Brenda Dixon Gottschild is a performer, choreographer, writer and scholar. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from NYU and served as a faculty member at Temple University for 17 years before taking early retirement to focus on writing and performing. She has written for Dance Magazine covering a range of dance from ballet to hip hop. She performed with the Mary Anthony Dance Theater for 2 years then began working as an independent artist. She currently collaborates and performs in the US and Europe with her husband Hellmut Gottschild. She has lectured both here and abroad on African American, modern and postmodern performance. Her work has been supported by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Grant in Women's Studies. Among many other publishing credits, she co-authored the latest edition of The History of Dance and Art in Education and her latest book, published fall 2003, is titled The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool.

Fran Holden, a seasoned arts administrator, presenter and educator, most recently directed the Colorado Council on the Arts. She initiated the development of a statewide plan for dance and received an NEA grant for The Healing Power of the Arts, an arts education program for public schools. She has served for the NEA as a panelist and site evaluator for Advancement, Dance, International, Presenting, Theatre and States & Regional Programs. Prior to coming to Colorado, Ms. Holden worked with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters in Washington, D.C., the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (a nine-state regional arts organization), the British American Arts Association, and the NEA. She has directed university and community arts center, developed and administered performing arts festivals and tours, produced and directed children's theater companies and taught theater management.

Bill Young discovered dance through contact improvisation while studying music and science at Oberlin College. He showed early work in San Francisco while dancing with Margaret Jenkins. He later moved to New York where he danced with Douglas Dunn, Randy Warshaw, Merce Cunningham (on video) and formed Bill Young and Dancers in 1988. He has taught and created over 50 works for dancers in the US and abroad, and his company has performed in Austria, Canada, Estonia Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Russia, China, Finland, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Taiwan and Venezuela. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and his company has been supported by the NEA, the US Information Service, Artslink, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the Mary Duke Biddle, Joyce Mertz-Gilmore, Harkness and Greenwall Foundations, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Fund for US Artists at International Festivals, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.