khalas fest — artist bios
Zaquia Luisa Salinas
A Call to Prayer · Drop In, Spiral Out
Zaquia Luisa Salinas is a dance artist invested in movement as an act of reclamation and world-building. Her work engages diasporic memory, practices for collective liberation, and interdisciplinary form, centering collaboration and response-ability. She works as a performer, choreographer, educator, curator, administrator, producer, and organizer. Originally from San Diego, Zaquia is the founder and Director Emerita of DISCO RIOT. In addition to creating and performing her own work, she is currently Resident Curator at ODC Theater in San Francisco, teaches in higher education, and developing Ephemeral Artery (a platform supporting creative practice and project development). Learn more at ZaquiaSalinas.com and EphemeralArtery.org.
Guillermo Castro
A Call to Prayer
Guillermo Castro is a NYC-based dancer and choreographer from San Diego, CA. He holds a BFA in Dance and Choreography from UC Santa Barbara. There he performed works by José Limón, Shen Wei, Andrea Shermoly, Stephanie Miracle, Brandon Whited, Nancy Colahan, and Ephrat Ashire. Guillermo has toured with LitvakDance (SD) and DISCO RIOT (SD) and has performed with Santa Barbara Dance Theater under Christopher Pilafian, and Jean Isaac’s San Diego Dance Theater. Other performance credits include, Unity Dance Ensemble, Selah Dance Collective, and works by Khamla Somphanh. He is a freelance performer, while also working on his own choreographic endeavors.
Sergio Barrientos
A Call to Prayer
Sergio Barrientos is a freelance dance artist based in NYC. Originally from California, he began his formal dance training at the age of 14. He received a BFA in dance from UC Santa Barbara where he was fortunate enough to work with faculty and guest artists including Monica Bill Barnes, Jacqulyn Buglisi, Doug Elkins, Ephrat Asherie, and works by José Limón reconstructed by Alice Condodina. Since moving to New York, he’s been training in floorwork techniques, and working with local choreographers.
Mette Loulou
There are no words, so may it be the end · Objects as Storytellers
Mette Loulou was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. They are a cultural worker, organizer, and educator committed to disrupting cycles of systemic, interpersonal and internalized violence. They wield their art in service of the liberation of Palestine. They are a graduate of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ EmergeNYC, former Jerome Foundation AIRspace Resident, and MacDowell Colony Fellow. They exit in two places at once.
Nicole Bindler
Sand in My Soda Pop · How We Move Together
Nicole Bindler is a dance-maker, Body-Mind Centering® practitioner, 500 hr yoga teacher, Polestar Pilates practitioner, myofascial bodyworker, writer, and organizer. She has practiced contact improvisation since 1997, and she is a registered Master Somatic Movement Therapist through The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, and presented on four continents. Recent projects include curating an evening of Palestinian dance films; somatic research on the embryology of the genitalia from a non-binary perspective; a workshop on neuroqueering embodiment; co-producing the Consent Culture in Contact Improvisation Symposium at Earthdance; and a solo dance, The Case for Invagination, in which her scars speak candidly about trauma and desire. Notable performance projects have included touring as a choreographer with the Bethlehem-Based Palestinian company, Diyar Theatre; a Pew-funded performance residency in Japan including Butoh training with Yoshito Ohno; and performing Deborah Hay’s I Think Not at Unidad De Vinculación Artística in Mexico City. She organizes with Jewish Voice for Peace – Philadelphia and Dancers For Palestine. She is co-editing a book, Gathering Sparks: Jewish Arts and Somatics, that will be published by punctum books in 2027. nicolebindler.com
Chelsea Thaler
Sand in My Soda Pop · How We Move Together
Chelsea Thaler is an actor, dancer, director, physical theater artist, and educator. Her work lies at the intersection of performance, devising, film, clown, dance theater, and the creation of new works of ensemble theater. She has created, directed, co-created, and/or performed Off-Broadway in NYC, at regional theaters, fringe festivals, and venues including: LaMaMa ETC, The Kennedy Center, Judson Church/Movement Research, United Solo Festival, Studio Theatre, Arena Stage, Synetic Theatre, Source Festival, Capital Fringe Festival, The Voxel, Keegan Theater, Theater J, Philadelphia Fringe Festival/Cannonball, Ford’s Theatre, Imagination Stage, and more. She was the 2025-2026 Artist in Residence at Duke University, and has taught and been a guest artist at University of Mary Washington, University of the Arts, at American University. She currently teaches in the BFA Acting program at the University of Connecticut. She is a teaching artist at Dance Place in Washington, DC for DC Contact Improv and co-facilitates the weekly jam. Member of Actor’s Equity Association (AEA). Training: Viewpoints with Mary Overlie, Certificate in Acting from the Moscow Art Theater School/NTI, and École Philippe Gaulier in France. MFA, University of the Arts/Pig Iron Theater School; BA, American University. chelseathaler.com
