ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Raja Feather Kelly, Creator, Director and Performer | Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory—a Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company that he founded in 2009. Over the past decade he has created 16 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim, most recently WEDNESDAY (New York Live Arts), the UGLY trilogy (Bushwick Starr, New York Live Arts, and ImPulsTanz), and The Kill One Race – part documentary, part theatre, part reality TV game show (filmed at Playwrights Horizon). Kelly choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon). He was hailed by The New York Times as the choreographer who “can make your play move” for his extensive work. Off-Broadway credits include: Macbeth In Stride (American Repertory Theater), We’re Gonna Die(Second Stage Theater – his directorial debut), On Sugarland (New York Theater Workshop),SUFFS (The Public Theater), and Lempicka (La Jolla Playhouse). 

He has received dozens of awards, fellowships and honors including a Mellon Foundation grant (2021), an Obie Award and Outer Critics Circle Award honor for choreography for A Strange Loop (2020 ), an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2021), a Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts (2019–2020), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019–2021), a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award (2009), a Creative Capital Award (2019 ), three Princess Grace Awards (2017-2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019 ), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine’s inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), a Creator-in- Residence at Kickstarter (2018), and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (2017), a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard (2017), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), an ImPulsTanz Festival DanceWEB Scholarship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography

Fellowship (2016). He’s been nominated for two Lucille Lortel Awards (2019, 2020), a Chita Rivera Award for Outstanding Choreography, and was a finalist for the 2019 SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award for outstanding choreography of A Strange Loop (Playwrights Horizons and winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2021 winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical) and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama). He was featured on the cover of the February 2020 issue of Dance Magazine.  

Laura Snow, Video and Projection | Laura Snow is a filmmaker, the Media Director for New York City Ballet, and since 2012, video collaborator of the feath3r theory. She most recently produced and edited the feath3r theory & Playwright Horizons’ series The Kill One Race (2021), and collaborated on video for Parts 2 and 3 of Raja Feather Kelly’s UGLY series, HYSTERIA (2020 ) & BLUE (2021), which premiered at New York Live Arts and ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival, respectively. Laura has associate produced documentary series and films for CNN, Discovery and VICE, including the Emmy-nominated Going to War for PBS and the feature documentary, Newtown (2016). Laura’s solo directorial work includes the short documentaries Leave-Taking (2016) and for New York City Ballet, Return to Form (2021). Laura holds a B.A. in Dance & American Studies from Connecticut College, and an M.A. in Arts & Cultural Management, with a specialization in the Moving Image from the University of Melbourne.

Tuçe Yasak, Lighting Design | Tuçe Yasak has been following light in NYC since 2009, creating over 100 site-specific light installations for performance in the US and abroad. Yasak received the 2018 BESSIE (...Memoirs of a... Unicorn by Marjani Forte-Saunders at Collapsable Hole and NYLA) and 2019 BESSIE (Oba Qween Baba King Baba by Ni’Ja Whitson at Danspace) for Outstanding Visual Design with her lighting design. She has been collaborating with Raja Feather Kelly and the feath3r theory since 2015. Among her recent collaborations: UGLY, HYSTERIA and BLUE by Raja Feather Kelly (New York Live Arts, Bushwick Starr and ImpulsTanz), This Bridge Called My Ass by Miguel Gutierrez (The Chocolate Factory/NY, Montpellier Dance Festival/ France, The Walker Center/Minneapolis, PICA/Portland), We’re Gonna Die written by Young Jean Lee, directed by Raja Feather Kelly (2nd Stage Theater/NYC), M---ER by Autumn Knight (On The Boards and Abrons Arts Center), JoyUS JustUS by Contra Tiempo (national tour and Jacobs Pillow). Light, movement and architecture intertwine in Yasak’s work to support space-making and story-telling. Her Light Journals were presented in March 2021 by Ars Nova NY and she is currently developing her first individual installation Wall. www.micoLUCO.com

