NCDF ARTIST BIOS
25/26 SEASON
Dance Project and the NC Dance Festival are pleased to announce the 2025-26 Season Artists. Artists featured here will be performing as part of the NC Dance Festival programming this season.
Alyah Baker is a dance artist, scholar, and choreographer working at the intersection of art and embodied activism. She is an assistant professor of dance at UNC Charlotte, where her research focuses on queer aesthetics, Black feminist praxis, and community building through dance. Baker earned her MFA in Dance(’21) and a B.A. in Sociology (’03) from Duke University. She has trained and performed professionally with companies including Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Oakland Ballet, and Carolina Ballet, dancing featured roles in works by George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, Laura Dean, José Limón, and Alonzo King. Baker has received choreographic commissions from the American Dance Festival, Queering Dance Festival, and Oakland Ballet, and has been recognized in local and national media, including Dance Teacher Magazine and the New York Times.
Chania Wilson is a Raleigh, NC native and graduate of Duke University’s MFA in Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis in Dance. She earned her BFA in Choreography and Performance with a minor in Arts Administration from UNC Greensboro. Chania taught at Enloe High School, her alma mater, where she co-directed the dance department and led the Enloe Charity Ball. She founded Ignite Dance Intensive, which received the 2024 United Arts Community Spotlight Award. Her dance films have screened at ADF Movies by Movers and Greensboro Dance Film Festival. As founder and Artistic Director of Nine Movement Collective, she creates interdisciplinary work grounded in Black performance theory, choreography, and embodied archival response. She frequently guest teaches in Raleigh and Durham high schools.
Nine Movement Collective is a professional modern dance company based in Raleigh-Durham, NC, founded and led by Chania Wilson. The collective is rooted in collaborative creation, emphasizing embodied research, choreography, and performance that center Black and interdisciplinary perspectives. Known for its haunting aesthetic and emotionally resonant works, Nine Movement Collective engages dancers, filmmakers, and community members in practices that blend improvisation, archival inquiry, and experimental storytelling. The company also facilitates workshops and educational residencies across North Carolina, expanding access to contemporary dance and supporting emerging artists. Through live performance and screen dance, Nine Movement Collective seeks to disrupt inherited narratives and build new frameworks for collective memory, liberation, and belonging in the American South.
Christa Oliver is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Performing Arts and Technology at NC State University and the Director of the Panoramic Dance Project. Previously, teaching eleven years in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State University. Christa holds a Master of Arts in Dance Performance and a Professional Diploma in Dance Studies from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. A Mellon Fellow in the School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University, Christa has performed internationally in the Netherlands, England, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Kosovo, and Mexico and has collaborated with renowned choreographers such as Donald McKayle, Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Rafael Bonachela, Donald Byrd, Rennie Harris, Lula Washington, Victor Quijada, Christopher Huggins, Willi Dorner, Miguel Pereria, Robin Lewis, and Dominique Kelly. Her credits include the national tour of The Color Purple and appearances in Avatar, and Crazy on the Outside. In addition, Christa Oliver has scholarly work published in Dancer-Citizen.
The Panoramic Dance Project is a pre-professional dance company within the Department of Performing Arts and Technology at NC State University. Dedicated to fostering a vibrant and supportive environment, the company encourages students to challenge themselves and explore their individual artistic voices, agency, and creative potential. Company members receive training in a variety of dance styles, including modern, tap, jazz, hip-hop, African, and Latin dance. In addition to rigorous artistic development, students engage in community outreach initiatives performing both on and off campus.
Eric Mullis is a dance artist and scholar whose work centers on the possibilities of interdisciplinary performance. His choreography has been featured in the North Carolina Dance Festival, The Fact/SF Summer Dance Festival, Breaking Ground Festival, UrBANGUILD Kyoto, and at Performance Philosophy, Amsterdam. He is a Fulbright Scholar who, in 2021, conducted research on dance and the philosophy of technology at Taipei National University of the Arts in Taipei, Taiwan. Eric has authored of two books, “Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance: Interdisciplinary Research in the American South” (Palgrave MacMillan: 2019) and “Instruments of Embodiment: Costuming in Contemporary Dance” (Routledge: 2022). He is the Director of Goodyear Arts (an artist-run gallery and performance space in Charlotte, North Carolina) and is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queens University of Charlotte.
