New Works Initiative Archives

The New Works Initiative places the creative process at the heart of the museum’s relationship with Chicago by funding and supporting the development of new performances and creative projects.

To promote connections between artists, audiences, and communities, the New Works Initiative consists of a three-part approach:

The Chicago Performance Commission fosters the artistic and professional growth of Chicago artists, providing consistent and comprehensive support for these local artists’ development. This commission also connects their work with the national and international performance scene.

The National Performance Engagement centers Chicago in the creative processes of national or international artists, connecting them with the Chicago community as they develop a new work or new models of engagement in advance of its final presentation at the MCA.

In Progress is an ongoing series designed to give Chicago artists, thinkers, and curators a platform for developing new works in dialogue with audiences. Artists present their thinking, share inspirations, and answer questions, giving patrons a glimpse into the creative process.

Past New Works Artists

cat mahari‘s practice is built from a richly layered body history, stemming from an archive of research, physical training, and intent to manifest an intellectual, material, and informal legacy of Black liberation through documentation. By examining personal marks and socio-genealogical maps, she explores inner and outer environments. She is a 2023 MAP Fund micrograntee recipient, and a 2022 Foundation for the Arts Emergency grant for blk ark: the impossible manifestation. Her upcoming works include the film, Sugar in the Raw, a surrealist-inspired exploration of Black intimacy, trust, and touch via Chicago house and stepping. In 2021 she was named the City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Awardee in Dance and received a 2021 3Arts Award in dance. Her works include the Afro Sci-fi Krump film Imprints & Traces, and the multidisciplinary performance BAM!, for which she received a CSF Generative Performing Artist Fellowship. BAM! is an immersive ensemble work, focusing on Blackness, Amerikkka, and violence. Her post-disciplinary work, the mixtape series violent/break vol i and vol ii, has received national and international development support at Brink Festival (London), High Concept Labs (Chicago), and Imir Scene Kunst (Norway). mahari is a culture bearer of hip-hop and house, having participated, judged, and held community initiatives and events. As well as a former member of the Krump family Gool, mahari holds a BFA in dance from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an MA in performance, practice, and research from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama at the University of London.

7NMS is the public emergence of Marjani Forté-Saunders and Everett Saunders’s work as a collaborative team. Operating in CA and NY, 7NMS radically engages art as a medium of elevation, healing, and futurity. With 7 award-winning projects in 10 years, 7NMS tote a revolutionary commitment to the Black radical imagination. Their latest work, PROFIT, is an awardee of the 2020 MAP Fund and 2020 New Music USA Award, and the National Dance Project Production and Touring grant 2021.

Marjani is a 2019 FCA Fellowship awardee, a three-time Bessie award–winner, and an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill, Dance USA, and Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowships. Everett is the composer and thought partner behind the award-winning and internationally touring production, Memoirs of a Unicorn, and a two-time New Music USA Awardee. His recent work can be found as composer/sound designer on Jaamil Kosoko’s Chameleon, mayfield Brooks’s Whale Fall, and Urban Bush Women’s Hair & Other Stories (2018). While incubating PROPHET through fall 2020 and winter 2021 Satellite Residencies, in 7NMS’s newly erected home studios, the duo has worked in close collaboration with co-visionaries d. Sabela grimes (movement composer and sound archivist), Meena Murugesan (filmmaker and media designer), and Marc Winston (photographer), producing PROPHET‘s latest filmic iteration, commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow.
Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a Chicago-based new media artist and poet. Known for her noisy experimental electronic and performance practice, Holloway shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally since 2012 in spaces like Performance Space New York, The New Museum, The Kitchen, The Time-Based Art Festival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), The Knckdown Center, and the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. Holloway is currently assistant professor of video/new media in the Kinetic Imaging department at Virginia Commonwealth University and is the digital developer and technology manager with Black Lunch Table’s archives team. In addition to her fine arts practice she is a dedicated open source software advocate and a powerlifter.
Derek Lee McPhatter is committed to new work at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, and technology. He recently completed a Chicago Dramatists Tutterow Fellowship where he developed Real Talk with Auntie B, a satire on American ambition, and completed an I AM SOUL residency at the National Black Theatre in Harlem where he developed Serious Adverse Effects, a futuristic play on the technologies of healing. Bring the Beat Back, his queer, Black, sci-fi music theater experience features music developed in collaboration with avery r. young, Manchildblack of the Illustrious Blacks, Alexa Græ, and others. Outside of theater, McPhatter has developed several digital media projects, including HIVE, a sci-fi anthology series cocreated with Stephanie Jeter and Tim Maupin. Other organizations that have supported McPhatter’s work include OTV | Open Television, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Otherworld Theatre Company, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and The Drama League.

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.