FELICITAS FISCHER is HMD’s Community Engagement Manager. Driven by a deep curiosity for movement in all forms, Felicitas is a contemporary dance artist performing, teaching, and creating on the ancestral and unceded land of Ramaytush and Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, part of what is colonially known as the Bay Area. Her artistic approach incorporates diverse dance practices from around the world and reflects her own polyethnic-cultural experience through the means of storytelling + reclamation + resistance. Since graduating from the University of San Francisco with a B.A in Performing Arts & Social Justice in Dance (2019), Felicitas has had the honor of working with various local performing artists and choreographers while continuing to explore socio-political topics and themes through embodied works of her own. Currently, she serves as the Community Engagement Residency Manager under HMD/The Bridge Project, Marketing Associate at ODC, and is one of the founding leaders of Artists for Justice, an artistic collective dedicated to supporting diverse emerging artists and local social-justice initiatives.https://ffischer.carrd.co

CHERIE HILL co-directs The Bridge Project with Hope Mohr and Karla Quintero. She is HMD’s Director of Art in Community. A choreographer, dancer, teacher, and scholar, her art explores human expression and how it is conveyed through the body in collaboration with nature, music, and visual imagery. Cherie studied dance at a young age, taking classes at the community parks and recreation center, then competed in dance competitions with a local dance studio. Her love for dance continued into her teens, where she trained and choreographed her first group dance piece as a student at Orange County High School of the Arts. Later, Cherie achieved a BA in Dance and Performance Studies and African American Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Dance with graduate certificates in Somatics and Women & Gender studies from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Cherie has co-curated HMD events for the Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, & Community Festival and the Anti-Racism in Dance series. As a researcher, she has published essays in Gender Forum, The Sacred Dance Journal, Dance Education in Practice, and In Dance. She has presented at multiple conferences, including the International Conference on Arts and Humanities, Western Arts Alliance, Black Dance, and National Dance Education Organization Conferences. Recently, she sat on a Dance USA panel with HMD Co-Directors to discuss distributed leadership. Cherie has held artist residencies with Footloose Productions, Milk Bar Richmond, CounterPulse's Performing Diaspora Residency Program, and the David Brower Center as a choreographer. She has danced with Bay Area Repertory Dance, Makomba West African Drum & Dance, David Dorfman, Kiandanda Dance, & Helander Dance Theater. Cherie is Co-President of the CA Dance Education Association and a National Guild for Community Arts Education Leadership Institute alumnus. She lives with her partner and two children, practices Surat Shabd Yoga, and is a meditator and teacher of movement and wellness..

HOPE MOHR co-directs The Bridge Project with Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero. She has woven art and activism for decades as a choreographer, curator, community organizer, and writer. In 2007, she founded HMD. In 2010, she founded HMD's core program, The Bridge Project, which creates and supports equity-driven live art that builds community and centers artists as agents of change.

As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. While dancing in New York, Mohr also freelanced with Liz Gerring, Douglas Dunn, Trajal Herrell, and Pat Catterson.  

As an activist, she has worked for women’s rights and environmental justice through such organizations as AmeriCorps, Earthjustice, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has led community-based performance projects with breast cancer survivors and military veterans. Passionate about pursuing both community organizing and dance, Mohr earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Columbia Human Rights Fellow. She is on the stewardship team of the Non Profit Democracy Network. Her law practice, Movement Law, supports artists, arts organizations, and nonprofits.

As a choreographer, Mohr makes work that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that just ride underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). Her work has been presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space (LA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Sonoma), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), SFMOMA, ODC Theater, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. More information at hopemohr.org

She was named to the YBCA 100 in 2015 and was a 2016 Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2014, Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron named Mohr as one of the “women leaders” in the dance field. She was nominated for the Herb Alpert Prize in 2019. She has held artist residencies at the 836M Gallery, Petronio Residency Center, Stanford Arts Institute, Bethany Arts Center, ODC Theater, Montalvo Arts Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for Art, Nature and Dance. Mohr's new book, Shifting Cultural Power, is out now from the University of Akron Press and the National Center for Choreography.  

KARLA QUINTERO co-directs The Bridge Project with Cherie Hill and Hope Mohr. She is HMD’s Director of Marketing and Development. She is HMD’s Director of Marketing and Development. Quintero graduated from Barnard College with a BA degree in Urban Studies and later earned a BFA from the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance. For five years she worked for leading pedestrian and bicycle advocacy group Transportation Alternatives (NYC) supporting pedestrian safety and community health efforts in Latino and immigrant communities.

In performance and dance, Karla's work explores themes of intimacy, consumption, biculturalism, and defamiliarization. Recent highlights include the dance film Flavedoom, which screened at the 2021 San Francisco Dance Film Festival. Karla also enjoys performing in the works of other artists, including Gerald Casel, Catherine Galasso (NYC), Hope Mohr, and Maxe Crandall.

As an arts administrator, Karla worked with PUSH Dance Company coordinating their annual mixed-genre dance festival, PUSHfest for many years. She also served as the Production Manager for the Festival for Latin American Contemporary Choreographers in 2019. karlajohannaquintero.tumblr.com