CDS Members Committee – Artists Announced

Valerie Ebuwa is a freelance dance artist, activist, writer and model from East London. She started her training at Lewisham College before obtaining a BA HONS degree from London Contemporary Dance School. Amongst others she’s recently worked with; Clod Ensemble, Vincent Dance Theatre, Bhebhe and Davies and Jamie xx. As a maker, she has choreographed and curated ValUE, a multi-layered project created in order to offer different perspectives on the black female image. ValUE is the first material archive to be featured at the Siobhan Davies Studio. Her writing has been featured in The Stage Magazine and is a regular contributor to I am Hip Hop magazine; a printed and online publication championing Hip Hop culture. Her work has been featured in Crack Magazine, Glass Magazine and The Earth Issue.

Jose Funnell (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, performer and activist based in London, who works to support migrant rights, the LGBTQIA+ community, the movement for black lives and the anti-racist struggle. Their research based practice considers the pedagogical potential of embodiment and emancipatory potential of performing agency within contexts of historic negation. Often in collaboration with Carlos Maria Romero, they facilitate somatic workshops in order to empower queer people of colour. They have presented solo work at the ICA (London); Les Urbaines (Lausanne, Switzerland), Steakhouse Live (London), Slap Festival (York), The Albany (London), CLAY (Leeds) and Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw).

Originally from NYC, Zjana Muraro is a London based dancer with a digital practice, making performances that explore more than human worlds. She is inspired by futuristic curiosities about societies and bodies and her research is inside the entanglement between embodiment practices, contemporary dance and the tech digital spaces of today and tomorrow. She's also a registered somatic practitioner and her writing has been recently published in journals throughout the UK on the topics of the human body in relation to digital environments including VR; mental health and social media; displacement and heterotopias.

Claudia Palazzo is a London born and based artist and dancer working across the intersections and contradictions of dance, performance art and film using her body as a responsive site to her environment and territory. Her work exists somewhere between the nightclub, gallery, and street. It is often poetic, feral, meditative and structurally violent. Aesthetically her work is influenced by my roots in nightclub culture, inner- city concrete dwellings and psychophysical training. She seeks to establish charged connections and subliminal understandings with an audience in order to process and harness our collective and individual sense of joy, sadness, resistance, power and endurance.