resident artists.
Saltwater Road Performance Institute
Inaugural Artist Residency
2023
It was an honor to host NEFA grant recipient Ebony Noelle Golden and @jupiterperformancestudio, along with Azuza "SheShe" Dance and Viktor le. Givens as they journeyed through Alabama as part of her upcoming larger work, "In the Name of the Mother Tree." You can also support her ongoing work by donating at jupiterperformancestudio.com.
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The opening of SaltWaterRoad Artist Residency, a not for profit organization centering community based ethnographic processes and creative practice as research, has been sponsored in part by the Robert S. and Gertrude B. Breen Memorial Award through the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Thank you to the elders, youth, family, and all who offered their additional time, wisdom, and support.
It is with deep gratitute that we conclude the 2023 SaltWater Road Artist Residency with such a beautiful opening. May our journey be abundant, long-lasting, impactful, and widespread.
The application for the 2024 Saltwater Road Artist Residency is now open.
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Holy Waters: A Ceremonial Sojourn is an element of Jupiter Performance Studio‘s Watering Whole cosmology composed of field work, interventions, conversations, theatrical ceremonies, festivals, fellowships, installations and multi-media activations. Led by Ebony Noelle Golden, this cultural organizing effort shares systems, strategies, stories and ceremonies centering an ecowomanist approach to sustainability, environmental justice, and climate reparations.
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-Ebony Noelle Golden
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Support her ongoing work by donating at jupiterperformancestudio.com.
Ebony Noelle Golden//Performance
Saltwater Road Performance Institute's Artist Residency is extremely proud to host the brilliant and skillful @ebonynoellegolden for our opening week! Sister Ebony is a gifted doula for the birthing of sacred community.
“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!
Viktor le. Givens//
Performance/Sound/Installation
Saltwater Road Performance Institute's Artist Residency is extremely proud to host the bright light conjurer of new worlds and potent creator Viktor l.e. Givens @southernandroid00 for our opening week! 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!!!
JENNIFER LIGAYA//
SOUND/MOVEMENT/PERFORMANCE
Jennifer Ligaya is an AfroPinay sound, movement, and performance practitioner, and healer born and raised in Chicago with an interdisciplinary background in visual art, vocal performance, dance, and theater. Mother to a Scorpio son and full time PhD student of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, her original work includes solo and collaborative performance compositions and sound installations. A sponsored artist, grant recipient, and commissioned multimedia artist, her compositions amplify critical conversations around identity, liberatory practices, ancestral indigenous knowledge systems, and moments of communal healing, through the weaving of traditional and contemporary sound, performance, and personal ancestral folk arts practices. The newest core member of Honey Pot Performance, her current creative practice explores Afro-Asian feminist subjectivities and speculative arts, indigenous healing and survival practices, and the genealogies of justice.
Website: www.jenniferligaya.com
AZUZA "SHESHE" DANCE//
ACTRESS/SINGER
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
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Sister SheShe, we are honored to walk with you!
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