NEXT! Mentorship Program 2026/28

Pioneers Go East Collective offers 6 emerging interdisciplinary artists with 3+ years of professional experience specializing in dance and movement-based practices, performance art, storytelling, and video art.

The NEXT! Mentorship Program offers artists support in knowledge sharing and public presentation opportunities based on each artist's needs; this includes guidance in production, creative design, grant writing, and project budgeting. The program nurtures the development of 8 NYC-based artists through exchange, monthly meetings, discussions, workshops, and presentations for a period of 20 months.

“As a creative incubator designed by artists for artists, we are fully invested in finding ways for artists to feel supported and thrive,” said co-curators Philip Treviño and Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte. “We launched the Next Mentorship in response to the pandemic, which saw funding and many programs for artists reduced, and aimed to fill this gap by offering direct support and mentorship. The program offers unique opportunities, helping artists build community and share experiences, and wanted to pass on the information we learned from mentors who helped Pioneers Go East Collective succeed.”

Photo: L to R - Annie MingHao Wang: Photo by Laura Bianchi; Maxi Hawkeye Canion / GUT PUNCH: Photo by Laura Carella; Jade Manns: Photo by Erik Tanner courtesy of The New York Times; Liberty Styles: Photo by Steve Pisano; Rohan Bhargava/ Rovaco Dance Company: Photo by Rachel Neville; Marie Lloyd Paspe: Photo by Jose Miranda

NEXT! Mentorship Program 2026/28 include:

Annie MingHao Wang 

Annie MingHao Wang (she/they) is a choreographer and dancer in New York. They are a 2025 Fellow of the Bogliasco Center as an awardee of the Van Cleef & Arpels Fellowship in Dance and have been Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research, Topaz Arts, Marble House Project, Leimay Foundation, BRIC, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Their work has been awarded grants by LMCC (Manhattan Arts Grant) and Brooklyn Arts Council. They have been presented by Danspace Project, Pioneers Go East at their 2024 Out-FRONT! festival, Movement Research @Judson, Leimay's OUTSIGHT series, Five Myles, and the Exponential Festival. Annie is a longtime company member of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group and is lucky to also have danced for Same as Sister, Sugar Vendil’s Isogram project, and Emily Johnson among other gifted artists.

Liberty Styles

Liberty Styles is a tap dancer, electronic musician, drag artist and choreographer based in NYC. Satire, collaged sound, and rhythmic improvisation are all pillars of their practice. Their research engages with histories of tap dance and queer performance art, drawing connections between embodied rhythm, nightlife, and experimental electronics as sites of memory, mischief, survival, and futurity. Liberty produces and performs in nightlife events that bring together diverse collaborators to explore the intersection of tap dance and drag performance. They are the recipient of grants from NYFA, Dance Lab NY, CUNY Dance Initiative, Green Box Arts, and more. Liberty performs regularly across the UK and Germany with artists including Xhosa Cole and Zyggurat, and has featured on live albums released by Stoney Lane Records. They performed in Ayodele Casel’s Diary of a Tap Dancer at the American Repertory Theater, and also collaborate extensively with Naomi Funaki, Michela Lerman and Orlando Hernandez's Knee-Heart Connection. Other stage credits include the Guggenheim, New York Live Arts, The Joyce Theater, and the Apollo Theater. Their work has been mentioned in The New York Times, Jazzwise, and Billboard.

Jade Manns

Jade Manns is a Canadian choreographer and dancer based in New York and a co-founder of PAGEANT, an artist-run performance space in Brooklyn. Named one of Dance Magazine’s 2026 “25 to Watch”, her work has been presented by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church and PAGEANT among others. Jade has received support from The New York State Council for the Arts, The Queens Art Fund, The Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA Emergency Grant), The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, NYU Artist Development Program for Dance and Kino Saito Arts Center. She was a 2024/2025 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist and is currently the inaugural Choreographic Fellow for the Martha Hill Dance Fund Mesh Fellowship. As a performer Jade has worked with artists such as Evvie Allison, Kim Brandt, Ayano Elson, Phoebe Berglund, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Luis Lara Malvacias, Alexa West, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Boychild, Cherrie Yu and Rosario Zorraquin. She is an alumna of the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and holds a BFA in dance with a minor in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Marie Lloyd Paspe

