NOW 2026

Alfonso Abraham Cervera and Irvin Manuel Gonzalez have been duetting in life and on dance floors since 2010. They are cuir, Mexican American artivists, community organizers, educators, and scholars. Cervera and Gonzalez’s artistic collaboration exists at the intersections of cuirness, Latinidad, ritual, and activism, using dance as a medium to tell stories that foreground queer Mexicanidades. Their work explores the crafting, grooving, sweat, and possibilities that emerge from these lived experiences and the messy, cuir life sources that are generated in nightlife and transborder mobilizations. They engage Latin American social dance forms as tools for queering futurity, challenging conventional understandings of the body and the materials with which they work. Through their art, they incorporate spices, iconography, projections, and movement to create immersive ecologies that reimagine cultural traditions while fostering care, awareness, and social change. Cervera and Gonzalez have presented work at venues including HIGHWAYS, REDCAT (Los Angeles), El Teatro Campesino (San Jose), Judson Memorial Church (New York City), The Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), Dance Place (Washington, DC), the Latinx/e Contemporary Movement Festival (Chicago), and Dance Mission Theater (San Francisco). They are two of the four co-founders of Primera Generación Dance Collective, a Latinx arts collective.

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Scottie Harvey is a writer, performer, and animator from Los Angeles. She received her BFA (Film & Television) & MFA (Dramatic Writing) from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she found animation’s unlikely twin in theater. Her work brings cartoon logic into alternative mediums, translating gravity-defying gags for the theater stage or by writing emotionally grounded character studies into otherwise absurd contexts. Most recently, Scottie’s dramatic work has been featured at Dynasty Handbag’s “Weirdo Night” and her fiction writing has been published in Michelle Tea’s CLOWNS Anthology (DOPAMINE, 2026). Her play A Live-Action Adaptation of an Episode of Tom & Jerry ran at Pageant (Brooklyn, 2023) and had a reading at Theatre Rhinoceros (San Francisco, 2024). Her musical Something’s in the Water at Abortion Beach! premiered at Ars Nova’s ANTFEST (2022). She is the recipient of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting (2020). Her animated work has been featured by artists such as Julien Baker and TORRES, and appeared in festivals such as Rhode Island Film Festival, Palm Springs Animation Festival, Berlin Filmhaus, and FLAnimation.

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Jeonghyeon Joo is a composer and haegeum performer based in Los Angeles. She explores the physical, social, cultural, and political relationship between the performer and instrument, frequently collaborating with filmmakers, visual artists, composers, and performance artists. She has presented her work at institutions across North America and Asia, including UCLA, UC Berkeley, CalArts, UC Riverside, Florida International University, San Francisco State University, Sejong Center, Seoul National University, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Jakarta Institute of Arts, and experimental music venues in Los Angeles such as 2220 Arts + Archives, Oracle Egg, Human Resources, and Coaxial. Joo has received the Emerging Artist Award from the National Academy of Arts of the Republic of Korea (2024) and the Presidential Award of Korea (2012), and her recent projects have been supported by Arts Council Korea, Sejong Center, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, and California Institute of the Arts, among others. She received a Doctor of Musical Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2023 and earned a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Music from Seoul National University.

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Photo: Ashley Deran; Nina Sarnell; Shin-joong Kim.