The Circle O Team

A white woman with chin-length brown hair and brown eyes smiles at the camera in front of a colorful wall. Photo: Phil Dembinski

Ellen Chenoweth

Management and Programs Partner

Ellen Chenoweth is a culture worker / performance-lover based in Philadelphia. She is the Director of Finance and Operations for Works & Process at the Guggenheim and works with artist Kayla Hamilton as her Action Partner. For the academic journal Dance Chronicle, Chenoweth is their copyeditor. A past board member at Links Hall, Chenoweth is currently on the Advisory Board for Cannonball.

In the past, she has worked at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago as the Lead Curator and Director of the Dance Presenting Series, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, at the Dance Exchange, and Pig Iron Theatre Company. Chenoweth holds an MA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University and a Graduate Certificate from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.

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Joselia Hughes

Researcher, Describer, Creative Consulting

Joselia Rebekah Hughes is working-poor, Afro-Caribbean-descended writer, editor, access provider, and interdisciplinary teaching artist surviving in The Bronx.

Her practice resides in lineages of Black and debilitated aesthetics and linguistics. Joselia’s poetry has been nominated for Best of Net and published in Apogee Journal, Massachusetts Review, The Poetry Project, Split This Rock, Blackflash Magazine, Leste Magazine, Ocean State Review, and elsewhere. She is a writing student at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

A headshot of Kayla Hamilton. She is posing in profile in front of a light blue background. Kayla is a Black woman. She is wearing a long sleeve black & tan striped shirt & her loc are down. She has a beautiful glowing smile.

Kayla Hamilton

Founder & Artistic Director

Kayla Hamilton is a Texas born, Bronx based performance maker, dancer, educator, consultant and the artistic director of Circle O - a cultural organization uplifting Black Disabled and other multiply marginalized  creatives. 

Kayla is 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, A 2023-2024 Pina Bausch Foundation Fellow, a 2024 United States Artist Disability Futures Fellow, a 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient and a 2023-2024 Bronx Cultural Visions Fund recipient. 

Her past performances have been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space NY, New York Live Arts and Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.

As a dancer, Kayla was part of the Bessie award winning ensemble Skeleton Architecture while also performing with MBDance/Maria Bauman, Sydnie L. Mosley/SLMDances and Gesel Mason. 

Kayla has developed/designed access centered programming for the Mellon Foundation, Movement Research, DanceNYC and UCLA Dancing Disability Lab. She is the co-director of Angela’s Pulse/Dancing While Black with Marguerite Hemmings, Paloma McGregor and Joya Powell.  

As an educator Kayla co-developed ‘Crip Movement Lab’ with collaborator Elisabeth Motley- a pedagogical framework centering cross-disability movement practices which they have taught in multiple dance centers and universities around the country. Kayla has also worked as a K-12 public school special education teacher in NYC for 12 years. 

A headshot of a white woman wearing a black button-up shirt and sweater. She has dark brown hair, wears glasses and is smiling directly into the camera. Photo by: Shannon Meredith

Shannon Meredith

Finance and Operations Consultant

Shannon Meredith earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 2009 and her Master of Arts in Gender, Culture, and Society in 2012. She worked as an ESL teacher for seven years in South Korea and the United States before moving to nonprofit work in 2018.

She has worked as a Program Manager, Finance and Operations Manager, Assistant Executive Director, and consultant in nonprofit organizations across the United States. 

Susana Baker Boey

Marketing and Business Consulting

With a creative career spanning over a decade, Susana Baker spent years as an award-winning marketer at major media companies in NYC.

In 2021 she founded Untangling Ideas, a boutique marketing agency, to support small businesses, nonprofits, and B2B organizations with brand strategy, messaging, and web design. She offers support uniquely tailored for Disabled, neurodiverse, and/or chronically ill small business owners and helps to improve accessibility across web and design. She operates in a way that centers empathy, clarity, integrity, and joy—where being fully human is very much allowed. 

Susana holds BAs in both Theatre and Mass Media Journalism from the University of Georgia. A proud daughter of immigrants, she’s Colombian-American, fully bilingual, and now based in Richmond, VA with her rescue dachshund, Lucy.

A Chicana with caramel skin, in pink lighting. She is in front of pink flower vines. She is posing with a black gothic shoulder cut dress, leaning on her walker and gazing upwards. Her dark hair is down with two space buns.

Vanessa Hernández Cruz

Social Media

Vanessa Hernández Cruz (she, her, ella) is an interdependent and interdisciplinary Chicana Disabled dance artist. Vanessa is currently set to premiere a new experimental contemporary dance solo titled “Soul Seeker” for the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition show 'Abundance' and it will later premiere for Mouthwater Festival this fall.

Over the past few years Vanessa’s work has been shown nationally & internationally. She is currently the recipient of the 2023 California Arts Council x The Center of Cultural Power Artist Disruptor Award. In 2023, she had two exciting dance solos that premiered in the summer: “Metal, Plastic, Skin” debuting at The Odyssey Theatre’s Dance Festival and “Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes” with her debut at The REDCAT’s NOW Festival.

Her dance, visual artwork, and writings are often woven together to generate works that have influences of dark aesthetics, horror, abstractions, experimentation, and storytelling that merge her Chicana Disabled experiences.

Ziiomi, a brown skinned, femme with a blonde fade laughs with a profiled view. they wear a white fitted tank top that exposes their shoulders. they have three piercings, all are silver. one in their lower lip, a hanging septum, and a hoop nose ring

Ziiomi Law

Administrative Care Coordinator

Ziiomi Law is an embodied et cetera, period! A professional dancer & performer, arts administrative careworker, writer, community consultant, death doula, producer, model, and actor, previously nomadically based nowhere creating everywhere, currently re-rooting back home out of Atlanta, GA. They are a Blackqueer non-binary icon who sweats possibility & oozes pleasure.

Zii was a proud member of the 6 time Lucille Lortel nominated, New York Times Critic Pick, cast of the Off-Broadway production (pray) in 2023. Their movement lineages include, Urban Bush Women as a New York Van Lier Fellow, MBDance and SLMDances as a company member, and Atlanta Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as a scholarship recipient, to name a few. 

They are most fulfilled when collaborating on projects that feel like soul food. Ziiomi believes if it ain’t a full body YES, it’s a no! You can find themme luxuriating at the intersections of both/and.

ziiomilaw.com