The Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) welcomed Cheri Stokes, Elisabeth Motley, and Ogemdi Ude as their artists in residence for the the 2024-2025 season.
Each artist will receive 450 hours of free rehearsal space over an 18-month period, an $8000 stipend, and advisory, marketing, and production support to develop their artistic practice.
Artists receive mentorship from Artist Advisors Abigail Browde and nia love, as well as additional advising from BAX Artistic Director Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, and Senior Director of Programs and Production Lucia Scheckner.
Cheri Stokes
Cheri Stokes, born and raised in Brooklyn, received her M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from The Florida State University in 2017. She received her B.A. in Dance Studies with a K-12 North Carolina Dance Teaching Licensure from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2005.
Her performance background spans the genres of West African, Afro-Contemporary, Contemporary and Hip-Hop dance forms. Her choreographic research examines the ways in which facets of social vernacular dance forms, specifically Hip-Hop and Dancehall, have influenced her contemporary practice and art making.
Elisabeth Motley
Elisabeth Motley is a disabled, neurodivergent, and Mad choreographer, scholar, and teacher whose work is concerned with disability as a framework for choreography and pedagogy.
Motley co-conspires with Kayla Hamilton on Crip Movement Lab – a pedagogical framework centering cross-disability accessible movement practices. She is an Associate Professor of Dance at Marymount Manhattan College (NYC) and is a PhD candidate at University of Roehampton (UK), focusing on dance and disability studies.
Ogemdi Ude
Ogemdi Ude is a Brooklyn-based dance and interdisciplinary artist, doula, and educator creating performances, texts, installation, and media that focus on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. She uses movement and voice as a tool for digging up personal and sociocultural narratives, and processing grief. She is interested in how we search for objective “truth” to justify grief; why we seek evidence of our relationships to that which we have lost. How do we find people, cultures, and histories that aren’t there anymore in all the bits that are? She engages the body holistically to re-member: sew together the fissures that trauma creates in our personal narratives.
In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.