Jen Guy Metcalf is an Associate Professor of Dance at Elon University. She earned an M.F.A. in Dance Choreography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a B.F.A. in Dance with a concentration in Ballet from Point Park University. After undergraduate school, she performed professionally with Bodiography Contemporary Ballet and for many independent choreographers. Metcalf is an award-winning choreographer and filmmaker who presented her work in the US, Ireland, Sweden, France, England, Turkey, Scotland, Brazil, Canada, the Netherlands and Bosnia & Herzegovina. She is the founder and artistic director of TERRANOVA Dance Theatre based in Greensboro, North Carolina.
TERRANOVA Dance Theatre was founded in 2008. The company creates innovative work for a variety of spaces including the STAGE (concert dance), SITE (site-specific dance) and SCREEN (dance for camera). Our company name is derived from TERRA: earth, land, territory, ground, place, topography, etc. and IN(NOVA)TION: featuring new method; introducing new ideas; original and creative in thinking.
Jiwon Ha, born and raised in Busan, South Korea, is a dancer, educator, and choreographer with expertise in contemporary, modern technique, ballet, and Korean folk dance. Her passion for dance has driven her to perform, teach, choreograph, and organize events across the U.S., Canada, and South Korea for over 20 years. She currently teaches in the UNC School of the Arts Preparatory Dance Program and at Elon University, along with teaching Modern III/IV at Dance Project. Jiwon has been a recipient of the ACGG grant, served as an Artist in Residence with the North Carolina Dance Festival, and her work has been featured in numerous festivals in North Carolina and abroad.
Kylie Venticinque is a movement artist from Raleigh, NC who recently earned her B.A. in Dance and is completing her minor in Apparel at Appalachian State University. She creates immersive, multidisciplinary work that blends contemporary/modern dance with physical theater. Her 2024 premiere stage piece, Frayed, was reimagined into a dance film by Kylie in collaboration with her partner and videographer Jackson Keys—deepening her interest in cinematic storytelling. Kylie was a 2025 American Dance Festival Merit Scholarship recipient and performed in a Footprints piece under Ravid Abarbanel. Aside from ADF, she has attended many other professional intensives that have shaped her artistry. She hopes to pursue an MFA in Choreography and continue growing through creative work, teaching, and collaboration.
Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen are the founding directors of Asheville’s Stewart/Owen Dance. As choreographers and performers, they create intimate, dynamic contemporary work shaped by curiosity and craft. Since 2014, the husband-and-wife choreographic duo has toured nationally and internationally, earning commissions from the American Dance Festival and the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts, and collaborating with artists like Moses Sumney and Sylvan Esso. The pair leads ongoing community classes in Asheville and hosts two annual intensive programs. In 2024 they were featured in Dance Magazine’s “Homegrown Heroes’. Through movement, Stewart and Owen continue to explore how dance can foster connection and reflect the nuance of shared human experience.
Tara Zaffuto Mullins is a Teaching Professor in the NC State Department of Performing Arts and Technology, where she choreographs for and directs the State Dance Company, and teaches a variety of courses. During her time at NC State, she created Operation Breadbasket, a mixed media dance that tells the story of this MLK initiative, Against the Railing, a digital platform and mixed media dance that tells the immigration stories of the NC State community, as well as Resume Normal Activities, a look at gun violence in schools. She has presented research at IADMS, NDEO, recently completed her service as a Faculty Senator, and serves on the Council on Athletics. Tara has an MFA in dance from Arizona State University.
Many alumni of the State Dance Company, and the other NC State dance companies, continue to work as a collective after graduation – performing, teaching, and choreographing in the community and beyond.
