BRIDGE LIVE ARTS

In 2007, Hope Mohr founded Hope Mohr Dance (HMD) and expanded the company in 2010 to include The Bridge Project. This activist curatorial platform built community among artists across genre, geography, and perspective.

HMD/The Bridge Project intentionally transitioned in 2020 away from a founder-led, hierarchical structure inviting Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero, employees at the time, to partake in a Distributed Leadership process to re-envision the organization’s structure with Mohr. HMD/The Bridge Project’s Board of Directors, and numerous community artists, the organization shifted into co-directorship and co-curation.

In 2022, as a reflection of the organizational shift, a new name was announced: Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.), developed through a collaborative process with a team of creatives and input from our larger artistic community. The new shared leadership structure features co-directorship over programs and operations, a reimagined Board of working artists, and a paid curatorial Artist Council. B.L.A. continues to evolve and emerge, staying present in the possibilities of shared leadership and equitable structures for employees and artists, acknowledging that the work is specific to the community and needs, and is an ongoing process.

Hope Mohr (she/her) is an artist and advocate. As a choreographer, Mohr makes work that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that ride just underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance (HMD). In 2010, she founded HMD's presenting program, The Bridge Project. In 2020, she co-stewarded the organization’s transition to a model of distributed leadership. In 2022, the organization changed its name to Bridge Live Arts and its mission to creating and supporting equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change. In 2023, Hope transitioned out of Co-Directorship and into Affiliated Artist status with Bridge Live Arts.

Rebecca Fitton (she/they) is from many places and peoples. She nurtures community through movement, conversation, and food, striving to equally prioritize her multifaceted roles as an artist, administrator, and advocate. Their work focuses on shifting cultural policy, asian america, and disability justice. She works as Co-Director/Director of Operations and Development for Bridge Live Arts and as the Director of Studio Rawls/Will Rawls. She creates artistic work in non-traditional performance spaces–bars, grocery stores, rooftops, gardens, sidewalks, and streets–across New York, New Jersey, Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas. She has been an artist-in-residence at Center (2019, MI), CAVE (2019, NY), EMERGENYC (2019, NY), and The Croft (2021, MI). Their writing has been self-published and by Triskelion Arts, Emergency Index, In Dance, The Dancer-Citizen, Etudes, Critical Correspondence, and Dance Research Journal. As an access practitioner, she creates audio description for experimental dance and performance artists. Currently, she is involved in a multi-year process with Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón as an audio describer-dancer. They hold a BFA in Dance from Florida State University and an MA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin.

Cherie Hill (she/her) creates art that explores human expression through the body in collaboration with nature, music, and visual imagery. Her pieces explore how dance, transcendence, and the body are vessels for metaphysical presence. With her dance company, IrieDance, Cherie has held artist residencies with Footloose Productions, Milk Bar Richmond, CounterPulse's Performing Diaspora, and a community partnership with the David Brower Center. In 2020 she collaborated with several artists to create the Earth Echoes Virtual Gallery, an exhibition of local Bay Area/Ohlone Territory artists whose work speaks to the power of feminism, ecology, and identity. Cherie has published in Gender Forum, The Sacred Dance Journal, Dance Education in Practice, and In Dance. She has presented at multiple conferences, including Dance/USA, WAA, NDEO, and IABD. Cherie lives on Luiseño-speaking Payomkawichum land in the Temecula Valley, CA, with her lifelong partner and two children. She is the Director of Arts Leadership at Bridge Live Arts, and an Assistant Professor at CSUSM, specializing in equity, inclusion, dance, and wellness.