Leila Awadallah
shuhada: alive-streamed un-ceased FIRE · Sumud, Tarab, Tarweeda
Leila Awadallah ليلى عوض الله (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer and community collaborator based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and sometimes in Beirut, Lebanon. She dances with roots that hold firmly to Palestine and softly to Sicily, born on Turtle Island – living in an Arab American context with mixed Mediterranean ways and waves. In 2021 she founded Body Watani Dance project which she holds as Artistic Director along with her sister Noelle. Body Watani is a body-as-homeland research practice that seeks to create, and work with movement from a Palestinian diasporic lens, asking how to find the dance practice and creative process that emerges with ancestral intuition, cultural folk experimentation, land-based attunement, and political clarity.
TERRANEA, Body Watani’s first evening length work was created through transnational collaborations across Lebanon, Palestine, Sicily and Mni Sota. Her solo YISSH has reached the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as well as festivals in Palestine, Egypt, and across Mni Sota. She is a DanceUSA (2025), McKnight (2023), Jerome (2021), and Daring Dances (2019) fellow and was mentored by Dr. Ananya Chatterjea as a company member of Ananya Dance Theatre for 5 seasons (2014-2019). Leila is a collaborator of Kelvin Wailey dance trio (MN) and the Palestinian Women’s Theatre in Borj El-Barajneh refugee camp (Beirut). Her artistry is deeply effected by working with the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine, Mizna, and El-Funoun.
Noelle Awadallah
C.A.U.T.I.O.N. · Body Watani Improvisation Research
Noelle Awadallah نوال is a Palestinian-American choreographer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the Co-Artistic Director of Body Watani Dance project alongside sister, Leila Awadallah. Awadallah’s daily pursuit towards a land-based life emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rooted relationality to homeland. Her artistic approach in upholding these ideologies extend from her commitment to multi-directional attention, embodied storytelling, grief and rage, sensuous imagination, and tending to relationship with land and more than human beings. She is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025-2028). Her artistic lifeforce is greatly influenced by her time as a company member with Ananya Dance Theatre (2019-2026) and practicing, playing, and learning with El-Funoun Dance Troupe. She farms at Cimarron Community Farm and lovingly co-holds the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine. She received a BFA from Columbia College Chicago.
Anniessa Antar
C.A.U.T.I.O.N. · Body Watani Improvisation Research
Anniessa Antar is a filmmaker, performance artist and software engineer based in Minneapolis. Her pedagogy and creative practices center the power of sensory, playful and collective work to make liberation irresistible. She has worked with Springboard for the Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Mizna, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Body Watani, the School for Poetic Computation and Backwoodz Studioz. She currently teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and she previously worked a professor of English and social practice at l’École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. Anniessa received a Master of Education from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Arabic from McGill University in Montréal, Québec. She is a recipient of Forecast Public Art’s Artists as Witness grant for an upcoming experimental documentary.
Fargo Tbakhi
An Evening With Complicity Huffman
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025) and ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT. (Deep Vellum, 2027).
Tarek Abdelqader
solo performance
Tarek Abdelqader is a Minneapolis-based composer and musician. He has produced and performed his own work under various monikers and with myriad collaborators, and regularly supports regional and international artists and bands as a drummer. He was a 2018-19 Cedar Commissions awardee and a 2019 Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Next Step Fund recipient, which enabled him to travel throughout Palestine for research related to his debut EP, Ramallah, 8/22. He is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
