mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of  the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.

brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at the UCLA World Arts and Cultures Dance Department. Currently, they are a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow. They love living by the sea.

Photo Credit: Cherilynn Tsushima

www.improvisingwhileblack.com

Instagram: @mayfieldbrookz @whalefallopera

FB: mayfield brooks (artist page)

Yanira Castro is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico) and living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Castro forms iterative, multimodal projects that center the complexity of land, citizenship, and governance in works activated and performed by the public. Co-creating with a team of collaborators under the name, a canary torsi, she investigates choreography as a practice of collective embodiment, grappling with agency and communal action as a body politic. She has developed over fifteen projects including installations, performance manuals, podcasts, video works, and performances at MCA/Chicago, ICA/Boston, ODC in San Francisco, Bates Dance Festival, and venues in NYC including NY Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, Danspace Project, LMCC's River to River, The Invisible Dog Art Center, and The Chocolate Factory Theater.

She has been recognized with national awards and commissions including Creative Capital, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Dance, NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist and Choreography Fellowships, NEFA's National Dance Project, and two Bessie Awards for Outstanding Production. She has recently been in residence at LMCC, MacDowell, Yaddo, and The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. She is thrilled to recently join the a haunted botany team for the Eastern White Pine piece of the project, a performance for a forgotten forest.

Photo Credit: Simon Courchel

zavé martohardjono is a Lenapehoking-based/Brooklyn-based choreographer, dancer, installation artist, educator, and community organizer. They make and collaborate on time-based works that activate audiences' senses, tap into ritual and memory, and point towards just and liberated futures. zavé performed in a haunted botany in NYC in 2023 and the Maritime Museum of Maine in 2025. They are a 2022 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for Outstanding Performer. Most notably, they have presented performance works at the 92Y, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Center for Performance Research, El Museo del Barrio, Issue Project Room, the Judson Church, The Kennedy Center, Storm King Art Center, and internationally at Mala Stanica Multimedia Center in Skopje, North Macedonia.

Residencies and fellowships include 2024 Center for Experimental Ethnography at UPenn, 2022 MRX/Movement Research Exchange program, 2021 NYPL Dance Research Fellowship, 2020 Gibney Dance in Process, 2019 Movement Research AIR, 2019 CATWALK Art Residency, 2017-2018 LMCC Workspace Residency, 2016 Bronx Museum, 2016 Shandaken: Storm King, 2016 Gibney Work Up 3.3, 2015 Chez Bushwick, and 2011 EMERGENYC.

Photo Credit: Ashley Smith/Wide Eyed Studios

Email: zave@zavemartohardjono.com | Instagram: @zavozavito

Lu Yim is a transdisciplinary artist working with experimental sound and dance, to situate pain and sensation within a queer and contemporary conversation. Since 2013 Yim has co-organized with queer and BIPOC-centered collective Physical Education alongside Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Takahiro Yamamoto. They are a personal trainer and somatic movement facilitator and host a virtual mutual-aid class titled Action & Rest made for their queer, trans and disability communities. They performed with Haunted Botany in summer 2024 at NYC’s Christopher Pier.

Photo Credit: Golden for Queer Art's Community Portrait Project 2025

luyim.hey@gmail.com

www.lu-yim.com

Instagram: @lu_yim

Xinyi Zhang is a graduate student in the MFA dance program “Embodied Interdisciplinary Practice” at Duke University. Zhang holds a BA in Performance, Theater, and Dance/Education, with a minor in Mathematics from Colby College. She is a performer, choreographer, and math teacher. Because of her own experiences of living between China and the US, her work explores relationships, community, and diaspora. She was the research assistant for a haunted botany in 2023 and performed in a haunted botany at the Maine Maritime Museum in 2025.

Photo Credit: Nick Caito

Instagram: xyi_zzzz

Opal O’Rourke is a sophomore at Colby College currently studying Environmental Policy and Marine Science. Her work focuses on archival research and performance studies. She is very excited to be supporting “a haunted botany” through research and documentation!    

Galle is a trans-indigenous refugee immigrant, bruja, farmer, artist, cook and tattooer, based in Brooklyn-Lenapehoking and Peru.  “I see my art as messages from a divine cosmic source, led by the spirit that gives beautiful life and happiness in the real world; mainly creating imagery and participatory narratives as alternatives to common apocalyptic structures.” She is currently working hard to open Chacra Vivir Sabrosa, the first queer farm in Latin America. Her work has been presented at Performance Space New York, Creative Time, The Museum of Modern Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, Residencia Paijan and Vivir Sabrosa Mercadita. She performed in the Maine 2025 iteration of a haunted botany.

Photo Credit: Kari Herer

Khadija Tarver is an artist and architectural researcher born in Everett, Washington. Her work is concerned with fugitivity, lesbianism, and lusophone postcolonialism. She lives and works in New York City. She holds an MArch from Columbia University and was a 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar in Brazil. Tarver performed in the 2023 performance of a haunted botany.

Photo Credit: Auden Barbour

Peter Simensky (1975-2023) was a beloved friend, partner, brother, son, community builder, activist, and vibrant human. He was a transdisciplinary artist who explored value and the volatility of art objects through sculpture, print, video, and sound, among other mediums. He lived in NYC and the Bay Area, while Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine continued to be places of home.  He received his MA at CUNY’s Hunter College, and was the chair of the Graduate Fine Arts MFA at California College of the Arts.

His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Museum 52, Museum 500meter, Sapporo; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Simensky’s performances and installations have been featured at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, The Swiss Institute, Wattis Institute, the ICA San Francisco, 18th Street Art Center, Cabinet, and the de Young Museum. He has received grants, residencies and awards including: NYFA Fellows Grant, Oregon Arts Commission / Ford Family Opportunity Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants, MacDowell Colony, La Tallera Proyecto Siqueiros, and Skowhegan to name a few. Selected group exhibitions have been included at The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Sculpture Center, Palais de Tokyo; Mass Moca, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Socrates Sculpture Park. Simensky performed in the 2023 iteration of a haunted botany.

Photo Credit: Auden Barbour