The Zora Project
About the Zora Project
The Zora Project, conceived by Tanya Birl-Torres, honors groundbreaking writer, cultural anthropologist, folklorist, and theater-maker Zora Neale Hurston, a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston celebrated the richness of Black culture, particularly that of the rural South, while challenging traditional gender roles and racial barriers designed to limit Black lives.
In celebration of Hurston’s life and work, The Zora Project finds sustainable connections between creativity and community that continues her legacy of “gathering the folk.”
After a successful first year in residency at The Shed with collaborator Reza Salazar, during which Hurston’s early theoretical and practical work in ethnographic and creative methodologies were explored, Birl-Torres returns for her second year of residency at The Shed. She will continue her work in investigating how democratized, human-centered creative processes further and deepen possibilities for artistic genius, stirring artworks, and true community-building.
Birl-Torres’s work will largely focus on exciting community programs that explore Hurston’s legacy.
To keep in touch for more information about upcoming programs, join our email list.
The Zora Project is part of the Social Practice Artist-in-Residence program.
Upcoming Public Programs: Movement Mondays
Each month or so, we will gather to explore the methodology at the heart of The Zora Project. We will activate the earth’s latent energy, make the mundane sacred, and practice what Hurston taught us: to be both human and cosmic at the same time.
Led by artist-in-residence Tanya Birl-Torres, we will lean into theater, somatic practices, and ritual dance to weave a story of all of us together. Each session includes:
- Guided warm-up connecting breath, rhythm, and embodied wisdom
- Story sharing and communal reflection on Hurston’s work
- Exploring the anatomy of a folk dance
No professional dance experience is necessary—just bring your curiosity and willingness to be in the practice together. This is ancestral communion through movement, honoring African diasporic ways of knowing where dance leads, music follows, and story emerges from the body.
Upcoming Movement Mondays
July 6, 6 – 8 pm
On the High Line Spur at 30th Street and 10th Avenue
RSVP here
August 3, 6 – 8 pm
At The Shed (in The Tisch Skylights on Level 8)
RSVP here
Past Public Programs
Past events included public programs incorporating music, movement, readings, and educational workshops. These sessions focused on revealing the threads that tie Hurston’s art to our own innate creativity as a direct reflection of our times and the “boiled-down juice of human living.”
In The Tisch Skylights (Level 8)
“Folklore is the boiled-down juice of human living.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
Join us as we follow in the dust tracks of groundbreaking writer, cultural anthropologist, folklorist, and theater-maker Zora Neale Hurston.
With the guidance of Afrofuturist folklorist Trelani Michelle, and led by The Shed’s Social Practice Artists-in-Residence, Tanya Birl-Torres and Reza Salazar, we will listen to some of Hurston’s collections of folktales, break them down, and use them as inspiration to create our own modern day folktales.
This program is part of Birl-Torres and Salazar’s The Zora Project, a yearlong program honoring Hurston by creating a sustainable connection between creativity and community that continues her legacy of “gathering the folk.”
In The Tisch Skylights (Level 8)
Zora Neale Hurston is seldom thought of as a choreographer, but her contributions to dance historiography were instrumental in reshaping diasporic Black dance ritual as a legitimate art and cultural form. As a stage director and choreographer, particularly involved in staging West Indian and Southern folk dances, Hurston created works that used dance and associated folk rituals to transmit complex meanings, crossing borders physically and spiritually.
Guided by Hurston’s choreographic visions, join us for a communal activation of embodied movement, led by Tanya Birl-Torres in collaboration with Move|NYC, with Wilson Torres on percussion as well as other surprise guests. Collectively we’ll find our own interpretation of the famed Bahamian Fire dance from Hurston’s folk revue The Great Day and enjoy a choreographed interpretation of her “workers’ dance” from her play Mule Bone.
This is a community workshop, where all levels and all bodies are welcomed! Please come prepared to move, participate, and have a good time.
Join us for a workshop exploring the history and legacy of African American work songs, led by The Zora Project’s Tanya Birl-Torres and Reza Salazar with collaborator Justin Hicks (Shed Open Call alum).
