Artists:
Dispatches
At Shebang, we invite local artists to take some time to delve into their current creative research; they share what they discover at the end of their respective research period.
This is Dispatches.
Check out our previous Dispatches artists below!
2026 Cohort
Shannon Brooks
What they are working on:
“S3AWRACK” is a practice to transform into gooey, demonic algae divas that digest the petro-plastics infused in our ideological walls and cavort with the shitty parts. This practice researches the generative qualities of algae, raving as ritual to transform personal and global ecosystems, and ecology(economy)’s capacity for change.
Imagine some sort of laboratory, petri dish, or gymnasium where an entanglement of people (“performers”) work with deviant objects made of ceramic, agar, mycelium, natural fibers and trash. These sculptures (bodies) will be transformed through a series of choreographed and improvised performances crescendoing into a scientific frenzy, covering you in generative a pop star goo.
Imagine smearing a clay log out onto the pavement, human fountains, agar potions poured over asphalt, weird faces, earrings attached to solar powered RC cars, RED WAXY LIPSTICK, mycelium bikinis, composting, your mom in the 90’s singing Ditto’s “White Flag” in the car with her hand out the window holding a cigarette dreaming of another life, figuring out how to use car exhaust and spent oil as a material.
Performers and collaborators:
Chloe Marie
Micah Lat
Zeze Schorch
Sheila Zagar
Shannon Brooks is an interdisciplinary artist grounded in experimentation, contextually wading between questions, spanning across mediums, and always in transition. Rooted in ritual, material, and performance, Shannon collaborates with the interconnected systems between ecology, disability, power, decay, belief, and deep time. Their creative process is an evolving ecology nurtured by listening to unseen impulse, touching material, a deep study of natural and industrial relationships, experimenting with groups of people as a form of ritual, performance composition and improvisation, and dreaming. Their practice approaches the body, materials, and environments as collaborators that hold historical memory, existing in a constant state of becoming and unbecoming. As a mover and sounder, she draws from Deep Listening, Self-Audio Description, BALLETJAZZTAP!, eco-somatics, improvisation, stimming, and clubbing. Shannon’s iterative, multisensory research evokes strange worlds between the physical and the ephemeral, feels time, makes power structures visible, and opens space for transformation.
As a Disabled/low-vision person Shannon creates layered sensory experiences and understands accessibility as a generative force that reshapes time, space, and power structures. They are a founder of Hook&Loop and UNDUE BURDEN, an artist collective and digital community archive led by Disabled people in Philadelphia. Their accessibility work has been published or shown through Yale Accessibility Symposium, WHYY, and Theater Journal, and Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival.
Shannon’s work has been presented at Movement Research at Judson Church, DarkRoom Ballet, ArtsonSite, Fringe Arts, The Painted Bride, TechOWL, Fleisher Art Memorial, The Soil Factory, Vox Populi, and Icebox Project Space. They have worked with artists such as Leah Stein, Krishna Washburn, Nichole Canuso, Asimina Chremos, Hana van der Kolk, Annie Wilson, David Brick, Annie Heath, and Donna Oblongata. Shannon has received support from The Velocity Fund, The Leeway Foundation, and The Bartol Foundation.
MAWU GORA
Biography: Mawu Gora is a Brooklyn native currently residing in Philadelphia. As a Black, queer, Caribbean, and transdisciplinary artist, their artistic practice studies rhythm, ritual, connection, and relatability. They are a graduate of Georgian Court University (BA) and Temple University (MFA). As a freelance artist, they have worked with Cardell Dance Theater, Big Dance Theater, and Jupiter Performance Studios. They are the founder and director of the project-based company, Ma’at Works Dance Collective, and an adjunct professor at Bryn Mawr College. They are currently collaborating with Kosoko Performance Studios on //shrouded\\.
Current Interest:
My transdisciplines serve as a healing art, both through resistance, hauntings, and cultural memory; ritual enhances imagination. My curiosity is tethered to storytelling as a Black temporality into the interior. Black feminist scholarship bolsters these beliefs, as the Combahee River Collective reminds, "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom necessitates the destruction of all systems of oppression."Additionally, I'm interested in Fannie Lou Hamer's teachings that the land is our ally and our relationship with it is inherently liberatory. In this shape, art is a conduit, our bodies are constellations, and the dirt holds our stories, location is memory: the sand beaches, tar pits, and clay roads. Liberation points to ecologies of living mirrored in our relationship to the land. Ritual, lovemaking, stories, and the everyday become potent source material for these rebirths. My artmaking investigates the past through the eyes of those who have lived it. Ancestral stories are quintessential to understanding art as life.
SHOSH ISAACS
Shoshana Isaacs is a queer interdisciplinary artist residing on Lenae/Lenape land (Philadelphia). They graduated from the University of the Arts in 2023 with a BFA in Dance and minor in Photography. At UArts, they had the opportunity to perform with Doug Varone, Joanna Kotze, Jesse Zaritt and Sara Shelton Mann, Sheer Spectacle, and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd. Since graduating, they have performed for the Next Festival, Urban Movement Arts, and in their own works for the 2025 Cannonball Festival and The Gathering at &Space.
