Staff & Board

Sean Dorsey is an Emmy award-winning choreographer, dancer, writer, educator and activist. Long recognized as the U.S.’ first acclaimed transgender modern dance choreographer, Dorsey has toured his work to more than 35 cities across the US and abroad – and taught with his explicitly trans-positive pedagogy in more than 40 cities.

Dorsey is the founder and Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions.

Dorsey is a Doris Duke Artist, a United States Artists Fellow, and a Dance/USA Artist Fellow. He has been awarded an Emmy Award, five Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, and the Goldie Award for Performance.

In 2019, he became the first openly-transgender person on the cover of Dance Magazine. Dorsey is the first openly-transgender US artist to be presented by The Joyce Theater (NYC), American Dance Festival and many other major stages.

As a transgender, white, disabled/Hard-of-hearing and queer longtime social practice artist, Dorsey creates his works over 2-3 years in deep relationship with/in community. Dorsey’s dances are powerful explorations of human experience – a fusion of full-throttle dance, luscious partnering, intimate storytelling and theater. Highly physical, accessible, rooted in story, and danced with precision and guts and deep humanity, Dorsey’s works have been praised as “exquisite…poignant and important” (BalletTanz), “trailblazing” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “evocative, compelling, elegant” (LA Weekly).

As a teaching artist, Dorsey leads workshops, classes and DREAM LABS with a trans-positive pedagogy – and centers and celebrates gender non-conforming and trans bodies, voices and aesthetics.

Dorsey has been awarded commissions from American Dance Festival (Durham), Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston ME), Dance Place (Washington DC), Highways Performance Space (Los Angeles), Links Hall (Chicago), Maui Arts & Cultural Center (Maui), Queer Cultural Center (San Francisco), 7 Stages (Atlanta), The Theater Offensive (Boston), Velocity Dance Center (Seattle), and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival (San Francisco).

Dorsey is also the founder and Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions – founded in 2002, Fresh Meat Productions invests in the creative expression and cultural leadership of trans and gender-nonconforming communities through its year-round programs including the annual FRESH MEAT FESTIVAL, resident company Sean Dorsey Dance, artist commissions, education and advocacy for intersectional trans, racial and disability justice in the performing arts.

For more info, visit read full bio at www.seandorseydance.com

Heidi Erickson is a choreographer, teaching artist, art administrator, and community organizer. She is a recent graduate from the University of San Francisco with a degree in Performing Arts and Social Justice and a concentration in Dance. She comes from a small mountain town in Colorado but has since moved to San Francisco to pursue art activism. She has supported the general operations of KD>>MovingGround for the past three years alongside Krista DeNio and performed in projects like the NETWORK project and EchoTheaterSuitCase. She is also a company member of the Dance Generators, an intergenerational company housed at USF. In 2022 she was the guest choreographer for the company and created Returning Forward and Evolutions of a Building. Heidi is passionate about social justice and has specific interests in abolitionist work, workers’ rights, gender issues, and general community mutual aid efforts. She uses embodied research to explore anti-racism and decolonization to further understand her own privilege and better support marginalized artists in her community. 

Eric Garcia is an arts administrator, choreographer, and drag queen whose feet are deeply rooted in the Bay Area. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Detour Dance, an ensemble that produces original devised theater works, hosts performance-based investigative workshops, and presents the annual Tiny Dance Film Festival. He is also the Festival Coordinator with the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. Eric hosts and performs at drag cabarets and clubs all around the Bay Area as Churro Nomi. He was a 2016-17 Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow, was nominated for an 2016 Isadora Duncan Dance Award and was the recipient of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s 2017 CHIME Award.

Zach Kopciak is a theater artist, event producer, and arts administrator currently based in San Francisco, specializing in supporting historically underrepresented artists create in non-traditional performance contexts. In the past, Zach has worked with art and event companies across the US and UK, after receiving an MA from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Currently, Zach is also the Co-Managing Director of 3Girls Theatre, which develops and presents new work by women playwrights living in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Den Legaspi has been designing gorgeous materials for Fresh Meat Productions and Sean Dorsey Dance since 2006.

Sarah is a queer, Bolivian-American community organizer, dancer, and filmmaker from the Bay Area. Sarah received her B.A. from Mills College in Public Policy and her M.F.A in Cinema from San Francisco State University. Her video work has been leveraged by social justice organizations like Advancement Project, The Utility Reform Network, and Just Cause/Causa Justa to win progressive campaigns. Sarah’s “2020 PSA” video was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network in the program, Where Do We Go From Here? Sarah’s documentary, “Dear Queer
Dancer,” aired on PBS in July 2021.

Dear Queer Dancer transformed from a documentary to an arts service organization that centers the professional and creative success of LGBTQ+ dancers. Dear Queer Dancer put on the first annual QueerDanceCon in 2021 which brought together LGBTQ+ dancers, choreographers, theatre directors, arts administrators, somatic practitioners, and dance movement therapists to network, inspire each other, and build creative opportunities. The entire event was held virtually!

Shawna Virago is a songwriter celebrated for her lyric-based songs. She is one of the nation’s first openly transgender women to perform and tour nationally, and has performed as an out transwoman since the early 1990’s. She has been profiled online, in print and on radio including Bitch, the Advocate, Huffington Post Louder ThanWar, No Depression, Paste magazine, on NPR and PBS. POP DOSE Magazine wrote “In these turbulent times, you may often wonder, ‘Where’s our Bob Dylan? Where’s the bard of the 2010s translating the dicey political and social climate into musical stanzas?’… Enter Shawna Virago.” Virago is also a published writer and her work appears in several anthologies. She is also the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival.

Melissa Lewis Wong (they/she/他) is a queer, non-binary Chinese American performer, artist, producer and administrator. Their administrative work—supporting artists via resource-sharing and process-driven containers—is part of the slow change and relational care they wish for in the world; with a particular current interest in facilitation, somatics and joy as pathways to disrupt systems of harm. They are a steering member of Asian Babe Gang, a Bay Area-based collective of queer, Asian-American women, femmes, and gnc/trans* artists, healers & educators organizing around identity-centered topics. Deuce Lee is their drag persona. They have been working and performing in Yelamu (San Francisco) since 2010 with various Bay Area arts organizations and dance companies – and are also based in Hilo, Hawaii. [Photo by Stephen Texeira]