Zora Neale Hurston found a deep interest in documenting the work songs of African American “Gandy Dancers,” railroad workers who manually laid and maintained tens of thousands of railroad tracks in the United States from the mid-19th to 20th century. She often incorporated this music into her plays and documented their songs in much of her anthropological work.
Hurston recognized the unique culture of the Gandy Dancer, rhythmic work songs, and the social dynamics of the gangs and their communities at large. Now seen as folkloric artifacts that embody resilience, possibility, and resistance, their work songs and movement serves as reminders of the vital role African American musical traditions have played in shaping the labor and sound of American culture.
This workshop will explore the rich tapestry of the Gandy music, work songs that Hurston documented, to make connections to our own lives while building modern-day work songs of our own.
This is a community workshop, where all levels and all voices are welcome! Please come prepared to use your voice, participate, and have a good time.
At Hi-ARTS in Brooklyn
10 Lafayette Ave., 4th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11217 (close to Atlantic Avenue/Barclays Center)
Each month or so, we will gather to explore the methodology at the heart of The Zora Project. We will activate the earth’s latent energy, make the mundane sacred, and practice what Hurston taught us: to be both human and cosmic at the same time.
Led by artist-in-residence Tanya Birl-Torres, we will lean into theater, somatic practices, and ritual dance to weave a story of all of us together. Each session includes:
- Guided warm-up connecting breath, rhythm, and embodied wisdom
- Story sharing and communal reflection on Hurston’s work
- Exploring the anatomy of a folk dance
No professional dance experience is necessary—just bring your curiosity and willingness to be in the practice together. This is ancestral communion through movement, honoring African diasporic ways of knowing where dance leads, music follows, and story emerges from the body.
This Movement Monday was supported in part by the Hi-ARTS Creative Continuum Program.
About the Artist
Tanya Birl-Torres is a leader and teacher who believes in telling stories that move us towards curiosity and connection. She has a passion and a vision to use her artistry to reach a diverse crowd and blur the lines between performer and audience, recognizing that we are all creative by nature of being born. She works at the intersection of art, justice, and systemic change.
Birl-Torres is a New York City–based creative director/choreographer, movement director, systems change facilitator, and mother. In addition to her decadelong Broadway performance career, she has served as the choreographer/movement director on productions, such as the world premiere of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Goodman Theater), How I Learned What I Learned (OSF), Twelfth Night (The Public Theater), The Red Letter Plays (The Signature Theater), Comedy of Errors (Classic Stage company), As You Like It (The Guthrie Theater), and Peter and the Starcatcher (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). As a systems change facilitator, she has worked closely with the National Arts Strategies, Illuminate Network, and Systems Sanctuary through her own company SoHumanity to bring embodied liberatory practice into the world of social innovation, bridging conversations across differences. She has created workshops with world-renowned educator Chris Emdin on Reality Pedagogy as Presencing and co-teaches Creativity and Communication at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Birl-Torres is the recipient of the 2024 MAP Fund Grant, Hi-Arts Critical Breaks Residency, and NoMAA Grantee. She served as the artistic director of the Washington Heights Womanist Arts Festival and the 2023 recipient of the NewYorker 4 NewYork Award from the Citizens Committee for New York City, named as a “woman breaking ceilings in NYC and beyond.” Birl-Torres Guest was a choreographer for Cabaret and guest professor in residence at the University of Michigan in fall 2025, and was lead embodiment facilitator for National Arts Strategies’ The Project 2024 – 25. @sohumanity
The Zora Project (TZP), led by Tanya Birl-Torres, is a multifaceted cultural initiative that bridges community-engaged social practice with artistic rigor. Following in Zora Neale Hurston’s “dust tracks,” the project honors her legacy as a writer, novelist, anthropologist, playwright, and choreographer through three sacred tools: folktales, ritual movement, and work songs. TZP encompasses community activations, creative development, and revolutionary theater work, all rooted in Hurston’s methodology of “gathering the folk.”
As The Shed’s 2025 – 2026 Social Practice Artist in Residence, TZP has expanded across diverse communities and geographies. Just as Hurston traveled, the project traces migration patterns from the Caribbean to the American South and up through Northern US cities all the way to Canada. In 2025, TZP hosted three community workshops at The Shed: The Anatomy of a Folktale, The Fire Dance: Exploring Zora’s Lost Choreographic Works, and Glitter in the Dust: Exploring the Work Song Tradition.
