Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York City since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. After working for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, she now works independently, performing as a soloist and directing her own projects.  

After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan and Manja Chmiel in Germany, Eiko & Koma created 43 performance works, three durational “living” installations, and many media works. Their commissioners include the American Dance Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, Joyce Theater, Kennedy Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum, among others. In addition to performing their own choreography, Eiko & Koma handcrafted their own sets, costumes, and sound.   

Their Retrospective Project (2009—2012, produced by Sam Miller), presented in several institutions across the US, included two career-spanning exhibitions, and new performance works. The Walker Art Center, which presented a month-long all day performance installation in a gallery, published a comprehensive monograph of Eiko & Koma, Time is Not Even Space is Not Empty.  

Eiko & Koma were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive both the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006). They were honored with the inaugural United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and the first Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). 

Eiko’s solo project, A Body in Places, began in 2014 with a 12-hour performance at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Since then, she has performed site-specific variations of A Body in Places at 76 sites. In 2016, Eiko was the subject of the 10th annual Danspace Platform, a month-long curated program that brought her a special Bessie citation, an Art Matters grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In 2021, Battery Park City, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), and New York University’s Skirball Center co-commissioned a monologue performance, Slow Turn, for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. 

Eiko’s multi-dimensional project, A Body in Fukushima, is a decade-long collaboration with historian/photographer William Johnston. Since 2014, they have visited Fukushima, Japan five times to record Eiko performing alone for Johnston’s camera in the irradiated landscapes affected by the 2011 nuclear meltdown. Eiko has presented these photos in many exhibitions, lectures, memorial events, and performances. Their book of photography and essays, A Body in Fukushima, was published in 2021. A feature length film of the same title premiered in 2022 at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight Festival. It was screened in many film festivals across the globe and was exhibited in the 2024 Yokohama Triennale. 

In 2017, Eiko launched her multi-year Duet Project, a mutable and evolving series of experiments in collaboration. Eiko has worked with artists as diverse as David Harrington, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Killacky, Joan Jonas, DonChristian Jones, Iris McCloughan, Beverly McIver, Mérian Soto, and her late grandfather, Chikuha Otake. The project has produced dance performances, talking duets, public dialogues, lectures, paintings, videos, and films. 

In 2019, Eiko started her ten-year project, I Invited Myself, which exhibits and advocates for the videos and films she has created over the last 40 years. Working closely with museum and gallery curators, Eiko considers how viewers experience her media works in the space with and without her live body. For different iterations at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, also in Philadelphia, Eiko applied varied logistics and themes in selecting and installing her works. 

Eiko teaches an interdisciplinary course that combines movement study with a focus on mass violence and nuclear issues at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Colorado College, where she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in 2020. 

www.eikootake.org

Wen Hui is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary dance. She also makes documentary films and installations. For the past thirty years, Wen Hui has been using dance theater as a means of social intervention. Since 2008, she has been researching the body as a form of personal social documentation and experimenting with how bodily memory can catalyze the collision between history and reality. 

A graduate of the Beijing Dance Academy in 1989 with a degree in choreography, Wen Hui studied modern dance in New York in 1994. She also received a 1997/1998 fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to continue her studies in New York.  From 1999 until 2000, she worked with Ralph Lemon’s Dance project, Geography Trilogy II – Trees and toured the US with the company which included a stop at Next Wave in 2000. 

In 1994, Wen Hui co-founded the first independent dance theater group in China, the Living Dance Studio, in Beijing. In 2005, Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang established the Caochangdi Workstation and co-curated The Crossing International Dance Festival in Beijing. The same year, they initiated The European Artists Exchange Project and Young Choreographers Project. In 2015, Wen Hui curated the ReActor Project at Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (Power Station of Shanghai).  

Wen Hui’s work has attracted much international attention and she has been invited to perform on the most provocative international stages and festivals, including Report on Body at the Walker Art Center in 2003. Her two films, Dance with Third Grandmother and Dance with Farm Workers, were shown in the Chinese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Dance Only Exists When It Is Performed is a set of two solo exhibitions featuring Yvonne Rainer and Wen Hui at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum in 2019. Her exhibition, The Arts of Memory, was shown at the Guangzhou Image Triennial in 2021. Wen Hui’s solo I am 60, was presented at Festival d’Automne in Paris and at the 2021 Ruhrtriennale in Germany. Her newest work, New Report on Giving Birth (2023), was also presented at the Festival d’Automne, Rhine-Main Dance Festival at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, HELLERAU European Art Center in Dresden, and at PACT Zollverein in Essen. 

In 2004, her Report on Body won the ZKB Patronage Prize by Zürcher Theater Spektakel. In 2021, Wen Hui received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as the Goethe Medal. 

David Ferri has worked with prominent choreographers such as Pina Bausch, Shen Wei, Doug Varone, Jane Comfort, Yin Mei, David Rousseve, and Ballet Preljocaj. He has been the Production Manager for the prestigious American Dance Festival since 1996 where he also trains up and coming American lighting designers. He received a 1987/1988 Bessie Award for his design of Doug Varone’s Straits, and a 2000/2001 Bessie for Sustained Achievement in Lighting Design. Mr. Ferri is the resident Lighting Designer and Technical Director for The Vassar College Dance Department. He was also resident lighting designer and technical director at PS 122 from 1985—1991. He lives in New York between his travels and projects. 

Iris McCloughan is a director, performance maker, and writer in New York. Their original performance works have been presented in New York (Danspace Project, PAGEANT, BAX, The Poetry Project, Ars Nova, Movement Research at the Judson Church) and Philadelphia (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Contemporary, FringeArts). Iris has collaborated with many artists and writers, including Eiko Otake, Joan Jonas, Mike Lala, Alex Tatarsky, Lena Engelstein + Lisa Fagin, Juliana May, Beth Gill, and Julie Mayo. They are the recipient of a 2024/2025 New Play Directing Fellowship from Clubbed Thumb and a member of the 2024/2025 Soho Rep Writer Director Lab.