ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Friday, April 10th, at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room in partnership with The Center for New Jewish Culture presents choreographer/composer and 2022 ISSUE AIR Tatyana Tenenbaum’s Night transits Day. The piece explores the art of dreaming in waking life—to conjure a future within the present.
Notes from Tatyana Tenenbaum on Night transits Day:
In 2023 I experienced a string of recurrent early miscarriages, whispers so loud they completely shook my foundation but nearly invisible to everyone else.
at the risk of marring myself
I share this embodied reality
to make visible legible
as a reluctant political gesture
because I know I am not alone
Those of us who suffer these losses wait live in shadow, and the darkness becomes an unrequited dream space fertile with vision, symbolism, magic, witchcraft. Our dreams become the liberatory space, Night transits Day.
I have been working on a daily practice of song summoning through sensual language—a framework I once used to excavate words through sounds, to compose work through body and voice. It is now a vessel for inhabiting the moment, as a child would grasp for language with a wide open mouth and a fully integrated being:
“I want”
“I need”
I let language drip off my lips, my mouth, my gestures—inhabiting me in the darkness, inviting the meaning to find me: a divination.
This solo practice is collaged with the vestiges of a group process (formerly titled Garment of the Interior initiated through an ISSUE Project Room residency in 2022 and further nurtured through a residency at Bennington College in 2024). I nest my solo practice within a group exploration. These brilliant artists and collaborators, Maria Bauman, Marisa Clementi, Myssi Robinson and Leah Wilks have held me throughout the years, weaving their own desires and womb journeys into the field. This performance is an evolving record of where I have been, and where I am going.
References and tomes include: Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams by Jill HammerI’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir by Hala Alyan
Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum’s work employs breath, voice, fascia and musculature to excavate spaces of memory, power and transformation. Her work sits at the juncture of experimental music and dance and has been commissioned and presented by Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory Theater, ISSUE Project Room, The Maryland Jewish Museum, Movement Research, Temple University, New Jewish Culture Fellowship and others. Tatyana sees her multidisciplinary work within a lineage of storytelling and multi-sensory musical theater; a cultural site of assimilation and invention for her Jewish ancestors who settled in New York City. Committed to radical collaboration and visioning, her most recent creative venture took the form of a debut feature documentary film Everything You Have Is Yours featuring the work of longtime co-conspirator Hadar Ahuvia with other Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian dance artists. The film, a labor of collective love and devotion, is currently touring and screening across the country. In addition to her own work, Tatyana has performed with and learned from artists Yoshiko Chuma & the School of Hard Knocks, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik, Jennifer Monson/iLAND, Emily Johnson/CATALYST, Hadar Ahuvia, Juliana May, Levi Gonzalez, and Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born. She is on faculty at Movement Research where she teaches for the Sounding Body series, and is in her second year of the Manhattan Feldenkrais Teacher Training Program.
Maria Bauman is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL now based in Brooklyn, NY. She just completed her momentous tenure as 2024-25 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Artist-in-Residence. Bauman is currently engaged in creative research at Hunter College where she is 2025-26 Hearst Artist-in-Residence and is also a current Mertz Gilmore/NYFA Dancer Awardee. Bauman has been recognized with two Bessie Awards, one for her dancing with Black improvisers' collective The Skeleton Architecture (2017) and another for her choreography as part of The Motherboard Suite directed by Saul Williams and Bill T. Jones (2021). She's also proud to be a recent fellow with the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center and has been awarded two Maggie Allessee National Choreographic Center awards/residencies in 2022 and early 2023 to develop her dance work. This season, Maria Bauman is dancing in works by Tatyana Tenenbaum, by Donna Uchizono and by Jasmine Hearn. She is also creating an original artwork with friend and collaborator Lacina Coulibaly. Maria's prior work with Urban Bush Women and with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) are proud parts of her legacy and influences. Previously, she was a dancer with Urban Bush Women (UBW), and was UBW's Director of Education and Community Engagement before becoming Associate Artistic Director. With PISAB, she has held many roles and is now a core trainer in Understanding & Undoing Racism.
Marisa Clementi dances to connect with her desires and dreams, to build a loving relationship with her insecurities, to speak with spirits, and to let them speak through her. Her way in tends to be through rhythm, melody, and gesture: layering postmodern, pop, and flamenco forms with ecstatic improvisation and the medicine practices of her Latvian and Italian ancestors. Marisa lives for the sensual delight within creative practice: dancing, singing, gardening, foraging, cooking, feasting, and mothering. She’s a longtime collaborator with Tatyana Tenenbaum and is thrilled to be dancing and harmonizing alongside her once again. This Summer she will be performing in Heather Christian's Animal Wisdom at the Signature Theatre. Marisa earned her MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence and BA in Music from Dartmouth College. Marisa is also an Ayurvedic practitioner and herbalist who regularly hosts witchy gatherings at her home.
Myssi Robinson is a Bessie award-winning performer, multidisciplinary maker, and ever-evolving provider of care from Powhatan lands / Richmond, VA. Alongside her work as a dancer and companion to the elderly, Robinson explores creative archiving, mixed-media marking, and spatial design. Her memory keeping ministry employs photography, videography, visual art response, and spirit-forward witnessing to meet others where they want to be held and enshrined. She asks how the archive can flirt with embodiment, ritual, collective processing and the blurring of legibility. Ongoing archival partnerships with Jasmine Hearn, Ogemdi Ude and Odessa tha Gawd reinforce the joy, belonging and agency of this work. Robinson’s set design work has supported the world-building of Cain Coleman, Davalois Fearon, Maxi Canion, Dominica Greene, Katelyn Halpern and four/ten media. Her making has been presented by Mana Contemporary, Smush Gallery, Pageant, the Jersey City Theater Center, BAAD!, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Center for Performance Research, and BRIC. As a dance interpreter, she has found home in the work of Maria Bauman, Kyle Marshall, David Dorfman, Big Dance Theater, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Anna Sperber, Baye and Asa, Alex + Xan Burley, Elizabeth Dishman, Kayla Farrish, Nimbus Dance Works and more. In all of her working, intuition and empathy play with maximalist instinct to give life to what comes. Each birthing whispers may we all heal. Myssi’s choices as an artist are directed by her vessel’s navigations of chronic reproductive illness. Gratitude to Carolyn Johnson, Darrin Robinson, and all who came before for her life and abilities to create freely within it. Shout out to our planet.
Leah Wilks is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer based out of Brooklyn, originally hailing from North Carolina. Leah has taught and shared her work in a variety of locations including the American Dance Festival, Elon University, University of Michigan, Ponderosa Tanzland festival, Theater for the New City, and Northern Stage. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she received awards for teaching and choreography, and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Montclair State University. As a performer/collaborator Leah has worked with a variety of dance, theater, and interdisciplinary artists including Fifi Zhang, Okwui Okpokwasili, Alexis Blake, Kendra Portier, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Anna Barker/Real.Live.People, Beth Graczyk Productions, and Tommy DeFrantz/SLIPPAGE. She has been an artist in residence at MOtiVE Brooklyn, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bergen Dansesenter, and MacDowell.
