Grisha Coleman, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jerron Herman and Candace Feldman, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, mayfield brooks, Reggie Wilson / Fist and Heel Performance Group, and slowdanger to receive prestigious creative support
September 24, 2025 (BECKET, Mass.) — Jacob’s Pillow is pleased to announce artists selected to participate in the prestigious Pillow Lab residency program as part of the organization’s continued year-round programming. Participating artists, in chronological order, are: Grisha Coleman, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jerron Herman and Candace L. Feldman, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, mayfield brooks, Reggie Wilson / Fist and Heel Performance Group, and slowdanger. An eighth residency will be announced in early 2026.
The Pillow Lab is a residency program that supports U.S.-based and international dance artists in the crucial development, research, and technical stages of choreographic projects, and offers the opportunity for artists to work in the Pillow’s retreat-like atmosphere, studio spaces, and wooded landscape. Lead support for the Pillow Lab is generously provided by the Mellon Foundation.
A portion of this year’s Pillow Lab cohort will work in the new Doris Duke Theatre, which opened its doors to the public in July 2025. The state-of-the-art theater expands residency location and opportunities for artists, providing access to a makerspace that can integrate emerging technologies and bring dancemakers’ tech-driven visions and works to full actualization.
“Pillow Labs are an essential component of the magic that takes place at Jacob’s Pillow year-round,” said Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge. “The exploration and artistic development that occurs through these residencies can be transformational for the artist, their collaborators, and the work. We are honored to be an organization that intentionally nurtures the choreographic process through an immersive retreat-like atmosphere, fueled by the generative power of nature.”
Pillow Lab artists and their collaborators receive unrestricted use of Jacob’s Pillow’s iconic site, founded more than 90 years ago in the bucolic landscape that characterizes the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Artists live on campus and receive housing, an artist fee for each collaborator, a grocery stipend, and access to the Pillow’s extensive Archives.
Residency programs have existed at Jacob’s Pillow in various forms since the organization’s founding in the early 1930s. The Pillow Lab program was launched in 2017 and sets an industry example with a distinctive mission, vision, set of values, and approach.
Choreographers selected for residencies through the Pillow Lab are chosen by Tatge as well as Associate Artistic Director Kim Chan and Associate Curator Melanie George. Most residencies include an informal, work-in-progress showing limited to an invited audience of Jacob’s Pillow Members, as well as faculty, staff, and students from the Pillow’s College Partnership Program, community members, and artists’ colleagues. For more information, visit jacobspillow.org/pillowlab.
View full gallery of Pillow Lab Artists
2025-2026 Pillow Lab Residency Season
Artist information and project descriptions follow. The work created during each residency is at varying stages of development and may or may not be performed as part of the annual Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Programming and dates are subject to change.
Grisha Coleman
Technology Residency: October 1-12, 2025
Invited Showing (not a sit-down showing): October 11, 2025 at 2pm I Doris Duke Theatre
During her Pillow Lab residency in the new Doris Duke Theatre, dance and interdisciplinary artist Grisha Coleman will develop THE MOVEMENT UNDERCOMMONS: Technology as Resistance | Future Archive. This project<> explores the cultural and expressive dimensions of human movement through mobile motion capture technology. While in residence, Coleman and her collaborators will experiment with the creation and installation of movement data ‘portraits’—time-based movement vignettes built from data—visualized and sonified to depict the beauty of everyday movement hiding in plain sight.
This project hinges upon data collected in subjects’ homes, storefronts, farms, studios, community centers, and roadsides. Through the gathering and creative use of motion capture data, the project builds ‘kinetic haikus’ from movement data. Alongside the installation, the project envisions a lexicon of movement-as-dance that considers the impact and ethics of technology and embodied cultural memory.
Coleman is a former member of the acclaimed dance company Urban Bush Women. At Jacob’s Pillow, she recently participated in the Dancerly Intelligences residency in 2023, and in the series of talks “FUTURE FIGURES: Dance and Emerging Technologies” in 2025. She is a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her art and scholarly work echo::system is a springboard for re-imagining the environment, environmental change, and environmental justice. A New York City native, Coleman has received national and international recognition, including a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts in Media Grant, the position of 2014 Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University, a fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and multiple grants from the Rockefeller Multi Arts Project Fund, The Surdna Foundation, and The Creative Capital Foundation.
