ographers Amy Sue Rosen, David Alan Harris, Sarah Pogostin, Li Chiao-Ping, Eun Me Ahn, Stephan Koplowitz, Charles Wright and Cheng-Chieh Yu. Johnson has a background in visual arts (drawing, painting and design), theatre and voice. He has been a student of Klein Technique with Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein for more than a decade, and continues to practice contact/improvisation in play and performance. His experience with the transformational process of The Work of Byron Katie has become a radical catalyst in his life.
Michael Mazzola (lighting designer) has designed lighting in venues across the U.S. and Europe, ranging from opera houses to circus tents to outdoor amphitheaters. Twice a New York Dance and Performance Award winner, Michael has recently designed lighting for the Bebe Miller Company, David Parsons Dance Company, Stuttgart Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Royal Ballet of Flanders, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and Easai Pharmaceutical Company in addition to several works with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.
Logan Kibens (video and effects editing) is a Chicago-based film and video artist whose work has screened at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. She has designed video projections for theatre and dance companies like Steppenwolf, About Face, The Neo-Futurists, Roadworks, Lucky Plush, Mordine and Co. and worked as a video editor with The Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Lookingglass Theatre, Royal George Theatre and Washington National Opera and more.
Cassie Meador (company member) is a choreographer, performer and teacher from Georgia, based in Washington, D.C. She has created dances in communities throughout the U.S. and in Japan, Canada, Ireland and Guyana. As an educator, she has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Dance Center at Columbia College, American University, Wesleyan University, Kyoto Arts Center, American Dance Festival and the Bealtaine Festival. Meador received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance from The Ohio State University, where she was awarded a scholarship in choreography. Meador currently serves as a project director at the Dance Exchange and makes her own work within it. In 2006 she co-directed the premiere of 613 Acts of Radical Prayer: Opening Acts with Liz Lerman at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and went on to create new versions of the work at Brown University and the Bealtaine Festival in Ireland. In 2008, Meador received a John F. Kennedy Center Local Dance Commissioning Project grant. She presented her work, Drift, on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in September 2008. In 2009, Meador was part of the Feet to the Fire project at Wesleyan University, where she co-taught a course on tropical ecology with Matt Mahaney and Barry Chernoff. The team traveled to Guyana and worked with science and art students to bring both artistic and scientific tools to bare on ecology and global warming. She joined the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 2002.
Matt Mahaney (adjunct artist) graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts and has performed works by Brenda Daniels, Sean Sullivan, Trish Casey, Diane Markham, Scott Rink and Alberto (Tito) Delsaz and his mentor, David Beadle. Mahaney also produces his own work which includes, but is not limited to, digital video, music, choreography and sculpture. Gesel Mason (adjunct artist) is co-founder and artistic director of Mason/Rhynes Productions and artistic director for Gesel Mason Performance Projects. She has performed with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, the Repertory Dance Theatre of Utah and the Silesian Dance Theatre. She was a Liz Lerman Dance Exchange company member from 1996 to 2000. Mason has been artist-in-residence at schools across the country and was granted numerous awards including Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards in 2001, 2004 and 2005, and an Arts Council of Montgomery County Artist Fellowship in 1999 and 2005. Mason was selected as emerging choreographer by the Bates Dance Festival in 2000. Her work has been presented by the Walker Arts Center, Diverse Works, Museum of Contemporary Art, Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, DanceAfrica and the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
Jesse Muench (lighting supervisor) has been touring with Ferocious Beauty: Genome since 2006. She toured nationally and internationally with Aspen Santa Fe Ballet for five years as the lighting supervisor. She was also lighting supervisor for the Aspen Dance Festival where she worked with companies like Hubbard Street Dance, Paul Taylor Dance Co., Washington Ballet, Pilobolus, Momix and Parsons Dance Co. Most recently she has toured to Australia with Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Muench has a Bachelor of Science in biology from Colorado State University and resides in Santa Fe, N.M.
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