Philippine-born Gerald Casel was raised in California where he began dancing in public school. His choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. As a teacher, he employs somatics as a way to amplify knowledge production through movement and by identifying and undoing coded systems of dance training that privilege Eurocentric canons and aesthetics. A graduate of The Juilliard School, he received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Casel danced in the companies of Michael Clark, Stanley Love, Zvi Gotheiner, Sungsoo Ahn, Lar Lubovitch, The Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and Stephen Petronio. Casel was awarded a ‘Bessie’ - New York Dance and Performance Award for Sustained Achievement in 1997. Casel is an associate professor of dance at University of California, Santa Cruz and is the Artistic Director of GERALDCASELDANCE. He was a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Fellow in 2016, a Hellman Fellow in 2015, a CHIME at 10 in the Bay Area mentee with Margaret Jenkins in 2014, and a Resident Artist at ODC (2015-2018). Future projects include collaborations with Peiling Kao, Na-ye Kim, Keith Hennessy, Netta Yerushalmy, Hope Mohr Dance’s Community Engagement Residency, and Camping at Centre National de la Danse, Paris. Photo: Robbie Sweeny.