MILE ZERO DANCE SEASON 2023-24

Originally from rural Saskatchewan, Gerry Morita (BA Dance/ MFA Theatre. She has lived and worked in Vancouver, Montréal, and Tokyo as a dancer, choreographer, performance artist and teacher before moving to Edmonton and becoming Mile Zero Dance’s Artistic Director in 2006. Her work has toured Poland, Turkey, Estonia, Canada, and Japan.  

Morita’s body of work involves continuous inquiry into new ways of seeing movement, the body, and the spaces between us. She studies and teaches contact improvisation, Noguchi Taiso and other somatic-based and improving technique, working with artists from all disciplines in a vast array of both conventional and site-specific venues. She has received the Mayor’s Award for Innovation in Artistic Direction, the Edmonton Salute for Excellence, Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund and was one of Alberta’s 25 Influential Artists recognized in 2016.

Lexi Pendzich is a lens-based artist whose work focuses on documentary photography and portraiture. She’s inspired by the power of images to tell stories, personal narratives and capture moments that wouldn’t otherwise be documented.

Lexi is a communications strategist with experience working at the intersection of marketing, social media, media relations, and web for arts and culture.

Katrina is an independent dance artist based in Edmonton. She has been involved with MZD in an administrative capacity since 2008, and has also contributed as a dance artist, on and off, since the early 90’s. She enjoys wordsmithing (wordsmith-ing, wordsmithery), and bookkeeping.

Whittyn Jason (them/them/theirs pronouns) is a queer, mixed race, multi-disciplinary artist living and creating in amiskawaciy (Edmonton, Alberta). In their practice, they are particularly interested in the intersection of visual art, installation in theatre, and creating devised performances. When not pursuing their artistic practice, they moonlight as an arts administrator.

Trent is an Edmonton based artist and arts enabler with a specialty in activating non-traditional performance spaces. A graduate of Grant MacEwan’s Theatre Production program and The Banff Centre for the Arts, Trent has spent the last 10 years as a Lighting Designer, Production Manager, Technical Director, Entertainment Programmer, Site Manager, and Theatre Technician.

M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator, whose collection of prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes, is available now from Anhinga Press. Their first full-length book, W&E, an experimental translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem commonly known as ‘Wulf and Eadwacer,’ will be published with Action Books (U.S.) in spring 2025. Their work in translation aims to revise the critical interpretation of the enigmatic Anglo-Saxon poem known as “Wulf and Eadwacer,” and to recover this radical female text to the feminist and experimental canons to which it belongs. They have published in many Canadian literary journals, including The Capilano Review, Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, and Prism International. Their recent work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Cordite, Gulf Coast, and The Kenyon Review. An editor for Asymptote, with grants from Bread Loaf, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship, they’re the founder of the Translation Now! symposium. Find them online: M-L-Martin.com.