Kinetic Light
Alice Sheppard
Alice Sheppard took her first dance class in order to make good on a dare; she loved moving so much that she resigned her academic professorship in order to begin a career in dance. She studied ballet and modern with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Alice joined AXIS Dance Company where she toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs.
Since becoming an independent artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton.
As an emerging, award-winning choreographer, Alice creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging with disability arts, culture and history, Alice attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race by exploring the societal and cultural significance of difference. AliceSheppard.com
Laurel Lawson
Laurel Lawson found that dance combines her lifelong loves of athleticism and art, and began her professional career with Full Radius Dance in 2004. She has performed and taught in Atlanta and worldwide with the company. At Kinetic Light, in addition to choreographic collaboration and performance she designed and created the DESCENT costumes, designed the DESCENT wheelchairs in collaboration with Top End’s Paul Schulte, and is the product designer for AUDIMANCE, a revolutionary app centering non-visual audiences.
Laurel also performs, choreographs, and teaches as an independent artist, and is the CTO and co-founder of CyCore Systems, a boutique engineering consultancy which specializes in solving novel, multi-realm problems. She is also a member of the USA Women’s Developmental Sled Hockey Team.
Michael Maag
Michael Maag designs at the intersection of lighting and projections for theatre, dance, musicals, opera, and in planetariums across the United States. He sculpts with light and shadow to create lighting environments that tell a story, believing that lighting in support of the performance is the key to unlocking our audience’s emotions. He has built custom optics for projections in theatres, museums and planetariums, and also designs and builds electronics and lighting for costumes and scenery. As a wheelchair user, Michael is passionate about bringing the perspective of the disabled artist to technical theatre and design. He is currently the Resident Lighting Designer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His designs have been seen on the Festival’s stages for the last 20 years, as well as at Arena Stage, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Florida Studio Theatre, Henry Hudson Planetarium, Albany, and many other places. Michael has been a proud member of USITT since 1986
