GFT in Residence
GFT In Residence is an artist in residence program which allows us to expand our mission of supporting works focusing on historically unrepresented communities. Artists will have full use of GFT’s venue resources to work on their theatre making, mentoring from our creative staff, a fully supported performance at the theatre, and will receive a stipend. We are working hard to create equity through art and this program moves us in that direction
Each quarter Ground Floor Theatre will look for an Austin artist that fits within our mission of focusing on underrepresented communities. We will be seeking passionate theatre makers who will benefit from an environment that nourishes and challenges them. The program is for artists who are just establishing or need to re-establish their place in the Austin theatre community.
We are now accepting Application for the 2nd and 3rd Quarter of 2022. Applications will be accepted through February
Current Artist
Photo by Cindy Elizabeth
Sadé Jones Jan - Mar 2022
Sadé M Jones is an award winning performing artist, choreographer and director, certified Trauma Informed Yoga Facilitator, Social Psychologist, griot and healer. She specializes in mind-body connectivity, cultural discourse/advocacy and identity engineering.
Her awards include B. Iden Payne, Austin Critics Table and Austin Examiner. She was featured on PBS Arts In Context as well as in EastSIDE Magazine. Her work allows her to present through an array of platforms, such as: SXSW, SixSquare, UT Austin, Women’s Community Center Central Texas, Facebook, The Amala Foundation, Salvage Vanguard Theatre. Sadé presented work at NYC’s Collective Thread Dance Festival, choreographed the one-woman show “devour.,” by Taji Senior which also premiered in New York City at the LadyFest and was a touring resident with The Ananya Dance Theatre in Minneapolis. Her workshops span the nation including the University of Louisville and Colt Coeur New York. As an actress, the film Dark Matters was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and has recently been inducted into the national Criterion Collection.
Sadé is the Founder and CEO of the performing arts collective Ashé Arts, and has her own practice, SADEIZM Movement Alchemy for creative, corporate, and healing programming. She fuses dance with yoga and psychology to curate artistic, mindful and culturally relevant ways for individuals and groups to embody innate wholeness and address otherwise ‘charged’ topics in a heartfelt yet honest way. Her work is heralded as “cathartic, genuine, provocative and beautiful.”
Upcoming Artists
Casandra Reveles TBD
Cassandra is a multi-talented, everchanging artist, born and raised in El Paso, TX.
A former Longhorn, she graduated in 2016 with a B.A. in Theatre and Dance, with a focus in Acting, Playwriting, Fiction Writing and Vocal Performance. Since then, Cassie has performed in several shows around Austin, making friends and forever-collaborators with groups like Paper Chairs, Scottish Rite, and Rude Mechs, to name a few. She has also worked with various youth arts organizations such as the Paramount Storywranglers and Creative Action, to share the skills she's learned through hard work and education.
Cassie's character work has been described as eccentric, wild, heartbreaking, magical, and outstanding. As a vocalist, Cassandra has successfully improvised many original songs and musical tid-bits for the shows she's helped develop, ("PP Sheetz" for the MOHA Alone Christmas musical, being her absolute favorite.)
Cassandra is especially interested in new work that highlights the lives of young women and marginalized communities. She believes in art that is uplifting and joyful, as her passion is comedy. Cassie dreams of work that doesn't just treat people of a certain age, ability, race, etc, as a commodity, but as life as we see it - beautiful, funny, sometimes strange, and most-importantly - winning.
The GFT residency will be Cassandra's professional writing debut.
Previous Artists
Indiia Wilmott Oct - Dec 2021
Indiia is an actor, director, theatre educator and emerging playwright. As an actor she has performed on stages in several cities including Phoenix, San Francisco, Berkeley and Paris. Credits include: Dance Nation (San Francisco Playhouse), Lucia Berlin: Stories (San Francisco/France) and various developmental workshops with San Francisco Playwrights Foundation.
In 2020 she wrote and directed 4 voting PSAs for the Texas Civil Rights Project. She has had the privilege of teaching at the American Conservatory Theater, Museum of the African Diaspora, California Shakespeare Theatre, Z Space , Ecole Jeannine Manuel, and Creative Action.
