Kinetic Light, Wired

Alice Sheppard

Alice Sheppard is the Founder and Artistic Director of Kinetic Light, as well as a choreographer and dancer in the company.

Sheppard studied ballet and modern dance with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Sheppard joined AXIS Dance Company, where she toured and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent artist, Sheppard has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the United Kingdom and Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton in the United States. Her choreography has been commissioned by Full Radius Dance (2019), CRIPSiE (2016), and MOMENTA (2019, 2016 and 2014).

As an emerging and Bessie award-winning choreographer, Sheppard creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging disability arts, culture, and history, she is intrigued by the intersections of disability, gender, and race. In addition to performance and choreography, Sheppard is a sought-after speaker and has lectured on topics related to disability arts, race and dance. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and in academic journals. She is a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow, a joint initiative of the Mellon Foundation and Ford Foundation respectively.

Jerron Herman

Jerron Herman is a dancer and choreographic collaborator with Kinetic Light.

Herman is an interdisciplinary artist who creates through dance, text, and visual storytelling. From 2011 to 2019, he was a principal member of Heidi Latsky Dance and also served as their Development Director from 2016 to 2019. Herman was a finalist for the inaugural Apothetae and Lark Play Development Lab Fellowship and was also nominated for a Fellowship in Dance from United States Artists. His latest works include Breaking and Entering with Molly Joyce at Danspace Project; Many Ways to Raise a Fist for the 29th Anniversary of the ADA at the the Whitney Museum; and Relative—a crip dance party—for the disabled-led festival I Wanna Be With You Everywhere at Performance Space New York. He studied at Tisch School of the Arts and graduated from The King's College. The New York Times has called him "the inexhaustible Mr. Herman."

Herman is also a writer, moderator, and advocate for the arts; he has served on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA since 2017. He is a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow, a joint initiative of the Mellon Foundation and Ford Foundation, respectively.

Michael Maag

Michael Maag is the scenographer for Kinetic Light.

Maag is an award-winning designer of lighting, video, and projection for theater, dance, musicals, opera, and planetariums. He sculpts with light and shadow to create lighting environments that tell a story, believing that lighting in support of the performance is the key to unlocking audiences’ emotions. Maag has built custom optics for projections in theaters, museums, and planetariums; he also designs and builds electronics and lighting for costumes and scenery.

Maag is passionate about bringing the perspective of a disabled artist to technical theater and design. He is currently the Resident Lighting Designer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His designs have been seen on the Festival’s stages for the last twenty years, as well as at theaters across the country. He has spoken at several theater and architecture conferences on the importance of access for disabled artists in the technical theater field.

Laurel Lawson

Laurel Lawson is a choreographic collaborator, dancer, designer, and engineer with Kinetic Light.

She is the primary costume and makeup designer, contributes other technical and production design, and designs the wheelchairs that she and Alice Sheppard use in performance. For the chairs used in the development of Wired, Lawson collaborated with Paul Schulte, lead engineer for Top End. She is also the product designer and lead for both access and technology initiatives, including Audimance, the company’s app that revolutionizes audio description for nonvisual audiences, and Access ALLways, the hospitality and experience paradigm and collected practices for holistic, disabled-led, equitable accessibility.

Lawson began her professional dance career with Atlanta’s Full Radius Dance in 2004. In her independent and transdisciplinary practice, housed at Rose Tree Productions, her work includes both traditional choreography and novel ways of extending and creating art through technology and design in the creation of worlds and products experienced, installed, embodied, or virtual.

Lawson’s choreography is marked by intensive partnering and grounded technique. Bringing the nuance of disabled artistry, she creates work for nondisabled, disabled, and physically integrated companies. She often weaves together abstract and concrete themes with overarching mythological inspiration, with attention to engaging, innovative, and immersive audience experience. Her work has been recognized with a 2019–20 Dance/USA Artist Fellowship, made possible with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Beyond the studio, Lawson is the CTO and cofounder of CyCore Systems, a boutique engineering consultancy which specializes in solving novel, multi-realm problems of all sizes for a global clientele. A noted public speaker and teacher, she speaks on a range of technical topics as well as on leadership and executive practice, accessibility, culture, and equity, and how to cultivate creativity and drive innovation.