⭐️ A warm welcome from NDA ⭐️ Announcing the 2025-2026 BASC Artist Recipients

July 15, 2025  | emily  | General

New Dance Alliance is thrilled to announce the selected artists for the 2025-2026 Black Artists Space to Create (BASC) residency program.

We are so excited to support the new cohort in their creative processes throughout the residency!

Keep reading to get to know the recipients: Tatiana Desardouin, Justice Jamal Jones, and Nathan Trice.

🎉🎉🎉

Tatiana Desardouin

From Switzerland and of Haitian origin, Tatiana Desardouin is a professional dancer, dance instructor, dance consultant, choreographer, organizer, curator, lecturer, and jewelry maker. With a master’s degree in adult education and a bachelor in psychology, Desardouin has won several competitions and is regularly invited to give workshops and judge competitions internationally.

Desardouin is the director and choreographer of Passion Fruit Dance Company, a street dance theater and educational company that she founded in 2016. The company has performed at venues such as The Guggenheim, Mass Moca, BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn, The Apollo Theater, Summerstage, Jacob’s Pillow, the New Victory Theater, BAAD!, Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival, 92Y, ADF, and abroad in Canada and Switzerland. Teaching and mentoring since 2005, she developed her teaching method, “Technique Within Your Groove”. She taught as adjunct professor and guest artist in several universities (Harvard, Mount Holyoke, Hunter College, Connecticut College, American University, Keene University etc.). She is currently a faculty member of 92NY.

Desardouin was selected as one of Dance Magazine’s 2020 “25 to Watch” and was featured in the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar magazines in 2021. She was awarded the Vilcek Foundation Prize for “Promise Creative in Dance 2022” and won the Bessie Juried Award 2022.

Justice Jamal Jones

Justice Jamal Jones is a filmmaker, performer, and cultural alchemist based in New York City whose work moves at the rhythm of spirit. Rooted in the cosmologies of the African Diaspora—particularly Haitian Vodou—they use cinema as ritual and dance as invocation, crafting stories that honor the body as an archive and a vessel for ancestral memory.

Their debut film How To Raise a Black Boy is a cinematic prayer that links childhood, spirit, and rebirth, and has screened at over 30 international festivals. A 2021 Sundance Ignite Fellow, Jones’s’s visionary work has been commissioned by MTV, Calvin Klein, Converse, and ARRI. Dance is central to Jones’s storytelling—both as sacred practice and embodied resistance. In Vodou, where movement is a form of possession, their films summon spirit through choreography, gesture, and repetition. Their mixed-media work Notes on a Siren, created in the Cayman Islands, explores Black magick, femme power, and transmutation through water, body, and motion.

Jones is currently developing a feature film on Romaine La Prophetess, the gender-shifting seer and revolutionary of the Haitian Revolution. Through ritual performance and archival activation, the film reclaims Romaine’s legacy as a spiritual and political force. Their upcoming short film Crossroads Blues continues this lineage work—exploring choice, embodiment, and the spirits we carry. For Jones, movement is not metaphor—it is memory, transmission, and the oldest language of the soul.

Nathan Trice

Nathan Trice, US Naval Veteran, ordained minister, anti-racists organizer and artistic director, choreographer and founder of nathan trice / RITUALS: dance, theater, music, created in 1998. His mission is to develop and present artistic/educational programs and performances that reflect the importance of empathy, compassion, and understanding for one another, in the pursuit of global humanism. His company has toured nationally and internationally and is in-residence at the Billie Holiday Theater, a center for arts and culture in Brooklyn, since 2005. His residency at the Billie has supported the development of creative processes rooted in community collaborative research that aim to foster inclusion, access, and exposure to art, as a form of cultural transformation and literacy.

Company projects include The Recognizing Women Project, residencies and performances about women’s experiences and stories across cultures, generations, and geographies. An Inquiry Dynamic: The Future of…, in partnership with Judson Arts, is a project that invites millennials, Gen Z dancers and their generations to contemplatively inquire, through community discussion, dance, theater and music, the trajectory of humanity and spirituality, morality and technology, and racism and environmentalism. Strange Love: EPISODES, a serialized performance that explores and illustrates the anatomy and beauty of courtship, intimacy and love.

Trice has taught and coached his brand of dance/movement for over 25 years at multiple dance education institutes. He currently serves as the director/consultant of the Billie Holiday theaters’ ChoreoQuest, a choreographer residency program and is the co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co- creating Racial Equity).

About the BASC program

Founded in 2020, BASC was envisioned by former NDA advisory board member Angie Pittman “as a way to value and amplify the tremendous work that Black artists have historically done and are doing to shape our nation’s imagination, language, and humanity.”

Each artist will receive a one-week residency with unlimited access to a dance studio and full living space at Arts on Site R&R in Kerhonkson, NY, as well as a $2,000 stipend.

The residency is designed as both a retreat and a space to create without the pressure of developing a new project. Additionally, artists have access to complimentary studio space at New Dance Alliance’s loft in Tribeca throughout the season, and are invited to show work at NDA’s annual Performance Mix Festival.

BASC Recipient Selection Process

Artists are selected by an invited curatorial committee of previous BASC artists and New York-based artists. The committee is modeled after Movement Research’s Artists of Color Council. NDA’s motivation in gathering this committee is to transfer organizational and curatorial power to artists of color, and work toward cultivating a more transparent and accessible organization for all artists. The committee selects artists who demonstrate a rigorous commitment to conversation in dance and performance within the communities they are rooted in, in addition to dedication and longevity in practice, performance, and community building.

The 2025-26 BASC curatorial committee: Maria Bauman, Ja’Moon Jones, Nubian Néné, and Jelani Taylor.

About Arts on Site R&R

Arts on Site R&R is a Residency & Retreat Center offering uninhibited space in nature for artists, wellness practitioners, and outdoor enthusiasts. The property is located in Kerhonkson, NY, in the Shawangunk Mountains, two hours north of New York City, and features 20 acres of forest adjacent to Minnewaska State Park. Guests can enjoy access to the outdoors with hiking trails close by that lead to waterfalls and high mountain lakes. The center features two large studio spaces, a communal kitchen, bath house, and a series of yurts, cabins, and canvas tents, with accommodations to host up to 25 guests. www.artsonsite.org

NDA’s programs include Performance Mix Festival, Black Artists Space to Create, LiftOff, Work Sessions, Satellite, and Karen Bernard Projects.

NDA’s BASC program receives support from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Bernstein Family Fund, Harkness Foundation for Dance, and generous donations from many individuals.