Erica ‘Twelve45’ Blunt (she/her) Composer, DJ, Spatial Sound Artist and Visual Artist, will showcase her work designed for the Meyer Sound Constellations Space Map at National Sawdust. Her project is an immersive storytelling experience featuring original music, spatial sound mapping, and live audiovisual performance. Developed while working with her mentor Alastair McMillan, Emmy nominee and the U2 tour spatial sound designer. 

Wang Lu (she/her) Composer and Pianist, will showcase her work for piano and voice, electronics, percussion and dance in collaboration with Madeline Hollander, dancer and choreographer. The purpose of this inquiry is to dig into a new potential liminal space of improvisation between dance and live interactive music where sound and physiology lead and feed off one another. Lu has been working with her mentor, Tania Leon, Pulitzer Prize winning composer. 

Ausia Jones (she/her) Dancer and Choreographer, is currently in the process of creating a duet featuring two dancers. Collaborating with Quentin Noble, an electronic composer based in Berlin, Ausia aims to delve into the boundless possibilities of choreography. Prior to presenting her work, Ausia will provide a brief overview of the creative process behind its inception.

Tiler Peck (she/her) dancer and choreographer, will showcase her journey from dance to choreography, including her experiences at the New York City Ballet, and Turn It Out With Tiler, exploring the learning and developmental stages of the process. She has been working with her mentor, Shanta Thake, Director, and Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center.  

The Toulmin Fellowship was established to foster collaboration between women composers and choreographers, and is in partnership with National Sawdust and The Center for Ballet and the Arts, at NYU, generously supported by the Virgina B. Toulmin Foundation. Toulmin Fellows receive financial support, time, and space to develop their work, as well as continued programming and infrastructure for the growing Toulmin alumni community. The artists have access to CBA’s community of fellows and alumni and the broad resources of NYU, immersing them in a community of scholars and a rich, intellectual environment where they can take risks, try new ideas, and receive feedback. National Sawdust provides expert mentorship to further inform the fellows’ work and feature their works-in-progress and/or performances through its MOTIF on-line platform and at other live performance and work-in-progress showing opportunities.

The CBA and National Sawdust partnership, with generous support from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, has supported more than 55 women choreographers and composers to help develop their skills, create and present new work, and build a community of artists with diverse training and perspectives. The program is committed to supporting choreographers and composers who are historically underrepresented in the field, by gender, race, or ethnicity. A majority of the program participants are women of the global majority.

Erica “Twelve45” Blunt - DJ, Composer, Sound Designer (she/her)

Erica “Twelve45'' Blunt has performed at the National Gallery of Art, the Highline Ballroom, and the Brooklyn Museum. Her career spans various genres and styles, as illustrated by her video mix series, Day by Day, which combines music and nature visuals to evoke peace and introspection. She composed and designed the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s ballet Sounds of Hazel, which premiered in New York’s City Center in April 2023. In the same month, she premiered an evening-length work, The Path, at EMERGE125, the modern dance company where she is resident composer. She collaborated with Tiffany Rea-Fisher, EMERGE125’s Executive Artistic Director, who was a 2022 Toulmin Fellow. Blunt has composed works for the films Rights of Renaissance and Geography of Grace. In 2022, she received the

John Brown Lives! Fellowship for Artists, Activists, and Scholars, and then joined JBL! as a board member promoting justice and equity.

Ausia Jones - Artist, Dancer, Choreographer (she/her)

Originally from Dallas, Ausia Jones earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance with a focus on choreography from the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. While studying at USC, she received training at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Orsolina Forsythe/Pite, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Jones joined Ballets Jazz Montréal in 2020. She has performed works by William Forsythe, Robert Battle, Crystal Pite, Azure Barton, and Jiri Kylian, and has choreographed at Ballet Jazz Montréal, USC Kaufman, and New York Live Arts. In addition, she is a YoungArts winner in Choreography and Modern Dance, the recipient of the Orion Choreographic Fellowship and a Toulmin Creator Grant, and she served as a panelist in A Celebration of Black Women in Dance, hosted by White Bird.

Tiler Peck - Principal Dancer at New York City Ballet (she/her)‍

Tiler Peck has been a Principal Dancer with New York City Ballet since 2009, and is widely recognized as one of the top American ballerinas performing today. Peck made her choreographic debut at the Vail Dance Festival in 2018 and has gone on to choreograph and appear in episodes of Tiny Pretty Things and Ray Donovan, and the film John Wick 3. She was the first woman to curate and star in The Los Angeles Music Center’s presentation of BalletNOW, an experience that was chronicled in the 2018 Hulu documentary Ballet Now. In 2022, Peck curated and directed the inaugural Artists at the Center for New York City Center, which marked her NYC choreographic debut and featured premieres from Michelle Dorrance, William Forsythe, Alonzo King, and Jillian Meyers. Her many accolades include the Princess Grace Statue Award, the Dance Magazine Award and inclusion in Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list in 2014.
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Wang Lu - Associate Professor of Music, Brown University (she/her)‍

Wang Lu’s artistic practice is influenced by improvisational practices, through which she creates compositions that combine the sounds of urban environments, linguistic intonations, and traditional Chinese music. Her works have been performed by the Ensemble Modern, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and Boston Lyric Opera, among others. She won the Berlin Prize in Music Composition from the American Academy in Berlin, the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Koussevitzky Award from the Library of Congress. She was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of a Fromm Commission from Harvard University. She has released two albums, Urban Inventory (2018) and An Atlas of Time (2020).