Kinetic Light is an internationally-recognized disability arts ensemble. Working in the disciplines of art, technology, design, and dance, Kinetic Light creates, performs, and teaches at the nexus of access, queerness, disability, dance, and race.
We are led by disabled artists; disabled artists create, design, and perform the work. Our work speaks to and emerges from disability aesthetics and disability culture, and it is connected to the rich traditions and exciting contemporary conversations of disabled artists in all artistic fields.
In our work disability is not a deficit, it is a powerful, intersectional creative force that is essential to our artistry. Access is integral to our art, creative process, administrative work, and audience experience.
Founded in 2016, Kinetic Light artists are Alice Sheppard, Laurel Lawson, and Michael Maag; Kayla Hamilton is a collaborating artist for the work The Next T.i.M.es. Jerron Herman joined the company for Wired 2019-2023 and appears in territory. Kinetic Light also includes a talented team of administration and production professionals who work behind the scenes and a roster of additional artists who join us to contribute on a project basis.
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artists
Alice Sheppard
Alice (she/her) 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).
A 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, in academic journals, and the anthology Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong. She is a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow, a joint initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ford Foundation, respectively.
Laurel Lawson
Laurel (any) is a founding member, choreographic collaborator, dancer, costume and production designer, and the Access & Technology Lead with Kinetic Light. Leading technology initiatives such as Audimance, the company's app which revolutionizes audio description, haptic interfaces for both audiences and artists, and more (including designing the wheelchairs the company uses in performance); Laurel brings decades of experience in product design, disability advocacy, and community organizing to access and technology work. They are the primary author and facilitator for Access ALLways, the hospitality & experience paradigm and collected practices for holistic disabled-led equity & accessibility.
Lawson began their dance career with Full Radius Dance in 2004, and continued dancing with the company until 2020. Their transdisciplinary practice 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. Their work with immersive embodied performance-installations lives in Choreodaemonics, where they co-lead a collective of artist-technologists.
Laurel’s choreography is marked by intensive partnering and grounded technique. Bringing the nuance of disabled artistry, they create work for nondisabled, disabled, and physically integrated companies which taps undercurrents of mythology and universal stories; always creating engaging, innovative, and immersive audience experiences. Their work has been recognized with a 2019-20 Dance/USA Artist Fellowship, made possible with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and with a 2023 Creative Capital Award.
Lawson is additionally the CTO and co-founder 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 facilitator in design, leadership, equity, creative practice, and innovation, they also advise a wide range of commercial, academic, and nonprofit institutions.
Michael Maag
Michael (he/him) is a founding member and the founding scenographer for Kinetic Light.
Maag is an award-winning designer of lighting, video, and projection for theatre, 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 theatre 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 20 years, as well as at theatres across the country. He has spoken at several theatre and architecture conferences on the importance of access for the disabled artist in the technical theatre field.
Kayla Hamilton
Kayla is a collaborating artist for the Kinetic Light work, The Next T.iM.es.
Kayla Hamilton is a Texas-born, Bronx-based performance maker, dancer, educator, and consultant. In 2024, she founded Circle O, a cultural organization created by and for Black Disabled and other multiply marginalized creatives. She is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Pina Bausch Foundation Fellow, NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, Bronx Cultural Visions Fund recipient, BAM Resident Artist, and Disability Futures Fellow. Her performances have been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space NY, New York Live Arts, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and The Shed. As a dancer, Kayla Hamilton was part of the Bessie Award-winning ensemble Skeleton Architecture while also performing with MBDance/Maria Bauman, Sydnie L. Mosley/SLMDances, and Gesel Mason.
Kayla has developed/designed access-centered programming for the Mellon Foundation, Movement Research, DanceNYC, and UCLA Dancing Disability Lab. She is the co-director of Angela’s Pulse/Dancing While Black with Marguerite Hemmings, Paloma McGregor, and Joya Powell. As an educator, she co-developed ‘Crip Movement Lab’ with Elisabeth Motley.
