Incubator Residency
The Incubator (hosted by Dancing Grounds and International Dance Festival New Orleans) is a creative intensive offering artists, rooted in performing arts disciplines, the opportunity to be in conversation with other artists to incubate and create work in real time. Artists will meet for one week to participate in both solo and group activities to entertain creative ideas, activate process, and synthesize practice.
2026 Artists
Mara Bartlett Asenjo
Mara Bartlett Asenjo grew up in the Dominican Republic, immersed in music and movement, dancing Latin styles with her family from an early age. She began formal dance training in Elementary school and continued dancing and choreographing through college -- dance remains her favorite creative outlet. After living in many places across the United States, she settled in New Orleans, where she has made her home for the past 13 years. For the last decade, Mara served as Administrator and then Director of Chulitna Lodge Wilderness Retreat Center, an artist residency program located at an off-grid lodge in Alaska.
Jasmyne Watts
Jasmyne Watts is a New Orleans–based dance artist, educator, and creative director whose work centers Black cultural expression, community engagement, and embodied storytelling. She holds a Masters of Public Health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a Bachelor of Arts from Clark Atlanta University. She received her dance education and training at Spelman College, where she performed with Spelman Dance Theatre and developed a strong foundation in African diasporic, modern, and jazz forms. While in Atlanta, she also founded the Clark Atlanta University Dance Theatre, creating a collaborative platform for dancers across the Atlanta University Center. Jasmyne is the founder of The Wellness Collective powered by Ballerinas of the Bayou /Jazzy Fusion Dance Unlimited, an arts organization dedicated to youth development through performance, wellness, and creative workforce training. Her artistic practice is grounded in accessibility, joy, and collective care, using dance as a tool for connection, healing, and social imagination.
Flora Cabili
Selected Artists:
Brittany “Baj” Jones
Angelina Neal
Asanda Ruda
Jakki Kalogridis
Jakki Kalogridis (she/they) is a dancer, choreographer, visual artist, and writer. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Their multidisciplinary work synthesizes cultural history through a contemporary lens and questions ableist assumptions about dance and dance-making. She is the co-founder of Shoestring Dance Residency. Their recent works include I’m Not Daedalus Yet (2025 choreography), Pestilence (2025 art books), I’m Thoreau Waiting (2023 choreography and prose), Fast-Paced World (2023 Choreography and Costumes), and TANGENT SPACES (2022 art book, short fiction, and performance).
Flora Cabili is a community-taught interdisciplinary artist, educator, and queer storyteller who uses public engagement, installations, movement, and mixed-media works to explore themes of origin, assembly and dislocation. She draws from found materials' memory to explore our collective relationship to the natural and built environment. Currently, Flora explores climate futures by drawing from the memory of found materials – specifically petroleum byproducts – to investigate our collective relationship to the natural and built environment. Through this exploration, they grapple with how we can collectively (re)consider the nature of the material and how we manipulate nature. How can we contemplate notions of space, permanence, and extraction?