Guest Artists

Taylor Black is a Richmond-based dancer, teacher, choreographer, and bodyworker. She received a BFA in Dance and Choreography from Virginia Commonwealth University in the spring of 2019, and continued her education later to become a fully licensed teacher for the State of Virginia, a certified EBAS (Elemental Body Alignment System) level I & II instructor, and certified Thai Bodywork practitioner. In recent years Taylor has performed and choreographed professionally with local companies KARAR Dance Company, RADAR, and PS Project, and is currently dancing professionally with Cora Dance. Taylor is Chair of the Dance Department at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School for Arts and Technology, where she teaches ballet, modern, jazz, composition, and repertory, and serves as the ARGS Chapter Sponsor for the National Honor Society for Dance Arts. After school, she teaches at Marianne Kelley’s School of Dance, where she holds the title of Co-Director of pre-professional company Compass Contemporary.

Aidan Carberry is a Los Angeles–born artist who graduated from the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance as part of its inaugural class. He is one half of JA Collective alongside Jordan Johnson, a creative duo known for their captivating choreography and multidisciplinary work across theater, dance, film, and live performance. Their signature style blurs the line between art and reality, combining intricate movement, storytelling, and raw human connection. JA Collective first gained widespread acclaim through their creative collaborations with the band half•alive, amassing millions of online views and making history as the first choreographers/dancers to perform at NPR's Tiny Desk. They have collaborated with Talking Heads, Future, Paul McCartney, Frank Ocean, Reggie Watts, Ryan Beatty, Margaret Qualley, Mike Mills, Taika Waititi, Olivia Wilde, Bishop Briggs, Saoirse Ronan, and Brockhampton, as well as brands like Apple, Allstate, Snapchat, Belvedere, and Pull&Bear. Through JA Collective, their choreographic work has received numerous awards, including prizes at RIDCC, First Prize at MasDanza, Runner-Up at the Palm Desert Choreography Festival, and the Critics’ Choice Award at the 38th Hannover Choreography Competition. Jordan and Aidan have also been honored as TED speakers/performers.

Emily Cargill is a Richmond-based contemporary choreographer, artist, and the Founder and Artistic Director of Emily Cargill & Dancers. Her choreography is rooted in instinct, curiosity, collaboration, and an ongoing investigation of the human experience. Through movement, Cargill explores memory, personal experience, relationships, and the complexities of the human condition, creating work that is intimate, visceral, daring, and deeply moving. Cargill’s choreographic practice is grounded in experimentation and discovery. She approaches the studio as a space for questioning, play, and collaboration, allowing movement and relationships between dancers to evolve through a process of exploration, workshopping, and deep investigation. Her work seeks not simply to tell stories, but to create experiences in which audiences can recognize something of their own humanity. Her choreography has been presented at venues and festivals throughout the East Coast and nationally, including the High Museum of Art, Mint Museum, Art on the Atlanta BeltLine, Dogtown Dance Theatre, Boston Contemporary Dance Festival, North Carolina Dance Festival, Charlotte Dance Festival, Detroit Dance City Festival, WhiteWave’s Solo/Duo Festival, NYC10 Dance Festival, Dance Canvas’ Emerging Choreographer Initiative, Richmond Choreographic Showcase, New Grounds Dance Festival, New Seeds Festival, Modern Atlanta Dance Festival and the Versatility Dance Festival, among others.

Joseph Hernandez is a choreographer invested in the possibility that dance can articulate an otherwise invisible, crucial beauty. To them, much of this beauty is created by the value dance can place on its context; who attends, develops and participates in the work. This arc of investment, as much as its physical appearance, is the work’s shape. With this line of thinking, they and their collaborators look at shape as a political tool. They were shaped against their values by decades of classical ballet training that, while it gestured toward the sublime and the unnamable, was embedded in a logic of conservation that ultimately left them feeling empty. When Hernandez started making their own work, though those initial pieces were created inside those same spaces, they learned that dance has the capacity to resonate forever if it is shaped in a way that supports magic over misanthropy and curiosity over solipsism. Now that Hernandez has extricated themself from those environments, their work has become a physical practice of constantly organizing ideas of shape towards a future that they believe in. Being a choreographer positions them towards an active relationship with human thinking in all of its gorgeous multiplicity, possibility, dissonance, and disaster. Their choreography is about how they (black, gay, and a little on edge) shape the world for the people they love (many of whom are the same), not how the world shapes them (or us).