Marie Lloyd Paspe is a dance artist, choreographer, and vocalist whose work physicalizes kapwa, the Tagalog word for “shared one-ness,” in re-membering we are not separate from each other. Daughter of parents from Batangas and Iloilo, Philippines, Marie’s family migrated from Singapore, to Canada, and the United States. As a descendent of nurses and farmers, Paspe’s work manifests through the hands of a laborious body: implying the brown, hypersexualized body as a revolution against the oppressor’s gaze. Paspe spent 2025-26 researching with shaman farmers in the Philippines. Her practice follows Mamerto Tindongan’s teachings: “to be a shaman is to work the rice fields” – considering our service to the land is in direct relation to the worlds we rebuild. Paspe’s choreography has been presented in the U.S., Sweden, Germany, and the Philippines. She has worked with Ching-I Chang, Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, Ayoung Kim, Faye Driscoll, Sugar Vendil, and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (2018-24) having received a Bessie Award for choreographic contributions to “Deep Blue Sea.” Paspe is a research artist with Ifugao Center for Living Culture (Philippines), 2026-27 Movement Research Artist-in-Resident, 2026 NYSCA Awardee, 2026 LMCC Artist-in-Resident, and 2025 NEFA National Dance Project Finalist. marielloydpaspe.com / @mmmlloyd 

Maxi Canion

Maxi (she/they) is a Performance Artist based in Brooklyn, originally from El Paso, TX. She is a 2026-27 Mabou Mines Suite/Space Artist and 2025–26 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. Her series of works present as radical fantasies, surreal disruptions, decomposing realities, and ruptures of “normalcy”. Piloted by personas known as “doom mascots”, she dissects the nuances of American class dynamics and labor, Trans-femininity, post-gender, and online culture's social and somatic impacts. Her process confronts humanity’s most grotesque aspects and offers experiential containers to process. All deeply supported by integral artistic collaborations. She has presented work at MoMA, Isabella Stewart Garner Museum, Pageant, Judson Memorial Church, New York Live Arts, Les Urbaines Festival (CH), Brooklyn Museum, La MaMa, Danspace Project, and Performance Space NY.

Rohan Bhargava / Rovaco Dance Company

Rohan Bhargava, raised in New Delhi, India, moved to New York in 2012 to earn his BFA in Dance from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Rohan is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rovaco Dance Company which produces immersive events exploring queerness, South-Asian culture, and contemporary performing arts. Rohan has received commissions from Sam Houston State University, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, The Dance Gallery Festival, and CUNY Dance Initiative. Rovaco's work has appeared at Battery Dance Festival, Little Island NYC, Provincetown Dance Festival, and Movement Research at Judson Church. Since 2021, the company’s annual production, Rovaco Dance Party has merged performance with South-Asian hospitality, embodying the belief that culture is best understood through intimate experience. In 2026, this event expanded into a two-day Rovaco Dance Festival with support from New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Org, and Brooklyn Arts Council, Rohan is a 2020 Jadin Wong Fellow of Asian American Arts Alliance and one of Dance Magazine’s "25 to Watch" 2021. Rovaco is a recipient of Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund 2022-23, Danse Mirage Foundation’s Choreography Pilot Program 2024, NYU Production Lab’s Artist Development Program for Dance 2024, and NYSCA’s Support for Artists 2025.

For more information or questions about Pioneers Go East Collective and the NEXT! Mentorship, please email community@pioneersgoeast.org 

History

The NEXT! Mentorship 2024/26 program offered artists one-on-one support and opportunities, including guidance in production, creative design, grant writing, and project budgeting. The program nurtures the development of artists through exchange, monthly meetings, discussions, workshops, and presentations for a period of 18+ months.

Dominique Castelano
Dominica Greene
Ian Askew
Suzzanne Ponomarenko
Cinthia Chen
Star Mitchell
Johnnie Mercer
Miranda Brown & Noa Rui-Piin Weiss

Pioneers Go East Collective’s NEXT! Mentorship is made possible in part thanks to funding from the Jerome Foundation.

