Performer, teacher, and director Rhodessa Jones was born in 1948 in Bunnell, Florida to migrant farmworker parents. As a child, she traveled with her family – which included her brother, the revered choreographer Bill T. Jones – up and down the eastern seaboard doing farmwork. Jones is Co-Artistic Director of the critically acclaimed performance company, Cultural Odyssey. She founded The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, an award-winning performance workshop now in its 23rd year. A recipient of a USA Artist Fellowship, Jones has conducted the Medea Project in South African prisons, working with incarcerated women and training correctional personnel and local artists. Jones is an author, and her work has been documented in numerous articles and books. At the University level, she was named Frank H.T. Rhodes Chair at Cornell University (2018-2021), and while a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, she was invited to join August Wilson, Cornel West, Yo-Yo Ma, and Anna Deavere Smith as a Montgomery Fellow, fostering “the advancement of the academic realm of the College in ways that will significantly add to the quality and character of the institution.” She has participated in residencies at Brown University and Scripps College Humanities Institute. Jones has received many awards and honors, including an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts, SF Bay Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Award, SF Foundation Community Leadership Award, Non-Profit Arts Excellence Award by the SF Business Arts Council, and an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater. In 2020, Jones voiced the character “Lulu” in Disney/Pixar’s SOUL, which was nominated for three Oscars and won for Best Animated Feature. In addition, the film won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score.

Joanna Haigood describes herself as a “site-artist, dancer and aerialist” whose multi-media work uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Haigood has presented her work in grain silos, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx, and San Francisco City Hall, to name just a few. She has been awarded commissions by numerous institutions including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, United States Artist Fellowship, New York Bessie Award, the Doris Duke Artist Award and a Rainin Fellowship. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor young artists through her teaching at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, the San Francisco Circus Center, and through her company, Zaccho Dance Theatre.