Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and recently presented the restaging of heralded choreographer Blondell Cummings’s solo Chicken Soup, re-imagined for Danspace Project’s 50th Anniversary (Chicken Soup 2025). In 2024, Marjani also celebrated her choreographic debut with the New York Metropolitan Opera, El Niño. Marjani is a 3x Bessie award winning choreographer, performer, teaching artist, and Mother. She is an awardee of the prestigious Dance Magazine Harkness Award (2020) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2020). She is an inaugural recipient of 3 distinguishing fellowships in dance, including Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2017), the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2018), and the DanceUSA Artist Fellowship (2019). Her performance installation Garden of Unicorns- a Surrealist Ode to Blondell Cummings unfolded in The Getty Gardens as part of the Ever Present Series, curated by Kristin Juarez and Sarah Cooper. Saunders is a founding member of the collective 7NMS, alongside composer/sound designer Everett Saunders. They are recent recipients of New Music USA and the National Dance Project Production & Touring award for their latest work Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist. In 2022, Saunders made her off-broadway debut as choreographer of Dreaming Zenzile, written and starring grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Somi Kakoma, and directed by Drama League Founder’s Award winning artist Lileana Blain-Cruz. Saunders is the Visioning Founder of the Art x Power a platform, dedicated to fostering purpose and innovation by investing in and building resilient futures for Black radically experimenting artists. Humbly, Saunders defines her work by its lineage, stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving, irreverent conjurers!

Zack Fine is an actor, director, playwright, and currently Assistant Professor of Acting at UT Austin. Onstage, he has worked on Broadway and off Broadway and in regional theatres nationwide, winning a 2015 Helen Hayes Award for his performance in Fiasco Theater’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. As a director, he helmed the world premiere of El Bien del País — the first Spanish translation of Our Country’s Good — which ran for two years in Mexico City. His plays have been developed at New York Stage and Film, The Public, MCC, and others; he was a 2024 Ucross Fellow for his adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels and a 2025 O’Neill NMTC Finalist for Father Time, with Tony nominee Bryce Pinkham. His play Bewilderness was a Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award nominee. He loves dogs but doesn’t currently have one.