Marjani Forté-Saunders
Developmental Residency: October 22 – November 5, 2025
Invited Showing: November 1, 2025 at 2pm I Perles Family Studio
In this residency, Marjani Forté-Saunders will develop float., a meditation and a study on the wondrous. In her words, “the word ‘wondrous’ evokes a sense of awe and admiration, often used to describe something extraordinarily beautiful, remarkable, or inspiring. It captures the essence of experiences or sights that leave one marveling at their splendor. The intuitive human entity is full of wonders.” float. contemplates the Zen Buddhist concept of clouds and water: to wondrously navigate the hurdles of a journey with a malleable and steady advancement. Through her creative, scientific, and technological research for float., Forté-Saunders engages the preternatural wonders of our central nervous systems weathering infinite change: love, loss, sensation, and—prayerfully—lift.
Marjani Forté-Saunders is a mother, choreographer, performer, community organizer, and a three-time Bessie Award winner. She received the Dance Magazine Harkness Award in 2020. She is in steady collaboration with her partner, composer Everett Asis Saunders (New Music USA Awardee), and the duo has emerged as 7NMS| Marjani Forte & Everett Saunders (7NMS| M + E), with awarded residencies at the Petronio Residency Center, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Academy of Music, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. They are recipients of the 2021 National Dance Production Grant for their new work PROPHET. She is the Visioning Founder of Art x Power, a platform dedicated to fostering purpose and innovation by investing in and building resilient futures for Black artists.
Jerron Herman and Candace L. Feldman
Residency: November 17-23, 2025
Invited Showing: November 22, 2025 at 2pm I Perles Family Studio
Choreographer and dancer Jerron Herman joins with longtime collaborator Candace L. Feldman to develop Many Ways to Raise a Fist, a full-length devised theater piece produced by INTERIM and featuring a fully disabled cast. Drawing from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where justice and superego are entangled in an eternal battle, the play centers Pros, who sits marooned on a literal and metaphorical island awaiting a trial on his “thought crimes.” The piece is written and performed by Herman, based on a 2019 solo. This new extension welcomes multifaceted artists Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, Ogemdi Ude, and vocalist/composer Molly Joyce. Together the ensemble will, through litigation and Structuralism, devise defenses that interrogate the method and necessity of protest.
Jerron Herman is a soulful, driven disabled artist committed to collaboration and joy as a performer/director. He has premiered works at Danspace Project, PSNY, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Herman has activated museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, and the Guggenheim with daring interdisciplinary installations. He was also the choreographer and co-director of Sensorium Ex, a new opera composed by Paola Prestini with libretto by Brenda Shaugnessey. He is a part of INTERIM, a boutique centering joy for disabled artists helmed by Candace Feldman. He has received fellowships through United States Artists, NYU/Center for Ballet and the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and Disability Futures, among other accolades.
Candace L. Feldman, daughter of a Zimbabwean father and Native Hawaiian mother, is a creative alchemist and producer with 20+ years of experience. She mothers INTERIM Corporation, a boutique management consortium for disabled artists centered on joy, co-envisioned with Jerron Herman, that includes Herman, Molly Joyce and Christopher Nunez. She has held leadership roles at Kinetic Light, UA Presents, 651 ARTS and continues to be a creative processor and encourager to colleagues. Honors include NEFA’s National Theater Project Grant, Kennedy Center Gold Medallion, and multiple awards for justice and leadership.
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham
Developmental Residency: December 1-7, 2025
Invited Showing: December 6, 2025 at 6pm I Perles Family Studio
During this Pillow Lab residency, choreographer Kyle Abraham will create a new dance work for his company Abraham.in.Motion (A.I.M) entitled White Space, an evening-length dance-theater work for 12 dancers that makes space for humor, solitude, comfort and catastrophe. Equal parts a conversation and an intentional contradiction, White Space features an original commissioned score by composers Jason Moran and Nico Muhly, and explores the uncomfortable space of belonging and the often unwelcome acknowledgment of “the other”. This 50-plus minute dance work, rooted in a “post-modern gumbo” of social dance practices, questions what constitutes “contemporary experience”, and defines it as the casual and passive observance of what surrounds us, but more so our collective participation.
A MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the 2012 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, Kyle Abraham and his company have performed many times at Jacob’s Pillow, most recently in the company’s Ted Shawn Theatre engagement in 2022 and in Abraham’s appearance in Merce Cunningham’s Three Duets on the Henry J. Leir Stage in 2024. Abraham has received the Princess Grace Statue Award and the Doris Duke Award Recipient, and served as a visiting professor in residence at UCLA’s World Arts Cultures in Dance program from 2016 to 2021. In 2021, he was named the Claude and Alfred Mann Endowed Professorship in Dance at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. He currently sits on the advisory board for Dance Magazine and the artist advisory board for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. In addition to performing and developing new works for his company, Abraham has been commissioned by companies including New York City Ballet, the National Ballet of Cuba, The Royal Ballet, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
mayfield brooks
Developmental Residency: January 21 – February 1, 2026
Invited Showing: January 31, 2026 at 2pm I Perles Family Studio
Since 2021, choreographer mayfield brooks has explored the life and death cycle of whales. When a whale dies and sinks to the ocean floor, its body sustains an entire ecosystem. In Whale Fall, brooks extends this research into their embodied practice of vocal and dance improvisation, expanding to explore the musicality of whale song and the history of the whaling industry, one of the first integrated industries built on Black and Indigenous labor.
At its core, Whale Fall asks: what becomes possible, inevitable, and necessary when systems break down? In what will become a performance cycle in three parts, decomposition is a world-making force, a process of unbecoming that feeds a different existence.
This Pillow Lab residency is co-sponsored by Wesleyan University and is part of brooks’s 2025-26 appointment as Artist in Residence at Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts, where they will develop a new dance film, artist book, and community gatherings, and teach a practice-based research class in the Dance Department. Their Pillow time will support early development of a new work that maps shoreline entanglements of human and non-human worlds. In February 2026, brooks and collaborators will present Whale Fall in three parts at Wesleyan.
mayfield brooks is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They teach and perform through Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology engaging dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks has received the Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Bessie Award nomination, and served as the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA, where they are now a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.
Reggie Wilson / Fist and Heel Performance Group
Developmental Residency: February 11-22, 2026
Invited Showing: February 21, 2026 at 2pm I Perles Family Studio
In this residency, choreographer Reggie Wilson will return to the Pillow to develop Sublimation of Clarity [working title], with contemporary interdisciplinary artist Nicholas Galanin as part of their multi-year collaboration. Wilson will develop dance and kinesthetics, Galanin sound and visual elements, and together they will create and weave a unique soundscape for the new work that explores evocative and provocative questions and responses rooted in human experiences and life changes imposed by loss, personal grief, connections to the Mississippi Delta blues, perspectives of resilience, and ideas around the word “community.”
This foundational phase seeks to sublimate hubris through deep listening, trust, and authentic exchange, embracing what emerges from the process. Wilson and Galanin aim to unearth intangibles of growth, leadership, belonging, and community while building pathways toward self-realization and self-determination.
Founded in 1989, Reggie Wilson / Fist and Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company that investigates the intersections of cultural anthropology and movement practices. Wilson draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he calls “post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances.” Reggie Wilson / Fist and Heel Performance Group made its Pillow debut in 1996 and has returned in several seasons since, including for presentations in the Doris Duke Theatre in 2014 and the World Premiere of POWER in 2019, which was developed in two Pillow Lab residencies.
