Meet the FRESH Festival Team
ainsley elizabeth tharp
is a Bay Area(Ohlone land) based alchemist+artist+activist.
she grew up in a small Texas town called Victoria(Karankawas land), she carries with her influence from catholic school, celtic folklore, mexican/tijuana culture, and white southern trailer trash. She’s a multimedia witch working to build new systems and queer futures as an artist and collaborator. She creates visual alchemy as performance using various modes and media, such as movement, magic, ritual, video, projection, lighting, and the sculpting of readymade objects. Her work is queer, transcends boundaries and norms, and surpasses the conventional yes and no. Her work is dedicated to creating and organizing low-income accessible art access spaces in the Bay Area. She is currently organizing and teaching with the ˈɡaT͟H(ə)riNGs class series with her collaborator gizeh muñiz vengel, and apart of the curatorial team for KH FRESH FESTIVAL 24. ainsley most recently was awarded the Impulstanz DanceWeb Scholarship 2023, the ARC seed residency at CounterPulse, and The Community Engagement Residency with Bridge Live Arts, and an East Bay Community Foundation grant.
BIG FAT THANK YOU TO KATHLEEN HERMESDORF for creating this space<3 Kathleen, you envisioned a world with so much spaciousness, love, abundance, physicality, magic, and grace. The dances you made were spells for the future. The magic you passed along is a guide for new worlds.
thx<3333
gizeh muñiz vengel
Mexicana, based in Chochenyo Ohlone Land. Movement artist, healer, educator, curator and arts administrator, gizeh is curator and organizer of KH FRESH Festival in San Francisco CA, Performance Primers and co-director of Gatherings class series in the Bay Area.
Her choreographic work is inspired in the unseen and invisible dimensions of life and she enjoys the dialogues created from and with the body. They are devoted to the study of being a body through movement and stillness while creating creative strategies for building kinder relationships with others and recognizing the sovereignty and personhood of the land, the waters and other beings who we coexist with.
Her work has been performed at the GUSH Dance festival, FRESH festival and FLACC festival in San Francisco and 4x4 choreography contest in Tijuana Baja California where she received the award for Best Choreography in 2016.
She is currently a RAW Dance Fellow and a Counterpulse EDGE resident.
Abby Crain
(she/her) is a dance artist who works through words, the body, and images in an attempt to make sense of the world, trouble what is considered sensible, and offer ways of seeing and being otherwise. Her performance, choreographic, and dance teaching work has been presented nationally and internationally; she co-organizes the Kathleen Hermesdorf FRESH Festival; and is the artistic director of the PORCH.Veranda program at Ponderosa Tanzland in Germany. She was a professor in the Mills Dance Department on Ohlone land (Oakland, California) from 2016-2022 and currently teaches writing at Mills College at Northeastern University and in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. She holds an MFA in dance from University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Abby has been a part of the FRESH Festival since 2010 as a curator, teacher, performer, fan, and organizer. This will be her last year with KHFRESH (2024). She is incredibly grateful to Kathleen for this beautiful gift and to all of the artists who have gathered around this legacy to keep it going.
Juliet Paramor
Juliet Paramor is a USA-born dance artist & teacher, bodyworker, birth doula, web designer, art model, nanny, sugar baby, waitress extraordinaire, administrative fairy, space shaper, tide pool dweller, food lover, laugh inciter, joy spreader, silly goose, bath taker, sunbather, lake swimmer, ocean floater. She is a bit nomadic these days— yet tethered to the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest. Her movement and performance research explores unearthing expression from subconscious realms. The space between and the space where transformation occurs excites her. Changing seasons, dreams, synapses, the birth canal, public transportation, silence, sex, death, seeds sprouting, movement, edges, black holes, the fertile void. She has loved being a part of the FRESH team in varying capacities over the past few years. She is eternally grateful to Kathleen Hermesdorf as a teacher and guide in the past-present-future as well as FRESH Festival for connecting her with her best friends, mentors, co-creators, learning + performing opportunities of various kinds and play! and love love love. She built and maintains this website and is a part of the marketing/publicity team.
Justin Ebrahemi
Justin Ebrahemi (he/they) is a Persian American arts writer, dance marketer, and poet based in San Francisco. His personal writing explores the queer Iranian American diaspora, political uprising, gender expression and mental health. He recently published his second collection of poetry entitled "Birdsong From Nowruz," while his journalistic work has been published in KQED, Content Magazine, and SFMOMA’s Open Space platform. Justin was previously the Director of Communications & Advancement at CounterPulse and the Digital Engagement Arts Manager at KQED Arts, where he engaged creative communities in digital and in-person arts experiences and authored dance reviews. Recently, Justin has committed his work to advocate for Palestinian liberation among the Bay Area arts community.
Kevin Lo
Kevin Lo (he/any) is a composer, choreographer, writer, and artist living on Chechenyo Ohlone land, born in New Zealand, with some time after that in Melbourne, Australia. In his compositions and improvisations for live performance and installation, he utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale. He co-organizes for the tritone poetry series, freelances in the arts (currently videographs for Small Press Traffic), performs nationally and abroad. Kevin is currently completing his PhD studies in Music Composition at UC Berkeley, where he teaches Music and Computing. He was CounterPulse’s Technical Director during the first 2.5 years of COVID. KHFRESH Festival is absolutely his favorite time of year – all power to the ever-shifting communities and ongoing histories this festival produces and collates.
Albert Mathias
Albert Mathias - FRESH Festival Founder, Musical Visionary, Artist, Movement Accompanist, Percussionist, motion picture Composer, International Recording Artist, Producer, Innovator, Empath, Healer, Addict and Eternal Student.
Best way to learn is to join. I have gained the most knowledge from real Artists by attempting to imitate in a real time environment. I will forever create music in support of this movement Arts craft that reflects the honor I feel for their generosity of inclusion. Encouragement is Everything and under standing is experiential. Be Living Proof. Be Bold. Be Brave. Forever Listen to your Heart!