NEXT PIONEERS!

Pioneers Go East Collective provides Educational and Engagement programs to promote understanding through the arts! NEXT PIONEERS! includes:

1.

NEXT! Mentorship is a Mentorship Development program in creative and critical thinking and producing opportunities to empower artists by supporting them during the crucial development process! 

NEXT! Mentorship is a mentorship development program in creative thinking and producing support serving emerging artists - and open to performance artists, movement-based artists, storytellers and video-artists. Each year NEXT PIONEERS program offers artists professional opportunities based on artist’s needs - in production support, grant writing, and know-how in financial & project budgeting, plus presenting opportunities at a pivotal time in their lives to enable and energize their creative voices and social practices. During the program artists are invited to Monthly career development with one-on-one mentoring; inclusion in the educational workshops offered 10 times a year; and inclusion in the collective’s curated series CROSSROADS SERIES, and OUT-FRONT! Fest. 

2.

NEXT! Workshop and NEXT! Youth

NEXT! Storytelling & Movement-based Workshop Program is a creative and engagement program that draws from the participants’ life experience to empower them. Designed for multigenerational people - the creative workshop focuses on performance and storytelling techniques including creative writing and interview-based acting. The goal is to create a nurturing learning environment and build stronger bonds within the participants’ community. The two-days workshop (three-hours/each session) intends to give participants essential tools to begin to connect with their story, to create original short pieces shared with others, and to reflect and cherish on the value of personal journeys. 

NEXT! Workshop series is a storytelling & movement-based FREE creative and engagement program presented at Judson Church in West Village, 14/Y and Lower East Side Girls Club in East Village, and online.

FREE, open to the general public to participants of ALL ages - these programs are intended to create intergenerational dialogues on social issues, and to nurture the next generation of underserved artists and their communities. 

*To inquire about our programs email: pioneersgoeast@gmail.com with the subject: 'NEXT! Workshops - Inquiry' and we'll be happy to invite you to participate.

DANCE IN THE ROUND created and developed by Parijat Desai

Dance In The Round (DITR) is dancing together in a circle. This is an age-old, nearly universal human activity—to express solidarity, to worship, or just to have fun. DITR is a program based on circle dances from Gujarat, India, called Garba and Raas. Our aim is to make these wonderful traditions more widely available, and more importantly to harness the power of the circle-dance experience to support health, well-being, inclusion, and community building among people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds.

Teaching Artists

India-born teaching artist and choreographer Parijat Desai teaches contemporary dance and contemporary bharata natyam, and leads Dance In The Round, workshops for all ages based on Garba and Raas, circle dances from Gujarat, India. She has taught at various colleges and school and at studios including Mark Morris Dance Center and Peridance. She has also taught actors through Theater Mitu New York Artist Intensive and Cornerstone Theater (LA). in September 2018, Parijat will teach an intensive through Stanford University in New York.

Queer writer, art-maker, and teaching artist Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte developed the collective's creative and educational practice with students at Public School 78 in Queens, and The Children Institute (NJ). The educational workshop focus on discovering the students heritage using oral storytelling and new technology. Additional educational programs taught at Pace University; and workshops presented at Stanford University in collaboration with artist, choreographer and educator Parijat Desai.

Argentinean-born and raised artist Anabella Lenzu's commitment to teaching dance and choreography is strong, as is evidenced by 25+ years of experience working in diverse communities in New York City. Lenzu's background affords her a unique perspective in teaching in a multicultural and multiracial environment. Her areas of artistic specialization are Dance Theater, Modern Dance, Argentinean Tango, Choreography/Composition. Teaching is a passion for Anabella. She is a dedicated educator and truly enjoy guiding her students to make discoveries and find their own voices through movement.
 Regular classes, workshops and residencies in more than 50 institutions since 1994, including universities, professional dance studios in USA, Argentina, and Chile. Anabella has been teaching in higher education since 2005, including NYU Gallatin, Lehman College (CUNY) and Sarah Lawrence College. She is guest teaching artists at Peridance, Wooster Group/ Summer Institute, and taught workshops in creative aging at Senior Centers in Brooklyn (Fort Greene, Bushwick).