You-Shin Chen, Scenic Design | You-Shin Chen is a USA-based Taiwanese scenic designer who is committed to diversity and humanity. You-Shin centers humans, both the characters and the viewers, and their experiences in her process of creating a three-dimensional space. She is the recipient of the 2019 Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award at The Lilly Awards, the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Scenic Design in 2020, and the Connecticut Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Scenic Design in 2022. Her scenic design was selected to be part of the USA exhibition at the 2019 Prague Quadrennial. She started collaborating with the feath3r theory in the summer of 2018, with projects including UGLY 1: Black Queer Zoo, The Kill One Race, Wednesday, and UGLY 3: Blue. Her other favorite projects include Red Velvet (Shakespeare Theater Company, DC); Mlima’s Tale (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis); Dael Orlandersmith’s New Age (Milwaukee Rep); SKiNFoLK (the Bushwick Starr & National Black Theatre); Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie (ArsNova); Troy Anthony’s The Revival: It Is Our Duty (The Shed, NYC); Walden (TheaterWorks Hartford); Lessons in Survival: 1971 (Vineyard Theater, NYC). Member of USA829.www.youshinchen.com 

Brandi Holt, Costume Design | Brandi Holt is the company manager for the feath3r theory and executive assistant to Raja Feather Kelly. She holds a masters in arts and cultural management from Pratt Institute and has been working with the feath3r theory since 2019. Holt has been a professional illustrator and fashion designer for the past 10 years. UGLY Part 3: BLUE which premiered in Vienna, Austria in August 2021 was her costume design debut.

David Baldwin, Music | David Baldwin is a songwriter, singer and producer based in Los Angeles. In 2020, he released Tears of Joy, the debut EP from his new project Creature of Doom. On Tears of Joy, Creature of Doom perform a sort of musical alchemy, lending new emotional texture to our most self-sabotaging impulses. “The idea for Creature of Doom is all about not being able to get out of your own way,” says Baldwin. “It’s about being able to laugh at that and celebrate it, instead of just wallowing in it.” In bringing Tears of Joy to life, Baldwin recorded and produced every track on his own, mining inspiration from artists as eclectic as Charlotte Gainsbourg, Gary Numan and Frank Sinatra. Mixed by Ali Chant (Perfume Genius, Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey) the result is a strangely exhilarating and endlessly unpredictable form of alt-pop, imbued with equal parts dramatic grandeur and raw emotional honesty.

 Emily Wells, Music | “Quietly transfixing” composer/producer Emily Wells is known for her varied use of classical and modern instrumentation, “a master of blending the worlds of classical and electronics” NPR and “dramatic, meticulous and gothic songs” New York Times. On stage Wells’ builds a “new instrument” out of acoustic and electronic drums, synth, violin, and her evocative performances leave audiences equal parts dancing and grieving. Wells’ latest full-length record, This World is Too _____ For You, has been hailed by NPR as “breathtaking” “mind-blowing” and “visionary”. The ten song album, arranged for chamber ensemble by composer Michi Wiancko, was commissioned by Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series and Metropolis Ensemble who performs on the album along with drummer/composer Shayna Dunkelman. Wells received the NYFA Women in music grant in 2020. She has toured internationally performing notably at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, The Guggenheim, MASS MoCA, Celebrate Brooklyn, The Getty, and MoMA. She has lectured at The National Gallery of Art, Emory College, Treefort Music Festival, and Arcosanti’s Convergence Festival.

Christoph Mateka, Sound Mix | Christoph Mateka’s focus is on Sound and the listeners’ experience with sound. Based in Vienna, he’s worked with it for more than 15 years as a sound designer, music producer and sound engineer for theater, opera and studio productions. Throughout studies of musicology, Christoph Mateka started a recording studio, working with popular music artists. Along with music production, he co-founded and toured with the electronic music project Gudrun Von Laxenburg (BMG UK), did sound design and live sound for the opera The Turn Of The Screw at LaMonnaie for Andrea Breth and Ben Glassberg and sound design for theater productions of Mateja Koleznik, as well as for ImPulsTanz Festival. Along with composition and sound design for Raja Feather Kelly’s VR experience Ordinary Gesture, he created concepts and the realization of Installations in Zoom Children’s Museum Vienna with Swiss artist Eloui. Christoph Mateka also works as an instrumentalist (violin, synthesizer, keyboards, singer) and producer.

UGLY Part 3: BLUE is supported by an APAP ArtsForward Grant from the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, made possible with the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as a commissioning grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. 

This is the third and concluding part of the pop queer empathy trilogy UGLY, which was commissioned and first performed at ImPulsTanz International Dance Festival; then on view at the Kamnagel Festival in Hamburg, Germany.