Dance Canvas Closing Performances

Billy James Hawkains III (Detroit, MI) is a performer, choreographer, and Lecturer of Dance at Kennesaw State University where he teaches Choreography, Improvisation, Safety Release Technique, Dance Entrepreneurship, and serves as Chair of the Dance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. He holds an MFA in Dance Choreography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a BFA in Dance Performance from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Billy has trained under and performed works by Duane Cyrus (Theatre of Movement) and continues to serve as his Rehearsal Assistant for numerous works, including Colony of Desire, a commission for Charlotte Ballet in North Carolina. He’s currently assisting Cyrus with a new work choreographed to Maurice Ravel’s Boléro with dancers from the University of Arizona and the Tucson Symphony that will premiere January 2024.

Alongside his collaboration with Theatre of Movement, Billy has performed works by Marquita Sams, Juel D. Lane, Veronica Silk, Julio Medina, Elizabeth “B.J.” Sullivan, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Doug Varone. Since moving to Georgia, Billy has taught at various studios including Atlanta Dance Connection & Center for Dance, Vincent Anthony Academy of Dance, and Fleet Studios to name a few, and served as the first Community Engagement Coordinator for DanceATL.

As a choreographer, Billy collaborates with creatives under the mantle of his collective, The Third Collective, and examines his own Blackness, Black Culture, and the Christian faith to generate transformative and provoking works of art. His dance creations have been presented at the Zuckerman Museum, Salvation Army Camp Keystone Florida, Chattanooga Dance Theatre, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Dance Canvas’s Choreographer Career Development Initiative Showcase, and Underground Atlanta. Billy is also a two-time consecutive guest artist for DC Next, an audition-based summer choreographic intensive that gives students essential career building skills by immersing them in the world of professional dance, both onstage and backstage.

When he’s not dancing, choreographing, or teaching, Billy enjoys reading books, listening to podcasts, traveling with close friends and family, and creating faith-based videos with the sole purpose of healing and restoring joy back into the lives of others!

Joy Paillet Attended La Roche University, majoring in dance and minoring in education. During her time at LRU, she performed works by Melissa Tyler, Kelly Basil, Gia Cocalano, Callan Newman, and Christina DiMarco. Joy has been educating young dancers for four years and is dedicated to pedagogy. Joy also choreographed numerous pieces, including one that has been performed for the award ceremony of Talk Magazine. She currently dances and choreographs professionally with CityDance Collective. Joy also is the active Artist Assistant of Atlanta Dance and Music Academy. Her future plans include dancing professionally, until she retires, and starting a performing arts school and dance company of her own.

Christiana “Chrissy” McLeod Horn is a movement artist and archivist in the Atlanta, GA area. Originally from Augusta, GA, McLeod Horn centers her work around embodied memory through the lens of afrofuturism. She actively engages with dance creation, creative direction, dance filmmaking, and pedagogy in the professional realm following her matriculation at Spelman College, which resulted in a Bachelors’ in Dance Performance and Choreography. McLeod Horn has toured nationwide training in contemporary modern dance forms, and procured much of her formal dance training under the tutelage of former Garth Fagan principal dancer, Sharon Skepple Mayfield. Additionally, she holds experience in studying and teaching ballet, tap, jazz, West African, hip-hop, liturgical and step dance forms.

N’seeka earned an MFA in dance from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, a Master of Science from Syracuse University and a Bachelor’s degree from Colgate University. Currently, she is a member of Giwayen Mata (“an all sista, dance, percussion and vocal ensemble”) and teaches dance at local dance studios and Universities in Georgia.

N’seeka trained at the Harlem School of the Arts on scholarship for seven years and continued her dance career as an instructor, dancer, and choreographer throughout undergraduate and graduate school. As a resident of Memphis, TN she was a company member of Kindred Spirit and member, choreographer and rehearsal director for Bridging Souls Productions, a supervising choreographer for a Debbie Allen Tribute and a performer, choreographer and director of an original musical production entitled “Musical, Memory in Motion”.

Past projects include designing and implementing a privilege movement exercise as a pedagogical tool to discuss social justice as the assistant and associate director of Connecticut College’s multicultural center. While there she taught in the dance department, advised and choreographed for various student dance organizations, taught dance at a local studio and directed the ‘Writer’s Block Inc. - Girls on the Block Program’ in New London Connecticut. While in New York City, N’seeka choreographed for independent dance companies such as Jewels of the Nile, Umoja, and Ayende Dance Company. N’seeka believes in the power of movement to preserve culture and enhance lives.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

-Toni Morrison

I am a genius and I am made of maajik. I was born a dancer. There’s video footage of me dancing in my crib as my father belts out Michael Jackson. I am convinced that movement materializes from conception to death, and even beyond this earhtly plane. I was born in Roosevelt, NY and rep both Long Island and NYC as my stomping grounds. Both my parents immigrated from Belize in Central America. My Caribbean/Central-American/African-American identities all hold exponential value to me. I hold my undergraduate degree in Dance with minors in Africana/Puerto-Rican/Latinx studies from Hunter College in New York. There, I studied Hip-Hop, West African, Contemporary, Modern, and Folk forms of dance. I worked with choreographers such as Marjani Forte, Doug Varone, Jodi Melnick, Vicky Shick, Patricia Hauffbauer, Julian Barnett. I went on to choreograph works at Gibney Dance’s Work Up 3.0, DanceSpace at St. Marks Church, and at LaMama Experimental Theatre. My choreographic work includes: No More Water The Fire Next Time, Boys Like Us, I Only Stop When I Am Full and uN-radical bodies.

My movement work confronts the horrors, grim imaginations, and joyful practices of history. I affirm memory as a form of resistance. I use themes of slavery, colonization, coolness, Blackness, anti-Blackness, ableism, queerphobia, transphobia, migration, sexuality, pleasure and time. I view my audience as active participants, community members, friends, enemies and oppressors of me and my work. I pull from my complex natural, ancestral, communal, familial, and “formal” dance techniques, I make work that forces the audience to confront me and my experiences, but most importantly, confront themselves.

Angela Harris is the Executive Artistic Director of Dance Canvas, Inc., a career development organization for emerging professional choreographers and youth. Through Dance Canvas, Angela has been a catalyst, consultant, and resource for numerous new dance organizations and artists. Angela has developed programs for the City of Atlanta’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Usher’s New Look Foundation, and the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation. Angela is a graduate of The Baltimore School for the Arts and trained at Dance Theater of Harlem, School of the Hartford Ballet & Eglevsky Ballet. She attended Mercyhurst College and City College of New York, earning a B.A. in Journalism, while dancing at Steps on Broadway in NYC. Angela danced professionally with The Georgia Ballet, Columbia City Ballet and Urban Ballet Theater. She has choreographed for companies and academies, including The Georgia Ballet, Steps on Broadway, Ballet Lubbock and Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute. Her theater choreographic credits include 110 in the Shade (Theatrical Outfit); The First Noel (True Colors Theater Company); Bridges of Madison County (Aurora Theatre). Angela was one of five Inaugural National Visiting Fellows at the School of American Ballet. In 2017, she received a SDCF Observership and worked with Tony Award winning director/choreographer, Susan Stroman, on the new musical, Little Dancer, during its Broadway Lab. Angela served on the national Emerging Leaders Council for Americans for the Arts and was a member of the 2014 class of Arts Leaders of Metro Atlanta. She received the 2011 National Emerging Leader Award from Americans for the Arts and American Express. Currently, Angela is on faculty at Emory University and is a ballet instructor at Dekalb School for the Arts & Academy of Ballet.