Collaborating with Nella Biacs and Claire Natiez, they create movement using choreographic and improvisational practices that explore capacity, truthfulness, and looping.
They also continue to work with photography as a freelance artist, mainly capturing dancers. In their downtime, they are a lab monitor at a community darkroom in Philadelphia called the Halide Project, where they work with analog photographic processes.
VITCHE-BOUL RA
Vitche-Boul Ra is a Transhumanist Folk-Theurgist with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts (Sculpture concentration) from The University of the Arts [2018] with additional studies in Dance under Donna Faye Burchfield. Ra’s performance practice is anchored in Performativity as a means to investigate Black sovereignty and individual action. As a Philadelphia native, It has shown solo + collaborative works at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vox Populi gallery, Little Berlin gallery, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery. In New York, Ra has been curated into the Center for Performance Research’s 2018 Spring Movement Festival, the New Dance Alliance's 2019 Performance Mix Festival: 33, and both Movement Research as well as Black Aesthetics/J.A.W. at Judson Memorial Church in 2023. Continually It has collaboratively worked with Moor Mother [Goddess] showing at Pace Gallery (NY), CalArts REDCAT (LA), The Kitchen (NY), and the Chan Centre (BC). In 2021 It lectured at Yale School of Art and in 2023 Ra’s solo work was curated internationally at the Murray Art Museum Albury in Albury, NSW (Australia) in addition to being awarded a 2023 Pew Fellowship.
2025 Cohort
Lu donovan
Lu Donovan is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in Philadelphia. His work prioritizes pleasure and researches strategies of queer-ing. He plays with other queer and trans artists to build widening worlds that create containers in which bodies can pump up, relax down, or find the sweetest way their hips move to a beat. As an amateur anatomist and physicist, his dance practice utilizes these “sciences” to open the possibilities of existing in a gendered body, offering more and more options for how to move about this world.
Lu creates work alongside Micah Lockman-Fine, designer, curator, and installation artist. The two have shown their work together over the past 2 years through Dream Sweet, Rough Man and Rough Man’s Playground. Lu has also shown original pieces at the Icebox Project Space, Fringe Arts, Headlong, and Vox Populi, as well as self-produced in fields, basements, and apartments across Philadelphia. His work tends toward facilitation with a curiosity not only about how it feels to witness performance, but also to explore movement within oneself. Lu has taught at the University City Arts League, the Woodlands, Mascher Space Cooperative, and through the Philly Dance Share.
jungeun Kim
Jungeun Kim (J.e.) is a choreographer, dance and movement-based performance artist, educator and digital media artis. Her research and practice embraces and integrates many disciplines, nurturing relationships between individuals as well as the social connections within communities while expanding ways of communication. What sparks her curiosity is how one’s lived experiences manifest in the body and body movements. Her research and creative process is motivated by accessibility: that art, whether it be dance, theater, music and beyond, is for everyone. She is interested in work that is approachable in many different ways for and with others as spectator, participant or collaborator. She works with both mediums of dance and digital media, such as video, moving images and animation to create live performance, participatory events, experimental video and animation works. Her process begins with interdisciplinary approaches by choreographing and mapping assorted images; crafting different pieces and movement sequences together like doing a puzzle without knowing the final image; improvising with various elements and materials such as sound/music, video projections and tangible objects to transform and design the performing space; embracing differences to create a collective story; facilitating events that invite people to build connections.
Her dance and video work has been presented around the U.S., Europe and Asia including Korean Cultural Center, Design Philadelphia, Taubman Museum of Art and Torino Esposizioni. As an educator, she has taught extensively, from a community center for refugees and immigrants, to dance festivals, to institutions of higher education.
She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from American Dance Festival/Hollins University, under direction of Donna Faye Burchfield and Master of Arts in Liberal Studies in Visual and Performing Arts from Hollins University. She is currently pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Restorative Practices at the International Institute for Restorative Practices Graduate School. Jungeun hails from Seoul, South Korea.
kaijo caggins
kaijo caggins (they/he) is a Black trans performance artist, educator and doula. they observe improvisation and defiance through pleasure in their performance practices. kaijo works with the body, sounding and disorientation; with an emphasis on queerness, somatics, and liberation as life force. they facilitate queer Contact Improvisation jams + teach CI based classes. living within Lenapehoking and Nacotchtank, he is currently in community with local CI enthusiasts, multidisciplinary artists, families, and the rivers. kaijo is pursuing their MA in Women’s, Gender + Sexuality Studies at The George Washington University.
Marisa Illingworth
Marisa (she/ they) is a movement and performance artist based in Philadelphia, land of the Lenape people. She is most interested in authentic movement, radical and expansive movement practices, and movement as a means of grounding toward collective liberation/revolution. In her work, she has been exploring themes of grief, rebirth, togetherness and queerness through performance. Marisa performed a solo dance theater show in the 2024 Cannonball festival called authentic grief baby monologue. They earned their BFA from the University of the Arts in 2016, and have worked with many incredible artists in the area since.
