Photo by Steven Miller

The 2025 Bessie Award winning company Degenerate Art Ensemble, led by Haruko Crow Nishimura and **
Joshua Kohl**, has shown their work throughout the US and Europe known for their large scale dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation.

Recent highlights of the group's work include a major exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in 2011, was commissioned by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach in 2012 and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet in 2013. Also in 2012 Degenerate Art Ensemble was commissioned by the city of Seattle to create a massive site specific work Underbelly in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair. The group’s 2015 work Predator Songstress premiered at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in 2015. In of 2016 DAE teamed up with Czech rock legends Uz Jsme Doma for an epic orchestral work inspired by the group's music at the Archa Theatre in Prague with the South Bohemian Philharmonic Orchestra. DAE’s work Skeleton Flower was first seen as a work in progress at the Spotlight USA Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, had its world premiere in Seattle in 2019, was performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City in August of 2021. Their recent collaboration with sculptor Senga Nengudi and musician/dancer Eddy Kwon was commissioned by Colorado College and the Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati and was performed at New York Live Arts. Their newest work Anima Mundi premiered at the Moore Theatre in Seattle presented by Seattle Theatre Group.

yuniya edi kwon (she/her) is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance maker based in Brooklyn. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation & transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer space & lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. Her work has been presented throughout the US and Europe, including Performa Biennial, Dia Art Foundation, New York Live Arts, Roulette Intermedium, Under The Radar Festival, LA Phil, On The Boards, and Monheim Triennale. A committed collaborator, she has co-created with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Senga Nengudi, Tomeka Reid, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Roscoe Mitchell, Moor Mother, Du Yun, Shahzad Ismaily, and International Contemporary Ensemble. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Awardee, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardee, Arts Fellow at Princeton University, Bessie Award Winner, Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and United States Artists Fellow.

Photo by Bruce Clayton Tom

Senga Nengudi (she/her) was interested in the visual arts, dance, body mechanics, and matters of the spirit from an early age. These elements still play themselves out in ever-changing ways in her art. She has always used a variety of natural (sand, dirt, rocks, seed pods) and unconventional (pantyhose, found objects, masking tape) materials to fashion her works, utilizing these materials as a jazz musician utilizes notes and sounds to improvise a composition. The thrust of her art is to share common experiences in abstractions that hit the senses and center, often welcoming the viewer to become a participant. Formerly teaching at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, Nengudi has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasizing diversity to the communities in which she resides. Winner of the 2023 Nasher Prize for Sculpture, she is in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Dia Art Foundation, New York, New York; Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; and others.