Studio 170 | Germany | Archive
Boston

Jessie Jeanne Stinnett is a dancer, choreographer, Climate Reality Leader, and founder and co-artistic director of Boston Dance Theater. Her work translates complex socio-political and environmental issues into embodied, community-centered performance experiences. Rooted in collaboration, her practice brings together dancers, scientists, visual artists, and activists, with recent projects focusing on climate justice and the impacts of sea level rise on coastal communities. Jessie holds a BFA from The Boston Conservatory and an MFA from Trinity Laban Conservatoire. Her work has been presented by institutions including the Metropolitan Opera, Tate Britain, and Boston Baroque Opera, and supported by major national foundations. Central to her practice is accessibility and equity, offering low-cost public performances, open rehearsals, and paid residencies for artists from communities most affected by climate change. Elisabeth Schilling is a dancer and choreographer working across movement, contemporary music, design, and visual art. Her transdisciplinary projects are developed through close international collaboration and long-term research into texture, sound, and relational systems. Her work spans stage productions for black box theatres, choreographic scores for urban space, and experimental formats for visual art contexts, with a strong emphasis on audience encounter and site-specific engagement. Founded in 2016 in Luxembourg, her company has toured extensively, presenting nearly 230 performances in 19 countries, from major European capitals to rural regions. Elisabeth’s practice foregrounds accessibility, responsibility, and interconnectivity, using choreographic structure to reflect broader societal dynamics. She maintains long-term artistic partnerships with TRIFOLION Echternach, Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, and Philharmonie Luxembourg, where she regularly develops community and youth-oriented projects.

Listen – the dance

“Listen – the dance” is a proposition, a laboratory, an exploration. After years of verbal exchange and reciprocal dreaming, Jessie Jeanne Stinnett (United States) and Elisabeth Schilling (Germany / Luxembourg), two international choreographers, have joined forces to explore a mutual curiosity – the relationship of music and dance. Jessie and Elisabeth will makea new dancework in collaboration with a TBD female contemporary German composer (in Elisabeth Schilling’s network), who will electronically work Hildegard Bingen scores in a contemporary way. A creation residency, supported in part by Goethe-InstitutBoston Studio 170, will take place in Germany in 2025 and serve to create the framework for the new piece, which will be premiered in 2026 when Jessie Jeanne Stinnett returns with her company Boston Dance Theater to Germany as a full company.

Leeza Negelev was raised in Brooklyn and Boston by three generations of Soviets from Uzbekistan. Her bicultural upbringing honed an interest in the way observation determines experience, and her current research explores the relationship between attention, empathy, and aesthetic problem-solving.

In the studio, she is drawn to the active quality of her materials and artworks, which emerge through a tension between formal analysis and a sensory-driven, dialogical approach.

Her installations, paintings, video, and sound works have been exhibited across the United States and internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Kyoto Shibori Museum in Japan and Hošek Contemporary in Berlin, the latter supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut Boston.

Leeza holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Welch School of Art and Design. She lives and works in Boston.  To Close a Small Distance The exhibition To close a small distance brought together the artists Leeza Negelev and Katie Kearns with musicians dejana sekulić and Victor Guaita Igual for a week of shared exploration at Hošek Contemporary. The project focused on how closeness is felt, perceived, and negotiated—especially at a time when so much of daily life unfolds through screens.

Negelev’s paintings and installations were shaped by a dialogue between formal structure and sensory intuition, offering viewers a way into the immediacy of her mark-making. Kearns’ sculptures reworked familiar domestic objects, shifting them into surreal, memory‑laden forms that invited reflection on identity and queer experience.

The exhibition also featured a new installation-based performance created collaboratively with Negelev and performed by sekulić and Guaita Igual, with additional performances presented throughout the week.

Wenhua Shi received his MFA from University of California, at Berkeley (2009). He pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. 

His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and theArsenaleof Venice in Italy. His work is distributed by Light Cone, Paris, France and Canyon Cinema, San Francisco, USA.

Wenhua also is the jury for the 62nd Ann Arbor Film Festival (2024) and National Endowment for the Arts (2017, 2018 and 2021). He has received awards and grants including Mass Cultural Council (2024), the New York Foundation for the Arts (2015), the New York State Council on the Arts, and LEF Foundation (2021). Prof. Shi is the founder and one of curators of RPM Festival (2013 - Present).  To Mom, I Want to...is a collaborative theatre project initiated by playwright Jiayun Zhuang, active in China and the US, together with the Berlin-based collective Nomadic Minutes (CAO Kefei, ZHANG Deng, ZHOU Niannian, and LIU Shiyu—artists born in China across four different decades, now residing and working in Germany).

With a focus on the relationships with their moms, the project examines the interplay between these theatermakers’ diasporic experiences in Germany and their sentiments toward their motherland.

It explores how individuals continually traverse temporal and physical boundaries, information asymmetry, and sociocultural differences between their home and host societies. In the post-pandemic context, the project also probes into the anxieties associated with uncertain mobility, the heightened sensitivity of negotiating dual identities, and a perceived trend towards cultural deglobalization. Supported by Shanghai’s Theatre YOUNG and Berlin’s Ballhaus Ost, the production will debut in both cities in 2025.

The Making of “To Mom, I Want to...”

Performance Documentation: Rene Staebler (Berlin)
ZOU Xueping (Shanghai)
Video Editor: Wenhua Shi
Subtitle Editor: ZHANG Deng

Coproduction partners: Jiayun Zhuang (China/US) and Nomadic Minutes — CAO Kefei, ZHANG Deng, ZHOU Niannian, & LIU Shiyu (Germany)

Heather Kapplow from Allston creates participatory experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video.

Kapplow has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, and has had work commissioned for galleries, film and performance festivals within the USA and 
internationally. See how Heather talks about the Studio 170 | Germany experiences: