About the speakers
Tamara Williams is an Assistant Professor at UNCC. She earned her MFA from Hollins University/Frankfurt University. Her choreography has been presented nationally and internationally in Serbia, Switzerland, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico, and Brazil. In 2011, Williams created Moving Spirits, Inc., a contemporary arts organization dedicated to performing, researching, documenting, cultivating, and producing arts of the African Diaspora.
Williams’ scholarly work includes: Giving Life to Movement: The Silvestre Dance Technique, "Reviving Culture Through Ring Shout" published in The Dancer-Citizen, and The African Diaspora and Civic Responsibility: Addressing Social Justice through the Arts, Education and Community Engagement(forthcoming).
Remembrance highlights African-American Ring Shout traditions in various historic sites throughout Charlotte. Ring Shout is an African-American tradition brought to the United States during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. One of the sites includes a cabin built in the
1760s and inhabited by enslaved families until 1848. Another site includes the Siloam School built around 1920 as an African-American schoolhouse, and the Catawba River.
Artist Bio
Julie B. Johnson, PhD, is a dance artist and educator on faculty at Spelman College in the Department of Dance Performance & Choreography and affiliated faculty member of the African Diaspora & the World program. She is a co-founding editor of The Dancer-Citizen, an online, open-access dance journal exploring the work of socially engaged artists. Her creative practice, Moving Our Stories, uses participatory dance, embodied memory mapping, and interactive performance to amplify Black women and femmes.
Julie is leading an archives-based dance and multimedia collaboration, Idle Crimes & Heavy Work (ICHW), exploring Black women’s experiences within the history of convict labor and incarceration. This work grew out of her participation as a Co-Director/Choreographer of the Georgia Incarceration Performance Project.
Julie was selected as a 2020-23 Partners for Change Artist through Alternate ROOTS and the Surdna Foundation. She awarded the 2019 Arbes Award, the 2019 Black Spatial Relics Residency Award; and the 2018-19 Hughley Artist Fellowship. She earned a PhD in Dance Studies at Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance.
“Visitation” by Julie B. Johnson
https://vimeo.com/356249177 (I think you have it already linked in Movie's by Movers vimeo page)
“Visitation,” staged as a prison visitation in Grant Park, Atlanta, contemplates embodied memory, place, and the impact of Black women’s incarcerated labor on the lives of all Georgia residents. Filmed as part of the Idle Crimes & Heavy Work initiative, “Visitation” invites the viewer to get close and make a human connection though the screen.
MFA Goddard College
Interdisciplinary Arts
BFA University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Choreography and Performance
Cara Hagan is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is informed by movement, words, digital space, contemplative practice, and community. Ms. Hagan has the pleasure of sharing her artistic pursuits across the United States and abroad. Most recently, Cara has set choreographic works on students at the UNC School of the Arts, Missouri State University, Roehampton University London, Gonzaga University, and on professional dancers at the DanceBARN Festival in Battle Lake, MN. Recent guest artist residencies include Thirak India (Jaipur), James Madison University, University of Colorado at Boulder, Bath Spa University, and DeMontfort University, among others. Further, Cara has made recent performance appearances at the Asheville Wordfest, the Taos Poetry Festival, the On Site/In Sight Dance Festival, Revolve Gallery Asheville, the Performática Festival in Puebla, Mexico, and the Conference on Geopoetics in Edinburgh, Scotland. In installation, Cara's work has been seen at Art Produce San Diego, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Revolve Gallery Asheville, and at the Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh. A recipient of several grants and awards, Cara received the “Best Southern States Documentary” award for her short film, Sound and Sole from the Southern States Indie Fan Film Fest in Biloxi, MS in January 2019. She was awarded an artist residency at PLAYA Summer Lake for the fall of 2018 and an artist residency at Elsewhere Gallery for spring/summer 2020. She has been funded by the North Carolina Arts Council, the Forsyth County Arts Council, the Appalachian State University Research Council, the Cucalorus Festival, and the Dance Films Association, among other organizations. Ms. Hagan serves on the dance studies faculty at Appalachian State University, as well as serving as director and curator for ADF's Movies By Movers, an annual, international dance film festival that hosts events at both the American Dance Festival and Appalachian State University. Cara's creative work can be found in various publications, including literary journals Collective Terrain, Zocalo, Quill and Parchment, the Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, and Headwaters Journal of Expressive Arts. Her scholarly publications can be found in the International Journal of Screendance, the Journal of Sustainability Education, Transmissions Journal of Media Studies, and in the book, Dance's Duet with the Camera: Motion Pictures, edited by Telory D. Arendell and Ruth Barnes. Currently, Cara is under contract to complete her first solo-authored book through McFarland Publishing.