Annie Wiegand
Annie is a Collaborating Artist with Kinetic Light, contributing lighting design restoration for DESCENT and lighting design for new works.
Annie Wiegand is the first and only professional Deaf Lighting Designer in the US theatre industry. Regional: Spring Awakening, Skylight Theatre Company; Cinderella, Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma and Zach Theatre; The Upstairs Department, Signature Theatre; Eclipsed, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre; Steel Magnolias, Under the Breeches, Alabama Shakespeare Festival; Steel Magnolias, Dallas Theater Center; The Who and The What, Huntington Theatre; Small Mouth Sounds, The Bridges of Madison County (IRNE Nominee for Best Lighting Design) Tribes, Speakeasy Stage. Off-Broadway: I Was Most Alive With You, Playwrights Horizons. Dance: Kinetic Light; Anikaya Dance Theatre. Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance Program, Gallaudet University.
Admin, Production, & Programs teams
MORGAN CARLISLE
Morgan Carlisle is the People & Company Operations Manager, connecting the internal dots at Kinetic Light.
Carlisle enjoys infiltrating and bringing equity to the arts scenes around her. Using a human-centered approach, she chaired, volunteered, worked with, and for numerous arts-based nonprofit organizations for over a decade. She has also sat on several councils and spoke on panels for arts advocacy. From her personal artistic pursuits to her administrative responsibilities, Carlisle uses curiosity and compassion to cultivate experiences of connection. She is committed to crafting a space of belonging for the people around her.
Carlisle loves the collaborative work she gets to do with the Kinetic Light team and adores her colleagues here. Outside of her professional endeavors, Carlisle likes to move, be a gentle momma, and embrace all the facets of being a ridiculous, complicated human.
Morgaine De Leonardis
morgaine de leonardis is a Co-Producer of LAB, creating space for gathering and connection.
she is a dancer, performer, creative director, producer, and community organizer with a deep and ongoing access practice. she is a creative dyslexic, third generation irish-italian american from jersey city, new jersey.
Alexis Etzkorn
Alexis is Kinetic Light's Finance Manager, connecting and organizing all things finance.
Alexis has 6+ years experience in financial management, supporting the growth of both small businesses and nonprofits. Alexis enjoys a creative approach to finance work, crafting spreadsheets and building financial systems as if they were works of art. Alexis holds a BA in Fine Arts with concentrations in both Sculpture and Painting from Haverford College.
Camisha Jones
Camisha Jones is a Co-Producer of LAB, creating space for gathering and connection.
Jones is a writer, spoken word poet, workshop facilitator, and gathering cultivator. She has close to 30 years of experience organizing and leading programs, gatherings, and people at nonprofits and institutions of higher education. For nearly 9 years prior to her role at Kinetic Light, she was Managing Director at the national social justice poetry non-profit Split This Rock and provided leadership for four poetry festivals, a poem of the week series, readings, open mics, a bi-monthly writing workshop series, and the expansion of the organization's core commitment to accessibility and disability inclusion practices. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Flare (Finishing Line Press, 2017) which focuses on her experiences with hearing loss and chronic pain. Her poems have been published in The New York Times, Poets.org, Button Poetry, The Deaf Poets Society, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Typo, and The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database at Split This Rock, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor for a forthcoming anthology of disability poetry with Travis Chi Wing Lau, Naomi Ortiz, and Michael Northen. She is a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow, a multidisciplinary award designed to amplify the work of disabled creatives supported by United States Artists, the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation.
Rachel Hickman
rachel hickman is Kinetic Light’s Access Manager & Cultural Steward, nurturing Kinetic Light’s commitment to disability aesthetics and culture internally and externally.
