mission

The mission of art @ the Nawn is to provide a welcoming, and inclusive space for performance artists to teach, and create works; and to make art and community in Roxbury and Dorchester accessible to all through public events and cultural enrichment.

advisory board

• Angela Guo

  

  Angela is a real estate broker and avid movement enthusiast traveler who has both performed and taught internationally. Beyond teaching pole fitness as a co owner of Fly Together Fitness, she is also a certified yoga, partner acrobatics, and barre instructor with 10+ years of experience in movement education. Her passion is in conditioning and working with beginners, particularly on building the necessary foundational blocks for a safe and successful practice.

  When not working on mastering the real estate market she can be found either in the air on an aerial apparatus or on the mat at a local BJJ gym.

• Evan Taylor

  

  
  Evan Taylor is a serial biotechnology entrepreneur with global experiences, who works on projects beyond sustainability and toward restorative models inherently improving the environment and local ecosystems. He believes that businesses should strive for restorative cycles in their supply chains and operations, not just carbon neutrality and renewable resource utilization.

  The last decade of his career was spent developing new technologies improving natural resource and energy efficiency of agriculture, water infrastructure, and most importantly, sustainable food production.

  As Founder & CEO of a biotech company, he led a team developing microbial biostimulants enhancing soil health and improved crop yield from food waste from Food Banks. This team used naturally derived soil micro-organisms to produce organic certified products. 

  As a Project Manager, he has worked on redevelopment projects related to environmental restoration and redevelopment of former brownfields and superfund sites, including an 880 acre land conservancy project in Pismo Beach, CA; the cleanup and mixed-use redevelopment of former landfill and junkyard sites in Tempe, AZ. 

  He is actively involved in supporting regional economic development; he consult in startup advisement, project planning, and financial modeling for new ventures in the environmental, biotechnology, and sustainable energy & agriculture spaces. Furthermore, he has led commercialization and product development working with a small environmental sensor instrument company on 5 awarded Phase I, Phase II, and Phase IIB Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants. 

  Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, he has lived and worked in Ghana, Bahrain and Tempe, Arizona.

• Henry Kasdon

  

  Henry "kidspin" Kasdon loves to dance. Whether at a party, onstage, in class, a battle or a video; he's always ready to break it down. Combining his athletic experience and love for music, he started out his dance career as a freshman at Tufts University in 1998 as a Breaker.

  He quickly spread into all styles of hip hop, and throughout his college career he expanded into jazz, modern, and various cultural dances. After graduating in 2002, Henry joined Rainbow Tribe and began teaching hip hop at Boston University and Harvard University. In the following years he expanded to various elementary schools, high schools and dance studios. He has spent time teaching for Boston Ballet, Berklee College of Music, and Boston Conservatory. He was featured in the only Boston episode of MTV's My Super Sweet 16.

  In 2008 Henry co-founded Bside and has been Director ever since. He has been teaching hip hop dance to 5th graders at Title 1 schools in and around Boston for over 20 years through the Drug Enforcement Administration Educational Foundation. Along with his ongoing classes, he teaches master classes all over New England under the Hip Hop Umbrella. From breaking to boogaloo, reggae, funk and krump, he works on both choreography and freestyling.

  As a DJ, drummer, filmmaker, property manager, coach, husband and father, he has a full life - but there is always time to dance. Henry continues to be the director of Bside with Mosaic Dance Inc.

• Julie Joseph

  

  Julie Joseph (JJ) has been dancing since she was about 3 years old. Hailing from Westchester, NY, she grew up attending Rose's School of Dance in Hawthorne. Now known as Inspire Dance Studio, she had the opportunity to train under Rose Cremonese Norton and Silvana Larkin for ballet, tap, jazz, lyrical, and jump rope tap. She also was able to train under Mack Norton in classical operatic singing. As an avid competition student, they traveled around New England and the tri-state area, learning from faculty at Access Broadway, Dance Educators of America, Hollywood Vibes, and more. Her tap and acting solos won her high awards in the teen divisions. 

  She went on to train in Boston, NYC and LA in various disciplines. Her training comes from incredible educators across the country, including her work with Boston Community Dance Project (BCDP GLOBAL), a commercial contemporary fusion company; DrumatiX, a drumming, body percussion, and tap dancing company; N.E.A.T., a tap company; and LUME Collective, a LA based commercially minded collective. Her performance credits include incredible spaces like the Jazz at Lincoln Center (NYC), Symphony Space NYC, and Carnival Choreographer's Ball (LA and NYC). She has also made it a priority to continue her education outside the dance, via professional development courses from Karida Griffith (History of Tap Dance), and Tia Rivera (Break Through Bootcamp).

  For the past few years, she has worked as a movement director for Model X: Inclusive Fashion, a New York Fashion Week show. She was able to debut her movement direction in Sayaka's music video, Bite My Tongue. Her production credits continue to grow, working in film and direction. She has had the honor of working with local artists to film and direct various music videos and branding content for their music.

  You can now find JJ living bi-coastally between the east and west coast. She currently is still performing, in addition to teaching, choreographing, filming, and directing. She absolutely adores educating the next generation, especially in Tap, Rhythm Work and history, contemporary movement, Percussive Contemporary, and Dance on Camera.

• Karesia Batan

  

  Karesia Batan has been a Queens-based modern dancer, choreographer, and producer of the Queensboro Dance Festival since 2006. She has performed for various choreographers, film directors, and installation artists, and established her dance + production company, The Physical Plant in 2010, under which the QDF began.

