Bridge Live Arts partners with Field Studies, a peer-to-peer creative development lab designed by Hannah Schwadron for dance artists-scholars to workshop new projects. The 2026 Bay Area iteration will include Schwadron, Melissa Hudson Bell, Rebecca Fitton, Bhumi Patel, and Jeannine Murray-Román, drawing inspiration from ink on paper works by Julia Schwadron Marianelli. The quartet will spend a few days in independent and collaborative studio practice that culminates in a public sharing and discussion on June 14, 2026, from 3pm-5pm. 

WILDCAT STUDIO is a no-step entry space housed in the Sawtooth Building. Please email admin@bridgelivearts.org with any access requests at least 5 days before the event. The studio is most accessible via the North Berkeley BART station, which is 1.4 miles away. B.L.A. recommends looking into AC Transit's local bus lines and carpool options.

PARTICIPATING ARTIST-SCHOLARS:

Hannah Schwadron (she/they) is Associate Professor of Dance at Florida State University, where she teaches the cultural politics of performance and directs the Arts in NYC semester program. Her first book, The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Jokework in US Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), won the de la Torre Bueno award for first book, and her recent coedited volume with Marta E. Savigliano, Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics (OUP, 2025) features ten original essays from Pakistan, Trinidad, Germany, Argentina, the United States, and the Mexico/US border region. More of her writing can be found in Choreographic Practices, Shofar, PARtake, Liminalities, Oxford Handbook on Dance and Politics, Oxford Handbook on Jewishness and Dance, Dancer Citizen, and InDance Magazine, as well as anthologies American Perspectives on Dance, and Critical University Studies. She serves as President Elect of Dance Studies Association and cofounder-core member of the Tallahassee Bail Fund, a grassroots volunteer organization that pays bail for people who can’t afford it and moves in partnership with them and their loved ones to access needed services upon release. 

Melissa Hudson Bell (she/her) is a dancer maker, teacher, writer, and producer based in Oakland. She holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography and a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from UC Riverside and has taught at UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University, where she was an artist in residence. Bell loves to attend live performance and has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, In Dance, Life as a Modern Dancer, SF Classical Voice, and Dance Mission, among others. She is a founding member of the Belonging Resident Company (BRC), the dance research entity created in conjunction with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. BRC is now in residence at Destiny Arts Center and conducts workshops with local organizations interested enacting embodied strategies for collective liberation. When she is not dancing, Bell is raising up her three amazing kids and helping with creative strategy for Who’s With Me, a racial justice-oriented media production company she co-founded in 2023.

Rebecca Fitton (she/they) is a queer, mixed race asian american, disabled, and immigrant person. Their work as an artist, administrator, and advocate focuses on arts infrastructure, asian american identity, and disability justice. Their writing has been published by Triskelion Arts, InDance, The Dancer-Citizen, Etudes, Critical Correspondence, Dance Research Journal, and the American Journal of Arts Management. She has been an artist-in-residence at Winslow House Project, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, the National Center for Choreography – Akron, SPACE 124 @ Project Artaud, Center, LEIMAY/CAVE, EMERGENYC, and The Croft.  She holds a BFA in Dance from Florida State University and an MA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. They serve as a Co-Director at Bridge Live Arts and GRAVITY, two Bay Area-based arts organizations.

Dr. Bhumi B Patel (they/she) is a queer-of-color scholar-artist-educator and director of pateldanceworks. Bhumi’s research on queer decoloniality and improvisation intersects with performance-making as a way of tracing the deep connections of past, present, future to build communities of nourishment and care. Bhumi earned a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, an MFA in Dance from Mills College, and an MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University. Bhumi serves as Dance Studies Association Treasurer, is an Editorial Assistant for Choreographic Practices and Dance Research Journal, and is committed to innovating through embodied, liberatory research.

Jeannine Murray-Román is an independent scholar whose research starts in the Caribbean region and is grounded in comparative, performance, and digital methodologies. Since publishing their first monograph, Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2016), their research has ranged from Taylor Mac's manifestos, Roque Salas Rivera's debt and poiesis, and Fanon's medical writing. Their current book project, "Changing Imaginaries," focuses on Caribbean artists' hand-made cognitive experiments in transforming their political imaginaries.