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
Shannon Brooks is a multisensory, multimedia artist grounded in iterative, time-based experimentation. My practice engages with the full range of our senses and draws on ritual, material, and performance, to construct strange worlds between the physical and the ephemeral. Shannon approaches materials as living entities that hold historical memory fossilized in their bodies, existing in a constant state of becoming and unbecoming. Their practice researches the interconnected systems between ecology, the body, performance, expired film, disability, power, clay/rock, residue, ghosts, geologic time, movement, textiles, and memory. Shannon's practice decentralizes sight as the ultimate means of validating experience, creating cacophonies of textures and sounds to explore the dimensions of our senses. As a Disabled/low-vision person, Shannon understands accessibility as a creative force that transforms time, space, and power structures.
Shannon has presented work at Movement Research at Judson Church, DarkRoom Ballet, ArtsonSite, Fringe Arts, The Painted Bride, TechOWL, Fleisher Art Memorial, The Soil Factory, AUTOMAT, Vox Populi, and Icebox Project Space. They have received support from The Velocity Fund, The Leeway Foundation, and The Bartol Foundation. Shannon is a founder of Hook&Loop, a collective of Disabled artists in Philadelphia, and UNDUE BURDEN, a digital community archive led by Disabled people in Philadelphia, through which they have programmed events with artists such as Krishna Washburn, Kayla Hamilton, Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, iele paloumpis, and HYP-ACCESS. Their work in accessibility has been published or presented through Yale Accessibility Symposium, WHYY, and Theater Journal, and Philadelphia Death and Art Festival.
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\\.
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.
