With support from the California Arts Council, Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.) will collaborate with movement-based artists B Dean (QUEER THE AIR), Swetha Prabakaran (MODERN NATYA), and Amber Julian (HEARTSPACE RISING) through the organization’s year-long Community Engagement Residency program. The artists will receive funding and infrastructure-building support for projects that respectively expand artistic development opportunities for LGBTQIA+/QTBIPOC in vertical dance (B), bring together Disabled Desi & South Asian artists to center access and disability justice in the evolution of hybrid South Asian dance lineages (SWETHA), and produce a new healing-centered dance and music festival by and for Bay Area artists rooted in Afro-diasporic lineages of improvisation and freestyle (AMBER).
Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.) creates and supports equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change. We are based on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who have stewarded this land for generations and are still here.
Our arts and culture programming features an array of live performances, public dialogues, workshops, classes, and residencies that reflect the organization’s deep commitments to cultural equity, racial equity, and artist power. This programming includes a Community Engagement Residency offering year-long funding and capacity building support to movement artist-activists working in community.
In 2020, B.L.A. transitioned from a founder-led, hierarchical nonprofit to a model of distributed leadership. In alignment with B.L.A.’s core values, our way of working currently embraces shared leadership across all aspects of the organization, pay equality across artistic & administrative staff, and a re-imagined Board comprised of 100% working artists.