The Alan M. Kriegsman Creative Residency

The Alan M. Kriegsman Creative Residency honors Alan M. “Mike” Kriegsman, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 1976, the first Pulitzer for writings on dance. While he belonged to the entire world of dance, Mike was a special friend to Dance Place and the artists presented here.

This program was established by Sali Ann Kriegsman and Dance Place in remembrance of “Mike” Kriegsman’s passionate support of artists and their commitment to research and discovery. The five day residency offers focused time for the early development of new work by established choreographers.

2024-2025 AMK Residency Artist: Omar Román de Jesús

Driven by the Boricua heartbeat of Puerto Rican beatboxer Black Rhythm, Omar Román de Jesús’s YAHAIRA YAHAIRA examines ancestry, grief, change and connections between oneself and the environment. Dancers come alive in a distorted forest, reimagined as a speakeasy-purgatory hybrid. Inspired by Kathrin Linkersdorff’s, life-cycle art series “Fairies” which reintroduces extracted flower pigments onto the same canvas as decaying plants, YAHAIRA YAHAIRA embraces contrast as survival, meditating on how loss reshapes meaning via cycles of ruin and rebirth. 

Lately, Román de Jesús has been absorbed by the question: What does it mean to share a story with staying power in an environment wrought with change? He notes that, “so many choreographers are put in a position where they have to treat their dances as fast fashion — an ongoing assembly line of urgently constructed works catered to suit what is currently popular or trendy in order to stay afloat.” YAHAIRA YAHAIRA exists as an experiment in legacy projection, centering on the key idea that dance doesn’t need to operate as an emergency. 

2024-2025 AMK Residency Artist: Jay Carlon

Jay Carlon is a Los Angeles-based choreographer and performance artist whose work reclaims ritual, honors tradition, and cultivates spaces for collective healing, resistance, and belonging. Rooted in their experience as a queer Filipinx American raised in a large Catholic migrant family, Carlon’s practice weaves together dance, installation, music, and community engagement to explore ancestral memory, post-colonial identity, and diasporic longing toward queer futurity. Carlon approaches choreography as both a decolonial strategy and a sacred offering—a ritual of survival and repair. Drawing from Catholic colonial rituals embedded in Filipino culture, they reframe these embodied practices through queer, ecological, and anti-colonial lenses. Their site-responsive work transforms everyday spaces—parking lots, streets, banquet halls—into arenas for grief, joy, protest, and celebration. In doing so, Carlon invites communities into shared acts of remembrance, resistance, and release. Carlon’s research continues to explore the erotic, ecstatic, and spiritual dimensions of performance while organizing community through food, dialogue, and movement. Their choreography is not only a form of artistic expression—it is a lived practice of connection, survival, and reclamation.

Previous Residencies

Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre (YSDT), April 2023

Léonardo Sandoval, February 2023

brooke smiley, April 2022

Maleek Washington, March 2022

Patrick K. Makuakane, February 2020

Joanna Kotze, April 2020

Gesel Mason, May 2019

David Parker, January 2019

Ephrat Asherie, August 2018

Raja Feather Kelly, May 2018

Deborah Riley (Honorary), May 2018

Rennie Harris: February 2017

Dianne McIntyre, May 2017

David Brick, March 2016

Rosie Herrera, March 2016

Koma Otake, May 2015

Founding Donors

Ted Bain & Libby Smigel, Elise Bernhardt, Gigi Bradford ,Barbara R. Britton, Bonnie Anne Brooks, Katherine Brown, Neil & Kathleen Chrisman, Jon Palmer Claridge, John Clark & Ana Steele Clark, Patricia (Tiki) Davies, Molly Davies, Alice & Jill Denney, Barbara Dufty, Rima Faber, Louise Feinsot, Eliot Feld, Norman Fields, Jeanne & Joseph Godbout, David Gordon & Valda Setterfield Gordon, Sally Harris, Lisa & Murray Horwitz, George Jackson, Harold & Berenice Jacobs, Nancy Kalodner, Heather Kaye, Spider Kedelsky, Carolyn Keleman, Elizabeth Lerman, Dorothy Dort Levy, Dawn Lille, Merianne & Jeff Liteman, Robert Kirk Marx, Cynthia Mayeda, Marie Nugent-Head, Eiko & Koma Otake, Norton Owen, Nancy & Steven Poulos, Dana Reitz, Nancy Ribakove, David Lee Rosen, Rena Shagan, Edward Sherman, Andrea Snyder, Ellen Sollod & Kenneth Torp, Douglas Sonntag, Nancy Umanoff, Laurie Uprichard, Ellen & John Villa, Alex & Nancy Ward, Suzanne Weil, Barbara Weisberger, Doug & Catherine Wheeler.

For more information or to make a donation to the Alan M. Kriegsman Creative Residency, contact our development office at Dance Place at 202.269.1601. 

The Alan M. Kriegsman Creative Residency is made possible through the gifts of individual donors.