Perpetually curious, hickman dances, writes, organizes, and develops multidimensional artwork that emerges from explorations of natural and unnatural fissures, divisions, and boundaries. She graduated summa cum laude from Florida State University with a BFA in Dance in 2020. During her time at Florida State, hickman was a Truman Scholar candidate and the recipient of the 2019 National AATI Essay Award. Passionate about intersectional social justice and the arts, she has attended and interned for Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute, and she continues to deepen her practice in disability aesthetics through her time with Kinetic Light. When not working, she refuels outdoors in the sunshine – preferably with hands in the dirt.
Mariclare Hulbert
Mariclare (she/her) is Kinetic Light's Marketing & PR liaison and manages marketing, communications, and media relations.
Owner of Mariclare Hulbert Consulting, she has 20+ years of experience in the arts and nonprofit fields, specializing in strategic marketing, communications, outreach, and PR. Her arts clients have included Dance/NYC, Dance/USA, the National Center for Choreography-Akron, and Jacob’s Pillow, among many other artists and arts organizations. Prior to consulting, she worked at the internationally renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for nearly 10 years, serving as Director of Marketing & Communication, leading a team of marketing and PR staff, customer service professionals, graphic designers, photographers, and videographers.
ADONIS BROWN
Adonis Brown (he/they) is Kinetic Light’s Coordinating Specialist, handling all the details and threads related to meetings, gatherings, and calendars.
Adonis is a Brooklyn-born writer & editor with over 7 years of Arts Administrative experience. Before entering non-profit Program & Access Coordination at Cave Canem, he taught ELA & Teen Poetry in NYC and was an Editor at Macmillan Publishers, where he acquired Raquel Willis' first book.
Adonis holds a Bachelor's in English Literature & ASL from New York University and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
Colin Clark
Colin (he/him) is a Research Fellow working in Technology and Access. He works closely with Laurel Lawson on technology research and development, including performance access.
Colin Clark is a computational media artist, designer, and developer of community-led technologies. He performs live electronic music with Bitstance, makes algorithmic video art that explores subtle sonic processes visually, and develops open source software and hardware frameworks that are used by artists worldwide. Colin identifies as neurodivergent, and his work explores non-normative senses of time and how technologies influence temporality. He co-directs Lichen Community Systems, a non-profit worker cooperative dedicated to creating expressive technologies and systems that are designed by, accessible to, and ownable by communities. Since the 1990s, Colin has influenced the growth of access design methods in Canada and has developed systems, research frameworks, and policy for digital access internationally. He holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design from OCAD University.
Kasson Marroquin
Kasson Marroquin (they/he) is Kinetic Light's Production Stage Manager: a NYC-based stage manager, show-caller, deck manager, and overall creative freelancer from Austin and Dallas, TX. Kasson primarily works in dance, theatre, events, and music and is a member of Actor’s Equity Association.
Outside of Kinetic Light, Kasson’s dance experience includes work with the American Dance Festival, Cora Dance, Battery Dance, Park Cities Dance, and Pilobolus, where they stage managed domestic and international tours, summer festivals, and a run at the Joyce Theater, as well as co-developed and co-taught a dance-centric stage management curriculum. Additionally, Kasson has collaborated with companies including Little Island, the Park Avenue Armory, Playwrights Horizons, MCC Theater, Soho Rep., Signature Theatre, the National Asian American Theatre Company, The Public Theater, Rattlestick Theater, Fiasco Theater, Hartford Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, Spoleto Festival USA, Shakespeare Dallas, Kitchen Dog Theater, Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, and Theatre Three. Some of Marroquin’s event work includes the UN Climate Change Conference, MCC Theater’s MisCast, the Primary Stages Gala, the Queer Liberation March Rally, Yo-Yo Ma’s Day of Action, The Good Place Activation at San Diego Comic-Con, Symphony at the Salk with Leslie Odom Jr., and many corporate conferences.
Kasson teaches stage management at the BFA and MFA levels and graduated with a MFA in Stage Management from the University of California San Diego and a BA in Theatre with an emphasis in Stage Management and minor in English from the University of North Texas.