JoVia Armstrong is a percussionist, composer, and educator whose work blends rhythm, technology, and experimental composition. Born in Detroit, Armstrong has performed with artists including El DeBarge, Nicole Mitchell, Isaiah Sharkey, and Malian musicians Ballaké Sissoko and Babani Koné. Her performance style bridges acoustic and electronic percussion, drawing influence from a diverse range of global traditions. 

She leads the electroacoustic ensemble Eunoia Society, which explores sound as a healing tool through immersive audio and contemplative composition. Their albums The Antidote Suite (2022) and Inception (2023) received widespread acclaim in The New York Times, DownBeat, JazzTimes, and The Wire. JoVia is also a member of the Detroit-based group Musique Noire and formerly served as percussionist and tour manager for JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound. 

An active educator and mentor for over two decades, she taught digital media and audio production and served youth in Chicago through YOUmedia and the Digital Youth Network. Armstrong earned her Ph.D. in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology from UC Irvine. She now serves as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, where she teaches composition and electronic music while researching the intersection of Black music, sonic healing, and urban space.

Kim Brooks Mata is a dance artist, choreographer, and filmmaker serving as Professor, General Faculty, and Dance Program Director in the Department of Drama. At UVA she teaches all levels of Modern, Composition, Screendance, and Somatic Practices & Research.

With an emphasis on somatic practices, Brooks Mata prioritizes embodied learning and collaborative creative processes to facilitate critical inquiry and enhance creativity. In her live choreography and screendance work, she is interested in the affect–the impact of, and response to, the embodied worlds we are creating on stage, in natural and built environments, and on screen(s). Her creative work focuses on questions that investigate notions of agency, a sense of place, and what it means to live and move in relationship. In her screendance work, she is interested in what she as a choreographer and dancer brings to the medium of film–namely an embodied, movement-centric, choreographic approach to camera operation and editing. Her screendance works have been screened as official selections in festivals in Scotland, England, Sweden, Italy, Finland, and across the US. Brooks Mata studied dance at the Rotterdam Dance Academy in the Netherlands, holds an MFA in Dance Performance from the University of Utah, and is a certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst (CLMA).

AB Brown (she/they) is a research-based artist, writer, and educator. She creates site-responsive, socially engaged, and participatory performances that unearth the material histories  of place, social structures , and the more than human. Brown is currently developing two large scale projects: a haunted botany, which traces the colonial histories of various plant species and how they continue to impact the present; and, The Garden of Trans Care, which animates queer and trans relationships to the natural world as a way to transform violent social structures. Their work has been supported by a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award from The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, as well as by the MAP Fund, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the New England Humanities Consortium.

Brown’s scholarship builds on a decade of creating performance with LGBTQ asylum seekers in South Africa and demonstrates the role of queer and trans performance in reimagining the colonial legacies of international asylum policy and its effects on the representation of refugees and their everyday lives. Her writing can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, the edited anthologies Queer Nightlife and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation, Women and Performance: a Journal of feminist theory, Text and Performance Quarterly, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies, among others. 

Brown received their Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University with specializations in Postcolonial Theory and Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Mona Kasra is a new media artist, designer, interdisciplinary scholar, and Associate Professor of Digital Media Design in the Departments of Drama and Art at the University of Virginia. Her research investigates the political and theoretical implications of visual media technologies within our culture and cross-culturally. Her creative practice experiments with the affordances of media technologies within artistic forms and in a variety of improvisational framings. 

Kasra frequently collaborates with artists, musicians, choreographers, and theater-makers to investigate the intersections of performance and new media—particularly the aesthetic possibilities that enrich narrative and deepen audience immersion in live events. She has received two Helen Hayes Award nominations in the category of Outstanding Media/Projection Design. Her artwork has been widely exhibited in galleries and film festivals across the United States and internationally, and she has served as juror, curator, and programmer for numerous exhibitions, festivals, and conferences.

Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society, The Communication Review, Journal of Dance Education, and Media and Communication. She holds a Ph.D. in Arts & Technology from the University of Texas at Dallas, an M.F.A. in Video/Digital Art from California State University, Northridge. More information at www.monakasra.com

William Wylie, Commonwealth Professor of Art, has been directing the photography program at UVA since 2000. He received a Mead Honored Faculty Award at UVA in 2003 and has been the director of the Study Abroad Program in Italy since 2007. He was Director of Studio Art for eight years. His photographs and films have been shown both nationally and internationally and can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and Yale University Art Museum, among others. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2005, a VMFA Professional Fellowship for 2011 and was the Doran Artist in Residence in Italy through the Sol LeWitt Foundation and the Yale University Art Museum in 2012 and 2015. He has been an Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Utah. Wylie has published six books of his photographic work: Riverwalk (2000), Stillwater (2002), Carrara (2009), Route 36 (2010), Pompeii Archive (2018) and A Prairie Season (2020). His forthcoming book, The Eighty-Eight, Photographs from a Japanese Pilgrimage will be published in February 2026.