Community partnerships with the project include The Embers Lab Artist Residency in Treasurer Beach and Black River, Jamaica in May 2025, where participants created an original folktale inspired by Hurston’s collections and the history and lineage of the land and peoples; Byrdland Artist Residency in Selma, Alabama, 50 miles from the place where Birl-Torres traces her ancestral roots, where collaborators will host community activations in June of 2026 in collaboration with The March Quilts in Birmingham and the Selma Public Library to share in the history of folktales, ritual dance, and worksongs, gathering with Black Belt communities rich in Civil Rights history. TZP will also make a pilgrimage to Africatown, the home of Kudjo Lewis (the last surviving African to cross the Middle Passage), whom Hurston befriended, archiving his life’s journey, now documented in her novel Barracoon.
In March 2026, TZP will collaborate with the OHMA (Oral History Masters of Art) at Columbia University and Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn for a Woman’s History Month community event called Gathering The Folk: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston, honoring Zora’s legacy and exploring “the crow dance and Buzzard Lope,” a selection of Hurston’s movement findings in her research and plays. Birl-Torres has also lectured and led workshops at Barnard College (Hurston’s alma mater) with the chair of Africana Studies and Hurston scholar Monica L. Miller. Together they recently travelled to Westville, New Jersey, where Huston and Langston Hughes wrote the contentious play Mule Bone, speaking with and gathering the community at the re-opening of the Rialto Centre for Creativity, minutes from where Hurston and Langston worked and lived in 1930.
As an embodiment facilitator and faculty member of the Inner Activist (British Columbia), Birl-Torres explores the connection of African American and Indigenous reckonings with displacement, sovereignty, and survival. Birl-Torres has also brought TZP to National Arts Strategies’ The Project and has led folktale workshops with arts nonprofit leaders across the country, which are now archived as living cultural memory.
TZP has touched theater communities nationwide, including bringing Hurston’s hoodoo and voodoo anthropological work into the world premiere of the musical Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil at Goodman Theater, where Birl-Torres served as a choreographer and cultural consultant. Birl-Torres is also partnering with Rites of Spring Music Festival and Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island where she is collaborating on an original opera based on Steve Wick’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book All That Remains.
All of these connections are influencing the creation of an inspired piece of movement theater that Tanya Birl-Torres is developing. Through salon gatherings, movement workshops, and story collection that honors African diasporic ways of knowing, TZP creates what Hurston modeled: sustainable connections between creativity and community that liberate and heal through dance, song, and oral history.
About The Social Practice Artist-in-Residence program
The Social Practice Artist-in-Residence program at The Shed is a vital platform for artists who are reimagining how art can function in society. While many communities continue to face systemic injustices, the arts have a unique capacity to catalyze change, by investigating creative solutions and forging connections between diverse groups. The program provides opportunities for artists to democratize artmaking, co-creating new possibilities for social transformation with communities. Past residencies have included FlexNYC, DIS OBEY, and The Fire Ensemble.
Program Credits
Darren Biggart, Director of Civic Programs
Daisy Peele, Producer of Civic and Institutional Programs
Christal Ferreira, Program Manager, Civic Programs and Visual Arts
Acknowledgments
Thank you to these past and present partners and collaborators: Reza Salazar; Jayme Stone; Crystal Monee Hall; Justin Hicks; The Dyckman Farmhouse; Shonica Gooden, Chanel DaSilva, Nigel Campbell, and MOVE|NYC|; Anya Andrews; The Inheritance Theater Project; Lillis Taylor, OHMA (Oral History Masters of Arts), Columbia University; Monica Miller, Chair of Africana Studies Barnard College; The Embers Lab; Trelani Michelle.
A special thank you to the artists and creatives who have contributed to the activations and development of The Zora Project.
Thank you to our partners
The creation of new work at The Shed is generously supported by the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Commissioning Fund and the Shed Commissioners.
Major support for live productions at The Shed is provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, with additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
The Shed is connected by