Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar) is a performance artist and scholar whose work unfolds at the intersection of social dance activism, gender experimentation, cultural geography, and interactive systems. Their practice investigates how bodies become politicized through place, and how embodied practices negotiate and reshape social hierarchies, urbanity, and transnational flows.

Their research is informed by their undergraduate training in architecture and sustained engagement with queer Black social dances in India, through which they draw connections among space, migration, and cross-cultural interaction. They are currently pursuing an MFA in Choreographic Inquiry at UCLA to study the etymology and cultural circulation of nazar—translated as gaze, perception, or the “evil eye”—from its Arabic origins to its regional transformations across South Asia. This inquiry informs their thesis show tracing their migration from Ahmedabad to Los Angeles, and critiquing binaries that fail to account for queer minoritarian experiences. They received the Asian Cultural Council Graduate Fellowship twice to support this work, premiering in Spring 2026 at UCLA.

Valeria Tizol Vivas is an artist from Bayamón, Puerto Rico who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a B.EnvD from the School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico, and an MFA in Sculpture from UCLA. Tizol Vivas is currently Faculty in the School of Arts at California Institute of the Arts.

Tizol Vivas’ practice explores the morphology of materials, time, and ancient dialects with the Caribbean as a point of origin. Her work alludes to memory, cultural histories, traditions, elemental processes, and architectural sensibilities, all of which are investigated through introspection, material interventions, experimental arrangements, and mark-making techniques. Her hypotheses and observations transfigure the narratives and languages of displacement and marginalization through the instinctual nature and processes of the elements, materials, and forms she communicates with.

Her recent work has been featured in Lenzner Gallery at Pitzer College, Transformative Arts, M+B, Gavlak Gallery, Five Car Garage, Adornment | Artifact x Getty, La Muestra Nacional de Artes de Puerto Rico, and La Galería Diagonal. She is a former Ceramic Artist-in-Residence at Pitzer College (CA) and an Artist-in-Residence at La Espectacular (PR).

Negar Kamali is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer whose work investigates the relationship between space, movement, and cultural memory. Trained in architecture, she applies spatial analysis to choreographic practice, examining how built environments shape bodily knowledge and social relations. Since 2011, she has taught Persianate and Iranian dance as well as contemporary dance, and her extensive travels across Iran have profoundly shaped her creative practice. Her choreography draws on the country’s diverse geography and rich literary heritage.

Currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental Choreography at the University of California, Riverside, Negar’s research asks: What do we carry when we move? Her methodology employs objects as live collaborators and draws on the Persian concept of Shuridegi a passionate transformation born from deep longing. Her work engages sensation as knowledge and acknowledges temporality’s imprint on movement, demonstrating how relocation across geographies shapes embodied understanding, and how movement itself becomes a living archive.

Emily Barasch is a choreographer, educator, intimacy coordinator, and curator based in Los Angeles. She engages with community building and performance making as interrelated political activation strategies, positioning choreography as both a survival strategy and a method for change. Her work is an exercise in communal resiliency, centering bodies and their inter-relational capacities to imagine queer, anti-capitalist futures that resist and transform dominant logics of fixed identity and linear time. Her choreography has been presented at venues and festivals throughout the US and abroad such as Human Resources, Electric Lodge, Highways Performance Space, The Wende Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Judson Memorial Church, Kestrels (New York, NY), The Stockholm Fringe Festival (Stockholm, SE), and Halle 2 (Kassel, DE), and The Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon, PT) among others. She has been an artist in residence at Atelier Real (Portugal), PReS (Germany), Forum Dança PACAP Residency (Portugal), and Ponderosa PORCH Residency (Germany). Emily has most recently served as choreographer Will Rawls’ research assistant on his recent project, Made in LA, for the Hammer Museum. She is a founding member of the Queer Dance working group at Dance Studies Association (DSA). Emily is currently the Intimacy Director and Educator at Cal Arts, a lecturer at UC Riverside in the Department of Dance, and a lecturer at UCLA in the Department of WAC/D. She founded and curates the work- in-progress series, First Draft, in Los Angeles.