Samuel Briseno-Jimenez
sbris001@ucr.edu
BA in Dance, UCR
BS in Business Administration – Marketing Concentration, UCR
Sammy is a queer and trans multipotentialite who enchants the space with their magic, rumbles the ground with their movements, and jesters with mischievous modes of moving drawing out the questions, concerns, curiosities. Their work focuses on dance making, community building and collective care, specifically for BIPOC & LGBTQIA+ communities. A descendant of immigrant land laborers who sprouted new life in the twin-border cities Mexicali-Calexico, Sammy queerly disrupts any confining configuration or binding binary, through their capacity to transform, flexibility to adapt, their groundedness and through their intentionality. Sammy’s work is sensational, dreamy, imaginative, reflective, and weaves together a collective tapestry of their identities, to pull the threads to a tighter tension, not only adorn but also to address our many intersections and how these intersectionalities are widely contested inside of our current political regime. Sammy is completing their Masters in Experimental Choreography at UCR and walking balls in the West Coast as Princess of the Kiki House of Peaches.

Yuran Choi, She/Her                                                                                                                                                                                    ychoi148@ucr.edu                                                                                                                                                                                                B.A. in Dance, Kookmin University                                                                                                                                                             Yuran Choi is a professional dancer with the Cheongju City Dance Company and a current M.F.A. student in Dance (Choreography) at the University of California, Riverside. She trained at the Korea National High School of Traditional Arts as a national scholarship student, touring Europe with the Arirang Art Troupe, and later earned her B.A. in Dance from Kookmin University with a focus on Korean dance. During her undergraduate studies, she was invited in 2017 to Rutgers University in the U.S., where she presented on arts education practices, performed in Hi K-Dance, and supported master classes as a teaching assistant.

She is a designated trainee of Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 92, Taepyeongmu, and a recipient of several top prizes, including the 2018 Vienna International Competition, the Korean Dance Association, and the Suri Dance Competition. With the Cheongju City Dance Company, she has also performed widely in major national productions and festivals.

Her research focuses on breathing-based practices in Korean dance as an alternative foundation for movement training and choreography, exploring how breath-centered methods can inform contemporary dance creation and pedagogy.

Megan Fowler-Hurst, They/Them
mfowl020@ucr.edu
B.F.A. in Dance, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
Megan Fowler-Hurst is a queer multidisciplinary artist whose work can be seen, heard, felt and worn. Their performance practice is a visceral exploration of the human experience in a digital age, where identity and emotion are constantly distorted by technology. Megan’s movement exploration includes floorwork, body communication through gesture and improvisation. They are drawn to dance in unconventional spaces, expanded cinema and vocal expression which is often present in their artmaking. In 2021, Megan founded the Riverside based dance film festival, Some Dance Screen Fest. As director they developed a mentorship program that provided community members with tools and equipment to create dance films. In 2024, Megan co-founded Merge Performance, an experimental artist collective based in the Inland Empire/SoCal. As a filmmaker, their films have been screened at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art (2022), Inland Film Festival (2024), Riverside Art Museum (2024) and Film Maudit 2.0 (2024).  Megan teaches Creative Dance for the Camera to K-12th graders throughout the Inland Empire.

Negar Kamali, She/Her
negar.hajikamali@email.ucr.edu
BA in Architecture, Qazvin Azad University                                                                                                                                                 She is a multidisciplinary artist with experience in dance, photography, videography, and woodworking. Since 2011, she has formally taught Persianate and Iranian dance forms, as well as contemporary dance. Her travels across Iran have profoundly influenced her creative practice, inspiring choreography that reflects the country’s diverse geography and rich literary heritage.

She is an active member of the Iranian Dance Studies Working Group (Dance Studies Association), where she contributes to dialogue and collaboration among dancers and choreographers in Iran and across the diaspora. Her current research explores themes of displacement, identity, memory, sensation, and temporality, creating works that offer a visceral connection between movement and meaning.

Maryam Malmir, She/Her
maryam.malmir@email.ucr.edu
BS in Pure Mathematics, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Maryam Malmir is a Contemporary Dancer and Choreographer from Iran. Her works are mostly conceptual, and due to her background in Mathematics, she uses Mathematical patterns as her choreographic language to convey meanings. She has produced her last choreographic piece, The Loop, in Cyprus collaborated with the dancers from Brazil and Colombia with the support of European Union. She has been awarded ISPA, International Society for the Performing Arts, global fellowship 2020,2021 and 2022, IETM, global network of contemporary performing arts, Global Connectors 2023-2027, GCRP, global Cultural Relations Program 2022, ATSA, Arthink South Asia fellowship 2019-2020 and internationale tanzmesse NRW professional visitors 2024.

Cecilia Slongo
cecilia.slongo@email.ucr.edu
BA in Dance Making. University of California, Riverside                                                                                                                    Cecilia is an artist deeply rooted in the philosophy of coexistence, focusing on understanding our humanity as a complex part of a delicate global balance. As the Argentine daughter of Italian immigrants seeking a politically progressive society, Cecilia inherited a strong political awareness that continues to shape her creative and personal worldview. Through her artistic practice Cecilia explores the potentials of dance creation from a perspective that embraces plural identities, cultural memory, and social expression. Cecilia obtained a bachelor’s degree in Dance Making from the University of California, Riverside in 2021. The same year she created a dance film Persequī, exploring collective memory and its residual in the body. The film screened internationally at film festivals such as the Exeter International Dance Film Festival (UK), the Toronto International Women’s Film Festival (Canada), the Berlin International Art Film Festival (Germany), the Sans Souci International Film Festival (USA), and AWARD (Serbia).

Venghour Than

Bio coming soon!