Open Call: Asia Stewart

Asia Stewart (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. She develops ways of transforming the language specific to studies of race, gender, and sexuality into materials that can be felt by and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theatre and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality. Stewart has received various honors and support for her works in performance from organizations that include Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, Marc Straus Gallery, Marble House Project, GALLIM, the Watermill Center, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Stewart routinely questions how performance, movement, and live art can be documented and represented across multiple mediums. Her works in video and installation have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Dominica Greene (she/her) is a movement-based conceptual artist, dancer, and facilitator based in Brooklyn. She values dance as one of the purest forms of expression, utilizing it as an energetic entity capable of affecting real and palpable change. Her company and freelance experience is extensive, having collaborated with, performed, and toured the work of many notable choreographers domestically and internationally. She creates body and time-based conceptual art which aims to reflect movement as one of the most fundamental conduits of existential and ancestral knowledge. As a biracial, Black, queer woman, she is committed to dreaming up and worldbuilding alternative realities and more expansive futures with her BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ community.

Candice Hoyes is an artist of “chill-inducing range” (Vogue) across genre, medium, and style. In 2024, Hoyes made her Lincoln Center composer debut in Sadah Espii Proctor’s adrift, which is the first augmented reality installation in the Social Sculptures Project, a series of public art exhibitions. Upcoming debuts in 2024 – 25 season include The Kennedy Center, Morgan Library and Museum, Blacktronika Festival, unerhört! Festival, Harlem Chamber Players, The Shed, and the Center for Performance Research.

Hoyes is featured on Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Timeline of African American Music. “Her scholarship on such luminaries of African American cultural history represents a noticeable departure from the usual practice of isolating creativity and critical analysis, and the textures of her sound exemplify Afrofuturism as well.” She is a 2024 Manhattan Arts Grant winner, 2022 MAP Fund recipient, 2021 Woodshed Network Women in Jazz Fellow and 2020 NYC Women’s Fund recipient. Hoyes is a 2023 – 24 Visiting Scholar at University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Rhode Island School of Design.

Born to Jamaican parents, Hoyes is a soprano, producer, songwriter, filmmaker, and archivist mutually steeped in exploring the untold stories of her heritage. She began composing for her voice after her start as an award-winning singer (including First Place, International Paul Robeson Opera Competition). Hoyes’s recent works include Carnegie Hall, Detroit Symphony, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Caramoor, NYC JazzFest, and Blue Note. She has collaborated or recorded with Chaka Khan, Courtney Bryan, Theaster Gates, Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Phillip Glass, Makaya McCraven, Lalah Hathaway, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. She is honored to be a portrait model for Amy Sherald’s 2022 painting as soft as she is….

As an organizer, Hoyes collaborates with the Feminist Press, Well-Read Black Girl, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Law, Harlem Arts Alliance, Women in Music, and numerous grassroots organizations. She has produced her feminist performance lecture series for Jazz at Lincoln Center and CUNY for three seasons. Hoyes has written for Shondaland, Blavity, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and has spoken and performed at TED HQ.

Hoyes is a graduate of Harvard University, Columbia Law School, and a lecturer at Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2023, she released her experimental jazz album, Nite Bjuti (pronounced night beauty), deemed by the BBC “a new group that is one of the most exciting and original I’ve heard this year.”

Yaz Lancaster (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist residing in Lenapehoking (NYC). Their work as a performer, composer, poet/writer, and collaborator is grounded in queer, DIY, and liberatory frameworks. It utilizes fragmentation and collage, relational aesthetics, improvisatory forms, and experimental electroacoustic composition. Through independent study, Lancaster spends time thinking about the cultivation of care and intimacy, Marxist/collectivist praxis, and digital (sub)cultures.

Their debut record, AmethYst, comprising music for violin, voice, and electronics, was released in April 2023 and has been featured on I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, Bandcamp (New & Notable), and Foxy Digitalis, among other publications. Recent and upcoming collaborators include Black Mountain College/Hub New Music, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Eliza Bagg, Massa Nera, Mingjia, Minnesota Philharmonic, Miss Grit, and Sean Pecknold.

Lancaster additionally works as the comanager of people places records, a co-organizer of abolitionist music collective Sound Off, and a freelance (music) writer. They love powerlifting, summers down South, and going silly mode with their little dog Nori. More at yaz-lancaster.com.

Shala Miller (they/them), also known as Freddie June when they sing, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find their way into an understanding of themself and their history, using photography, video, writing, and singing as an aid in this process.