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April 22, 2025

Shayla-Vie Jenkins received the prestigious  from the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Wrote Jenkins in her artist statement: 

"My creative research centers Black aliveness and somatic presence, with choreography and durational improvisation as channels for ritual, mourning, and catharsis. My performance practice is one of acceptance—of messy, resilient life in the constancy of change. Performing invites me to inhabit vulnerability and thrive in the unknown. It is a call to witness and be witnessed, to connect with others, and to explore my multiplicity. 

Performing can be crushing. Performing can be alchemical. The body can be both a vessel and bridge. Dancing and dance-making are profound responsibilities; a delicate exchange between self and surroundings, charging me to hold vital the acts of transmission, interpretation and archive. My artistry anchors me deeply in my Blackness and fleeting NOW. Dancing for me is spirituality in action.

I love dance and the emergent, always arriving, unraveling impossibility of its demand."

Niall Jones received the acclaimed for 2025-2027 and presented a new work in fall 2024 at .

Jones points to this quote by artist and activist David Wojnarowicz as influential to his own work: “Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”

Mark Caserta set a new work for this May on Seattle's contemporary dance company, .

Said Caserta, “My mission is to create safe space for myself and for people to come together, make art, move, share culture, live out experiences together and truly be themselves. To grow as a community and reconnect us to ourselves, our world(s) and each other.”