Nicholas Galanin is a Sitka Tribe of Alaska multi-disciplinary artist and musician of Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent whose work examines the complexities of contemporary Indigenous identity, culture, and representation. Galanin holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from London Guildhall University in Jewelry Design and a Master of Fine Arts in Indigenous Visual Arts from Massey University in New Zealand, prior to which he apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers in his community. He is represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York, his music is released by Sub Pop Records in Seattle, and he lives and works with his partner Merritt Johnson and their children in Sheet’ka (Sitka), Alaska.
slowdanger
Technical Theater Residency: March 18-29, 2026
Invited Showing: March 28, 2026 at 2pm I Doris Duke Theatre
During this Pillow Lab residency in the new Doris Duke Theatre, multidisciplinary performance group slowdanger will develop STORY BALLET, a surreal dance theater quintet with an intergenerational cast, holographic projections, and live sound. The work reimagines Hector Berlioz’s 1830 Symphonie Fantastique as an evening-length performance exploring mental health, escapism, and the question: what holds us together?
Berlioz’s original narrative objectifies “the woman” as an obsession; STORY BALLET queers this concept, reframing it as “dancing with the ghost of one’s self.” Five performers embody facets of a central character, each confronting obsessions and past selves, with noir lighting, Pepper’s ghost–style projections, and live sound underscoring the theme. The work was first incubated at Texas A&M University in 2024 and will premiere at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh in fall 2026.
slowdanger is a multidisciplinary performance entity founded in 2013 by co-artistic directors and life partners anna thompson and taylor knight, creating work at the intersection of dance, sound, and technology. Rooted in queer, non-binary world-building, their practice reimagines performance as a space for embodied intelligence, resilience, and collective transformation. Their work has been shared at The Museum of Modern Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Kennedy Center, Dance Place, Springboard Danse Montreal, and internationally at venues such as Place des Arts and Usine C. Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2018, they have held residencies at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and Texas A&M University, receiving support from the New England Foundation for the Arts and the National Performance Network. Recent works include SUPERCELL (2023), ABYSS (2025), and the forthcoming STORY BALLET (2026).
ABOUT JACOB’S PILLOW
Jacob’s Pillow is a National Historic Landmark, recipient of the National Medal of Arts, and home to America’s longest-running international dance festival, which celebrated its 93rd season in Summer 2025. Jacob’s Pillow acknowledges that it rests on the ancestral homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok or Mohican people. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors and elders past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all. In addition, we acknowledge the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag and other tribal nations who also made their homes in what is now known as Massachusetts.
Founded by Ted Shawn in 1933, each Festival includes national and international dance companies and free and ticketed performances, talks, tours, classes, exhibits, events, and community programs. The School at Jacob’s Pillow, a prestigious professional dance training center, advances the careers of the upcoming generation of performers and choreographers; during the Festival, 100 international dancers evolve as artists in ballet, choreography, contemporary, musical theatre, tap, and other genres; and year round, artist faculty and accomplished alumni nurture younger dancers in a series of Jacob’s Pillow 360 workshops and intensives offered in partnership with leading dance institutions worldwide. The Pillow also provides professional advancement opportunities across the disciplines of arts administration, design, video, and production through seasonal internships and a year-round Administrative Fellows program. Through its community engagement programs, the Pillow serves as a partner and active citizen in its local community. The Pillow’s extensive Archives, open year-round to the public and highlighted online at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, chronicle more than a century of dance in photographs, programs, books, costumes, audiotapes, and videos.
Notable artists who have created or premiered dances at the Pillow include choreographers Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Donald McKayle, Kevin McKenzie, Twyla Tharp, Ralph Lemon, Susan Marshall, Trisha Brown, Ronald K. Brown, Wally Cardona, Andrea Miller, and Trey McIntyre; performed by artists such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Carmen de Lavallade, Mark Morris, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Edward Villella, Rasta Thomas, and hundreds of others. On March 2, 2011, President Barack Obama honored Jacob’s Pillow with a National Medal of Arts, the highest arts award given by the United States Government, making the Pillow the first dance presenting organization to receive this prestigious award. The Pillow’s Executive and Artistic Director since 2016 is Pamela Tatge. For more information, visit www.jacobspillow.org.
MAJOR INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT FOR JACOB’S PILLOW IS GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY: Arison Arts Foundation, Barr Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, Mellon Foundation, Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund, and The Shubert Foundation. As of September 10, 2025.