Changemakers: Ana María Álvarez & Aaron Jafferis

Ana María Álvarez, a 2020 Doris Duke Artist and an inaugural Dance/USA Artist Fellow, is a prolific choreographer, skilled dancer, masterful teaching artist, and movement activist who has achieved multiple accolades for her dynamic works. Her thesis work explored the abstraction of Latine dance, specifically Salsa, as a way to express social resistance as related to the U.S. immigration battle. This work became the impetus for founding CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater in 2005 in Los Angeles. Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO have continued to tour “joyUS justUS” (2017). This signature work is a radical celebration of humanity and the feminine, centering joy as a more loving and just future is imagined. Her work has been presented in theaters across the country and the world, including in Germany, Bulgaria, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and El Salvador.  She was selected as the 2018 BiNational Artist in Residence, connecting communities in the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix (U.S.), Douglas (U.S.), Tucson (U.S.), and Agua Prieta (M.X.), through leading artistic workshops, collaborative performances, and public talks, and concluding with a performance at the U.S.-Mexico border. Alvarez and CONTRA-TIEMPO were also invited to represent the best of American Contemporary Dance Abroad through The Obama Administration’s U.S. Department of State cultural exchange program, produced by BAM, DanceMotionUSA. In the Fall of 2022, Alvarez was invited to join the UC San Diego Theatre and Dance Department as a tenured faculty member. In this exciting new chapter of her career, Alvarez, in collaboration with her colleagues and students, is imagining and designing a new future for embodied performance and practice at UCSD.

Alvarez has been recognized with a number of awards and grants including NEFA’s National Dance Project, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, LA City Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County and the California Arts Council among others. She is the recipient of  the Mujeres Destacadas award from LA Opinion and a Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival Rainbow Award for her work with CONTRA-TIEMPO called “Agua Furiosa.” She received a Bachelor of Arts in dance and politics from Oberlin College and a Master of Fine Arts in choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.

Aaron Jafferis is a hip-hop poet and playwright whose shows The Ones, Trigger, (Be)longing, Stuck Elevator, How to Break, Kingdom, Shakespeare: The Remix, and No Lie have won a Creative Capital Award, Richard Rodgers Award, Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship, NEA Art Works Grant, NEFA National Theatre Project Grant, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, and multiple MacDowell Fellowships.

A New Haven native, Aaron began working with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas as an interpreter for the Ballet Folklórico Nacional de Cuba in 1997. Since then, he’s written shows about his (and New Haven’s) relationship with race, class, language and activism including No Lie (Arts & Ideas 1999) and his trilogy with composer Byron Au Yong – Stuck Elevator (Arts & Ideas 2013), (Be)longing (Arts & Ideas 2017), and Activist Songbook (Arts & Ideas 2020).

Current projects include Smooth Criminal – a musical (about white people) to end all musicals (about white people) in development with Arts & Ideas, Collective Consciousness Theatre, Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University, and Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth; Tell, in development with co-author Antonio Fernandez and director Chay Yew; and the opera version of Stuck Elevator at Hawai’i Opera and Knoxville Opera.  

Aaron is Writer-in-Residence in the Arts for Healing Program at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, where he supports adolescent patients creating poems and raps; this experience inspired his collaboration with breaking pioneers Kwikstep and Rokafella on How to Break, a musical about hospitalized teenagers fighting for control of their bodies.

A former Open Rap Slam champion at the National Poetry Slam Championships, Aaron founded The Word youth poetry program in New Haven, which supports young people using hip-hop and spoken word as engines for justice and liberation.