For the last 12 years she has enthusiastically amplified stories and characters created by other artists, working primarily in development of new work from workshop to the stage. However, she has spent the last two years focusing on the development of her own stories and is currently working on two plays; a solo show and a play that reimagines her hometown in the context of the afterlife. As a playwright Indiia brings to the forefront humor, hope, and joy as she weaves together her experiences as a Black woman in America with the stories she enjoyed reading as a child; unbridled happiness is a radical act in her work.
In 2020, Indiia, in collaboration with Austin Black theatre artists, created Austin Black Theatre Alliance. Their mission is to support Black theatre artists in Austin in artist development, advocacy and production
siri gurudev Apr - June 2021
siri is a multidisciplinary artist from bogotá, colombia. siri is a trans, pansexual, nonbinary, writer, performance artist, kundalini yoga instructor, and wounded-healer.
their work orbits around the questioning and destabilization of gender binarism, visibilization of racialized gender violence, and the quest of how (being a mestizx from the "third world") can they connect with their ancestry while finding traces of queerness in the archive.
siri uses performance as an art form and methodology for research. their tactics include their own version of "disidentification" (José Esteban Muñoz), intervening reggaeton music and pop culture with humor and political strong messages, and their version of "fabulation" (Donna Haraway, Saidiya Hartman, etc.), imagining the past from a futuristic point of view. video art, visual art, and soundscapes are also a tool to explore their ideas and find ephemeral answers.
with two majors (one in philosophy and one in literary studies) and a master's in creative writing, siri is currently working on their doctorate degree in Performance Studies at UT Austin.
Follow siri gurudev @siri_gurudev
Visit their website: https://mivellopublicoblog.wordpress.com/
Michael J. Love Jan - Mar 2021
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist—a choreographer, scholar, and educator whose embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theory and aesthetics with a rigorous practice to engage in thinking on the Black cultural past and Black futurity. His work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival, ARCOS Dance, and The Cohen New Works Festival. His collaborative writing has been published in Theatre Topics and he has given public lectures and presentations at Texas A&M University and "Black Voices in Dance Studies," presented by Collegium for African Diaspora Dance and Dance Studies Association.
Love has also collaborated with transmedia artist Ariel René Jackson on video and performance projects which have been featured in or programmed by The New York Times Style Magazine’s #TBlackArtBlackLife series, the New Museum (New York), CUE Art Foundation (New York), the Galleries at the University of Northern Colorado, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, PARA Foundation (Berlin), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), the Visual Arts Center (UT Austin), and the George Washington Carver Museum (Austin).
Love's performance credits include the Broadway laboratory for Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, performances with Baakari Wilder, and roles in work by Andrew Nemr’s New York-based company Cats Paying Dues.
Michael holds an M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.S. in Marketing Communication from Emerson College. Visit DancerMLove.com and follow @dancermlove on Instagram to learn more about Michael and his current project, "LIVE From The BEATBOX."
Laura de La Fuente Oct - Dec 2020
Laura de la Fuente is a comedian, writer, and performer based in Austin, TX. As a house performer at ColdTowne Theater, she performs weekly with all-female improv team, Loverboy, and regularly with all-Latinx improv team, Prima Doñas. Laura co-hosts the bi-weekly queer variety show, QueerTowne on ColdTowneTV’s channel on Twitch, and is a writer/performer with queer sketch team, Martini Ranch. She has written her one-hour solo sketch show “Liz Behan: One Woman at Dusk” which completed a sold-out run at ColdTowne Theater in Summer 2019. She has performed in UCB’s Del Close Marathon (NYC/LA), San Francisco Sketchfest, The Second City Los Angeles Diversity Comedy Festival, and most recently was cast in the upcoming ViacomCBS 2021 SHOWCASE.
Recognized as the industry leader in actor showcases designed to highlight diverse talent, SHOWCASE has developed into a hybrid comedy show with Broadway-worthy live performances and original, creative writing. The show is attended by executives, showrunners and casting directors from CBS and other networks as well as talent agents and managers from across the entertainment industry.
