team
Will Rawls
lead artist
Will Rawls is a multidisciplinary choreographer whose practice encompasses dance, video, sculpture, works on paper and installation. Rawls' choreography explores language and gesture to stage performances of black presence and becoming. Rawls has presented solo exhibitions at 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), Art Basel (2023), Adams + Ollman (2022) and a multi-part installation, Everlasting Stranger, at the Henry Art Gallery (2021). He has also presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, Performa 15, Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory Theater, High Line Art, Walker Art Center, REDCAT, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and the Hessel Museum at Bard College.
He has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Alpert Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Mellon Foundation, United States Artists, the Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, MAP Fund, the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Movement Research. In 2016, Rawls co-curated Lost and Found—six weeks of performances at Danspace Project that addressed the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS. Rawls is Associate Professor of Choreography in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and cultures/Dance. His writing has been published by the Hammer Museum, MoMA, Museu de Arte de São Paolo, Dancing While Black Journal, Brooklyn Rail and Artforum.
Margaret Knowles
finance & operations manager
Margaret Knowles (she/her) has worked in administrative and curatorial roles at MoMA PS1 and MoMA, as well as in operations and finance roles for small businesses and start ups whose missions involved indigenous craft preservation and the economic participation of people with disabilities. She grew up in Nashville, TN and came to New York to attend NYU, where she studied Contemporary Art at Critical Theory. In 2021, she earned her MBA from Columbia University. Margaret is a dancer and enjoys seeing, thinking about, and practicing dance!
Kearra Amaya Gopee
whistle space project manager
Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and atemporal--leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present and possible afterlives. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. They hold a MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles; BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University, and are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Benedict Nguyễn
[siccer] producer
Benedict Nguyễn (she/her) is a creative producer, dancer, writer, and creative producer. Her cultural criticism has appeared in The Baffler, BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She is the author of the [redacted] email zine nasty notes (2022) and debut novel Hot Girls with Balls (Catapult 2025). As a creative producer, she created the multidisciplinary performance platform ‘soft bodies in hard places’ (2019-2020) and has supported recent projects by Fana Fraser, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, and Johnnie Cruise Mercer, among others.