Moti Zemelman, MFA, began practicing Contact Improv 30 years ago. Over the past 22 years he has taught and performed across USA, Canada, Central America, Mexico, Europe and Israel. In 2008-09 he taught as Professor of Dance at the Instituto Naciónal de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Over the last 10 years in his desire to integrate communication and intimacy skills in his life and teaching he has studied Non-violent Communication, Tantra, Butoh, and Byron Katie’s “The Work”. Moti has been a teacher and a board member at Earthdance Retreat Center.  He was an original member of Wire Monkey Dance Co., (Holyoke, MA, USA) and is a featured dancer in Sanford Lewis’ documentary film about CI “An Intimate Dance.” As a musician Moti plays vocal-electronic music for Contact Jams and in 2007 released his debut CD, Doorwaves.  He also designs and moderates the international Contact Improv resource website www.contactimprov.com.

Garrell Bevirt is an artist, designer, dreamer and currently a student, practitioner, and teacher of yoga and tantra. For the last three years he has been immersed in a full time, live in tantra/yoga/meditation/permaculture mentorship with Swami Ravi Rudra Bharati (Rudolph Ballentine, MD), who himself underwent twenty years of intensive training with his own guru, Swami Rama. Garrell has lived in community at Kalani in Hawaii, Easton Mountain in Albany, NY and now resides in and oversees Dancing Shiva Ashram and Retreat Center in the mountains of Western North Carolina. He has co-facilitated workshops in Costa Rica, Mexico, Hawaii, North & South Carolina, and NY. Garrell is excited and privileged to be a part of helping shift consciousness through meditation, touch, connection, transformation and love.

Julia Taylor is an artist, dancer and performer. Long time contact improviser, she lead movement and contact improvisation classes and jams for many years in Asheville. Her dance is informed by Butoh dance, authentic movement, ritual and connection with nature. No matter the medium, her art is rooted in the powerfully feminine, untamed, and emotive Body, and emphasizes the mysteriousness of womanhood, sensuality, and the primal sides of the psyche. Since moving with her husband and two young children to Earthaven in the summer of 2015, she has been dedicated to cultivating a vibrant culture of art and dance and ceremony within the community. www.juliaanntaylor.com

Michael Hurd  is writing this biography (even THIS sentence) in the third person, because he thinks you’ll think he’s cool if you think someone else wrote his bio. He’s been doing contact Improv for 20 years and he still hasn’t done it right (or wrong). Along the way, he did 8 years residential Zen training, 4 months residential yoga training, got a Masters in Counseling and became an SEP (Somatic Experiencing Practitioner). He’s been practicing therapy for 5 years and has been a licensed General Contractor for 10 years. He first encountered NVC (Non-Violent Communication) almost two decades ago and still manages to put his foot in his mouth on a regular basis. He’s been facilitating and DJ’ing for ecstatic dances for 7 years, and He is NOT funny but if you picture him with horns he kinda looks like Pan.

CJ O’Reilly is a lifelong movement practitioner, a linguist, and passionate philosopher of life whose practice in life is an exploration of movement, food, language and relationship with a mind to bridge the gap between his experience of the world and his ideas and desires about it. His movement background spans internal and external martial arts, body-weight training and conditioning, acrobatics, yoga, and dance. He regularly teaches, facilitates and explores CI, Partner dance, language, and more. The rest of his time is usually spent organizing, working or facilitating for communities including the Asheville Movement Collective, Asheville Poly(amory) Network, Asheville Jam, Living Arts Collective & Durham Dance Wave (Durham), as well as other local residential communities and passion driven collaborative socially or ecologically progressive businesses.