  Karesia also produced curated dance film screenings Dance Shorts, and the Site Moves dance installation series for the LIC Arts Open. Prior, she was Creative Producer for Forward Flux Productions NYC (Best of Fringe 2012) and Studio Producer for National Choreography Month. She has spoken on arts & culture panels for the Center of Urban Future, QPTV, and the LIC Partnership. She currently serves on Queens Community Board 2 as Chair of the Arts & Culture Committee, as well as several task forces for Queens District 26 and Queensborough President’s Office, and is on the board of The Design Trust for Public Space. She is a recipient of the Filipino Spirit Award by the NY Mets and listed on the 2024 City & State Power 100 for Arts and Culture.

  Karesia’s latest dance projects are performing Filipino folkdances most recently in her Queens neighborhood, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Google, and dancing for choreographer Craig Hoke Zarah. Karesia holds a B.S. in Communication from Boston University with honors.

• Kristin Baker

  

  Kristin Baker serves as the director of Suffolk Performing Arts , an arts and leadership program at Suffolk University. Kristin has worked in the theater for 25 years as an actor, director, playwright, producer, and educator. She was the co-founder and producing director of Boston’s award winning Rough & Tumble Theatre, and has served on the executive boards of many arts and service organizations including StageSource and Arts Administrators in Higher Education (AAHE). She is a vocal arts activist, a mother of three, and a novice balloon bender.

• Laura Teicher

  

  Laura Teicher, the president and executive director of FORGE, leads the 501(c)3 nonprofit on its mission to help innovators with physical products navigate the journey from prototype to commercialization and impact – at scale.

  Laura is responsible for organizational impact, strategy, and sustainability as FORGE helps emerging and scaling companies with their physical product development, manufacturing strategies, and localized supply chains. Under her leadership, FORGE has added hundreds of startups to the network it serves each year. Twenty percent of those companies are in mature production today, an incredible number considering that more than ninety percent of hardware startups fail.

  Laura previously served as executive director of the Boston chapter of TiE – the largest global network dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship. Her unique background includes experience in the nonprofit, private, and public sectors. Prior to joining TiE, she managed business operations at a growing financial firm, while serving as President of the Boston professional chapter of Net Impact. She has also served as an aide to the Massachusetts state senate.

  Laura earned her M.B.A. from Boston University and holds degrees in English literature and studio art. She currently serves on the board of directors of ClimateXChange, a recognized leader in climate and economic policy research.

  In her spare time, Laura loves spending time in the woods and at the beach with her dog Finn, reading, and making art. If you want to make her smile, start with a bad pun!

• Marilyn Plotkins, PhD

  

  Dr. Plotkins has been directing, producing, and facilitating professional and student productions at Suffolk University for thirty years where she was a tenured professor and chair of the Theatre Department. She has championed new work both inside the department and as founding director for the Boston Music Theatre Project (BMTP) making a specialty of developing new musicals. In 2008, she led the renovation of the Modern Theatre which became the recipient of a National Trust for Historic Preservation Award.

  As director of the Modern Theatre she has nurtured programmatic relationships with cultural institutions e.g. Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Boston Preservation Alliance, Casa Patas, Central Square Theater, Goethe-Institut, and WGBH to name a few. Most recently, she led the collaboration with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company to co-produce the world premiere of Robert Brustein’s The Last Will, the third in a trilogy of plays about Shakespeare’s life and work which were all premiered by Suffolk University.

  Dr. Plotkins has served on the New Works and Festival panels for the National Alliance for Music Theatre, the Performance Review Panel at Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute and is the author of The American Repertory Theatre: The Brustein Years published by Praeger Press. She holds a MA from Emerson College and a PhD in Theatre History and Criticism from Tufts University.

• Phil Cohen

  

  Phil 'Bakuri' Cohen is a life-long martial artist and dancer and is currently an Instrutor de Capoeira at Mandingueiros dos Palmares with over 16 years of experience in capoeira and over 30 years of experience in martial arts. Phil has formal modern and ballet training and has performed hip hop, k-pop, modern, martial arts, and various other modalities and movements. 

  Phil is also a Principal of Boston Communities, a Boston-based housing development company specializing in building mixed-income, transit oriented, deeply sustainable communities in diverse neighborhoods. Phil has over a decade of affordable and mixed-income housing development experience working in both the public and private sectors. His projects include over 4,000 units of housing and leverage local, state, and federal resources to create affordable and market-rate rental and ownership homes for families and elderly adults. 

• Jon Smalls

  

  Jon Smalls has trained in the performance arts of dance, theater and music for more than two decades. He knows and understands the needs of artists for each of their chosen media, and is closely connected to the industries surrounding these needs.

  Before starting the Nawn, Jon worked as a full time software engineer for the US Department of Commerce, writing intranet software to support regulatory compliance. He earned a BS in computer science, minoring in theater from Suffolk University. He has managed multifamily properties in Boston, and overseen deep renovation efforts to expand and improve the habitable space; electrify its power plant and net zero out its energy consumption. Fun fact, at one point Jon also operated a fleet of leased taxicabs in Boston before transitioning into technology.

  Jon was inspired to open the Nawn after seeing a neighborhood and cultural need, and reaching into his network to address it.

  Jon grew up in the South End of Boston near Columbus Avenue, attended Boston Public Schools and currently lives in Dorchester.

  Want to learn more about Jon?

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