about
GRAVITY
our mission
GRAVITY creates liberatory performance works and expands radical, intersectional access and services within the Bay Area performing arts ecosystem and beyond.
GRAVITY uplifts arts workers and audiences at the margins. We center experimental artists, QTBIPOC, disabled, and blind/low vision communities to further the Bay Area’s legacy of radical collisions, queer placemaking, and inclusive loud, bold, body culture.
Initiated in 2000 by the late Jess Curtis, the organization now practices shared leadership with a queer, intergenerational, mixed-race creative team.
our team
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Gabriele Christian (b. 1991) is a San Francisco-based conceptual artist and descendent of stolen folk. Experimenting within somatic practices, language, performance composition, video production and community arts facilitation, they locate and center BlaQ (Black and Queer) experience, vernacular, and aesthetics as wellsprings for radical futurity. They perform original work and collaborate trans- and inter-nationally, most recently in Berlin, New York City, Vienna, and Amsterdam. They are a founding member of multiple Bay Area born performance collectives and land projects including: RUPTURE; OYSTERKNIFE; and BlaQyard. They currently serve as Co-Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director of Jess Curtis/Gravity, a body-based arts and accessibility non-profit living on in the wake of Jess Curtis' transition in March 2024. At the heart of all their work: exhaustive research into belonging, spirit, and desirability while living in the fangs of dehumanizing times.
Co-Executive + Co-Artistic Director
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Rebecca Fitton (she/they) is a queer, mixed race asian american, disabled, and immigrant person. Their work as an artist, administrator, and advocate focuses on arts infrastructure, asian american identity, and disability justice. This intentional attention-switching means their research question takes variable forms including community gatherings, dances, essays, and improvisational quilts. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, the National Center for Choreography – Akron, SPACE 124 @ Project Artaud, Center, LEIMAY/CAVE, EMERGENYC, and The Croft. Their writing has been published by Triskelion Arts, In Dance, The Dancer-Citizen, Etudes, Critical Correspondence, Dance Research Journal, American Journal of Arts Management. As an administrator she has worked with Edisa Weeks, Abigail Levine, zavé martohardjono, J. Bouey, Adrienne Westwood and Will Rawls. She holds a BFA in Dance from Florida State University and an MA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. They also serve as a Co-Director at Bridge Live Arts.
Co-Executive Director
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Rachael Dichter is a San Francisco based dancer, performer, choreographer and curator. She makes work about closeness. About the shortest distance and shortening the distance between things - between people. She grew up on the ocean and in the mountains and forests of Northern California, performing as a ballerina and attending Mills College. She studied performance and classical techniques in New York and Bangalore India and danced with Fougere Dance in Brussels Belgium. She was a Danceweb Scholar, a resident artist at the Marin Headlands, Caldera OR, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and her work has shown locally and internationally. She had been lucky to collaborate with a number of fierce and talented folks, and for four years she co-curated the San Francisco based live arts festival THIS IS WHAT I WANT. Since 2014 she has performed and collaborated with Gravity in San Francisco, and currently serves as Gravity’s co-artistic director.
Co-Artistic Director
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Aiano Nakagawa is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and educator whose work explores the intersection of art, queer homemaking, and power analysis. Aiano is deeply curious about the role of art-making, curation, and design in the act of new world building. Their practice is rooted in the belief that we must practice liberatory ways of existing on a small scale in order to create radical change on a larger scale. She is a founder member of the Bay Area Queer art collective, Asian Babe Gang and is a facilitator at CompassPoint Non-Profit Services. Aiano joined Gravity in 2022 as a Production Manager and helped produce dark/lessons/rupture in San Francisco in 2022 and the rolling world premiere of “Into the Dark” in Berlin and San Francisco in 2023. Aiano joined Gravity as Director of Operations and Communications in January 2023 and now serves as Director of Communications and Productions. Aiano’s work envisions and embodies the possibilities of the new world that is being born through collective imagination, organizing, creative disruption, and a commitment to creating the futures we need to exist.
Director of Communications + Productions
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Michael Whitson (he/him) is a disabled, mixed-race Native American musician and poet with a long San Francisco history of community arts engagement. He was a co-founder of 848/CounterPulse in 1990 and co-director from 1990-2007. He is a co-founder in 2009 of Yuba Libre, a 30 acre community-based land project integrating ecological stewardship with the generative process of bringing Bay Area artists and teachers to a "wild and scenic" protected section of the Yuba River. Michael has been the Managing Director/Gravity Access Services since October, 2022.
Director of Access Services
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As a blind woman with a BA degree in Theatre, Tiffany uses her lived experience of disability and performance to challenge ablest practices in performance spaces. She advocates for increased access to performance events for blind audiences and authentic casting and employment for disabled workers in the performing arts.
As a Visual Access Consultant, Tiffany tests the usability and accessibility of websites for performance venues, ensuring they cater to the needs of blind and low-vision audiences. In her role as an audio description consultant and coauthor, Tiffany facilitates blind and low-vision audiences having access to quality professional audio description.
Tiffany has performed in San Francisco and Berlin with Gravity in In-Visible, and Into the Dark. As well as in Sight Unseen in San Francisco.
Additionally, Tiffany has served as part of the grants review process for the National Endowment for the Arts Musical Theatre Panel, leveraging her expertise to shape funding decisions that support a diverse array of artistic endeavors. She has participated in the flagship training program Access Acting Academy for blind and low-vision actors and the Axis Dance Choreography and Performance Lab. Currently, she sits on Gravity’s board of directors.
Blindness Accessibility + Audio Description Advisor
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Maia is an interdisciplinary artist and educator teaching accessible arts through City College of San Francisco's DSPS program and working independently as an arts educator and activist advancing accessible arts programming and spaces throughout the Bay Area. Maia holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts from California Institute of Integral Studies in addition to other certifications and degrees in bodywork, sound healing, dance, therapeutic recreation and labyrinth experience facilitation. Maia's recent work focuses on the labyrinth as a tool for creating gentle spaces in arts settings and beyond in which attendees follow the choreography of the winding path and inviting diverse bodies to be celebrated as elements of art.
Blindness Accessibility + Audio Description Advisor
Board of Directors
B Dean
Board President
Simone Thelemaque
Board Treasurer
Tiffany Taylor
Board Secretary
dress wedding
Board Member
John Link
Board Member
Maia Scott
Board Member
Rachel Hickman
Board Member
Michael Whitson
Staff Representative