Co-founder, Artistic Director, Choreographer, Community Workshops

Michael Spencer Phillips is an interdisciplinary artist/choreographer/producer working at the intersection of dance, film, community engagement, environmentalism, and social issues. Phillips’ work has been presented/commissioned by Carnegie Hall, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Universal Records, UC Berkeley, Ariel Rivka Dance, Open Look Festival, Notre Dame, University of Michigan, Interlochen, the Ailey School, Lehigh University, and Traverse City Dance Project. Phillips holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Michigan and was honored with their alumni “Emerging Artist” Award. He has also been a panelist for the New York State Council for the Arts, Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, CBS News, and the NYC Dept of Education. Phillips’ work has received support from Tauck Ritzau Innovative Philanthropy, ArtBridge, Stonewall Community Foundation, ArtsEverywhere Canada, Musagetes Foundation. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Bloody Sunday Trust, and The Swedish Arts Council. He was a dancer for over 25 years in NYC, credits include: RIOULT Dance NY, Robert Battle’s Battleworks, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, and Jennifer Muller / The Works.

Phillips co-founded Site-Specific Dances in 2020.

Co-founder, Artistic Director, Performance Installation Design, Site Analysis

Dino Kiratzidis is an architectural designer and Associate at the New York-based architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. His work at the studio has focused largely on concept and schematic development for projects in the performing arts as well as museums and institutional buildings, and most recently, the new arts school at Rice University. Dino studied architecture at Yale University, where he received his Master of Architecture degree. Dino has been an invited reviewer at Yale University, Pratt Institute and The University of Pennsylvania, and taught design studios at UPenn and at The Yale School of Architecture. He is interested in moments of disciplinary overlap between performance and architecture. Through site analysis, he helps to better understand the ‘theatrical potentials’ of our found sites - both wild and urban. Dino will leads Site Analysis as well as the design of our performance installations, what we call “Performance Architecture”.

Dino co-founded Site-Specific Dances, along with Michael Spencer Phillips, in 2020.

Videography, Editing

Emma Kazaryanis a multimedia artist, journalist, and filmmaker based in New York City. She has worked on wide-ranging topics including geopolitics, conflicts, arts, culture, sports, and business. She has contributed to numerous film projects for HBO, ABC News, Al-Jazeera, Conde Nast, the United Nations, and other publications. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Photography from Baruch College, CUNY.

Merging art and journalism, she combines different forms of media to tell a compelling story. Her experimental multimedia video Heroin Highway was a part of a group exhibition The Curse of Geography organized by ArtsEverywhere publication and the Art Gallery of Guelph in Canada. Her recent film Waltz Noir, created in collaboration with Polina Nazaykinskaya and Michael Spencer Phillips, premiered at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and was selected for the 2020 Quiet City Film Festival in New York.

In 2020 she joined Site-Specific Dances as a videographer and editor.

COLLABORATING COMPOSER

-To/From, Megaflora Interviews Soundscapes

Darian Donovan Thomas is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist and was born in San Antonio, Texas and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He is interested in combining genres and mediums into a singular vocabulary that can express ideas about intersectionality (of medium and identity). Necessarily, he is interested in redacting all barriers to entry that have existed at the gates of any genre - this vocabulary of multiplicity will be intersectional, and therefore all-inclusive. Darian’s work, ‘A Disintegrating Foundation Under a Catastrophe of Air’ was premiered on June 16th, 2020 in Brooklyn New York as part of Quarantine Concerts and the Next Festival of Emerging Artists. He has received a Bachelors in Music Composition from The University of the Incarnate Word, and was a 2018 New Amsterdam Composer Lab Fellow, 2018 SoSI Composer Fellow, and 2019 Bang On A Can Composition Fellow. He is currently touring with Moses Sumney, Balùn, and Arooj Aftab.

Darian will create immersive sonic environments to accompany the Megaflora environmental expert interviews.

COLLABORATING COMPOSER

-Fenix, Megaflora

Polina Nazaykinskaya The music of an award-winning Russian-born American composer Polina Nazaykinskaya has become a staple of orchestral, chamber and solo repertory in the United States, and Europe. This season Polina’s orchestral music will be performed by The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, The Salina Symphony, The Florida Orchestra, Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes, The Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, the Portland Youth Philharmonic and the Minnesota Orchestra. In October 2021 Polina`s recent ballet “Reverse Perspective” was performed at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the Jaani Kirik in Saint-Petersburg. In March 2022 the San Francisco Ballet premiered a new piece based on Polina’s composition “The Rising”, choreographed by Yuri Possokhov. In Spring 2022 MorDance will be premiering Polina’s new ballet “Encounters” at Symphony Space in New York City. Polina is a graduate of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory College and the Yale School of Music. Currently, Polina is a Lecturer of Composition at Brooklyn College Conservatory and the GCTYO Philharmonic Orchestra conductor.

Polina’s expressive symphonic poem Fenix is the score to our work of the same name. Polina will also compose music for all the environmental ballet sequences of Megaflora.

COLLABORATING COMPOSER

-Movement Bridge (Northern Ireland)

Emma O’Halloran is an Irish composer and vocalist. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, O’Halloran has written for folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, film, and theatre. Her work has been described as “intensely beautiful” (Washington Post) and “unencumbered, authentic, and joyful” (I Care If You Listen), and has won numerous competitions, including National Sawdust’s inaugural Hildegard competition and the Next Generation award from Beth Morrison Projects.O’Halloran’s music aims to capture the human experience, exploring complex emotions felt at specific moments in time. This approach has found a wide audience: her work has been featured at Classical NEXT in Rotterdam, the Prototype Festival in New York, New Music Dublin Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, and MATA Festival. Additionally, her music has been performed by Crash Ensemble, Contemporaneous, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, the Refugee Orchestra Project, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, and the Irish National Symphony Orchestra, amongst others. She holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University and is currently working as a freelance composer.

Music by by Emma O’Halloran will accompany Movement Bridge Derry, a short film documenting our community performance project in Northern Ireland.