FIRST DRAFT is an ongoing performance series that showcases works in progress by Los Angeles–based artists. Organized by choreographer and educator Emily Barasch as a creative laboratory, the program centers community-building and artistic exchange, supporting experimental performance practices that challenge dominant social orders and prioritize self-directed research.
FIRST DRAFT x ICA LA builds connections between visual art and live performance, foregrounding shared lines of inquiry with the artists currently on view at ICA LA, This season, performing artists include Kate Ladenheim, Jazmin Jazzy Romero, and Kai Hazelwood with a performance by Mars Garcia. This collaboration with ICA LA seeks to deepen local artistic networks and foster institutional partnerships that expand the reach and sustainability of FIRST DRAFT.
FIRST DRAFT is an ongoing performance series that showcases works in progress by Los Angeles–based artists. Organized by choreographer and educator Emily Barasch as a creative laboratory, the program centers community-building and artistic exchange, supporting experimental performance practices that challenge dominant social orders and prioritize self-directed research.
FIRST DRAFT x ICA LA builds connections between visual art and live performance, foregrounding shared lines of inquiry with the artists currently on view at ICA LA, This season, performing artists include Kate Ladenheim, Jazmin Jazzy Romero, and Kai Hazelwood with a performance by Mars Garcia. This collaboration with ICA LA seeks to deepen local artistic networks and foster institutional partnerships that expand the reach and sustainability of FIRST DRAFT.
Performance-making is often isolating, shaped by individualistic and extractive production models. FIRST DRAFT intervenes by activating shared resources, mutual support, and collective growth among local artists. The series positions performance as a collaborative practice, providing space for rigorous artistic research, advocating for more equitable models of development, and strengthening the Los Angeles performance ecosystem.
Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer and media artist who makes work about technology and how it shapes, pressures, and socializes the body. Their projects, which span installation, performance, media design, and robotics research, have been presented and published internationally, including at EMPAC/RPI, The Brown Arts Institute, Jacob’s Pillow, National Sawdust, DancePlace (DC), and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Ladenheim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. They are currently supported by a 2025 Creative Capital Award and an LL Stewart Fellowship at PRAx.
Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer and media artist who makes work about technology and how it shapes, pressures, and socializes the body. Their projects, which span installation, performance, media design, and robotics research, have been presented and published internationally, including at EMPAC/RPI, The Brown Arts Institute, Jacob’s Pillow, National Sawdust, DancePlace (DC), and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Ladenheim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. They are currently supported by a 2025 Creative Capital Award and an LL Stewart Fellowship at PRAx.
Jazmin Jazzy Romero is an artist working across performance, sound, sculpture, and moving image. Her practice uses experimentation, improvisation, and collaboration to develop alternative forms of storytelling that resist fixed form. Drawing from musical composition, she works with sound, movement, bodies, and objects as material, creating scores and performance-based worlds activated through liveness, repetition, variation, and exchange.
Romero draws from formal musical training alongside embodied and intuitive processes, using composition to translate personal and collective histories into spatial and sonic experiences. Dissonance, distance, and harmonic intervals operate as both musical and conceptual frameworks within her work.
In 2026, Romero presented Transcription and Counterpoint for the UCLA MFA New Genres thesis exhibition and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work has been presented at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and she has performed and ...
Jazmin Jazzy Romero is an artist working across performance, sound, sculpture, and moving image. Her practice uses experimentation, improvisation, and collaboration to develop alternative forms of storytelling that resist fixed form. Drawing from musical composition, she works with sound, movement, bodies, and objects as material, creating scores and performance-based worlds activated through liveness, repetition, variation, and exchange.
Romero draws from formal musical training alongside embodied and intuitive processes, using composition to translate personal and collective histories into spatial and sonic experiences. Dissonance, distance, and harmonic intervals operate as both musical and conceptual frameworks within her work.
In 2026, Romero presented Transcription and Counterpoint for the UCLA MFA New Genres thesis exhibition and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work has been presented at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and she has performed and collaborated on projects presented at REDCAT, MoMA, ODC Theater, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also participated in residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), ACRE, and Skowhegan.
Romero received an MFA in New Genres from UCLA in 2026 and a BA in Applied Art and Social Concerns through the Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, in 2022.
Kai Hazelwood is a transdisciplinary Disabled, Black, and Queer body-based artist, researcher, and embodied healing practitioner.
Kai is the founder and director of Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven collaborative arts project celebrating queer identities and centering disabled and chronically ill QTBIPOC. Kai and Good Trouble Makers have been supported by Arts Omi International Arts Center, The cities of Los Angeles and West Hollywood, California Institute of Contemporary Arts, Pieter Performance, The California Arts Council and DAS Graduate School.
To foster communal healing for QTBIPOC and unravel embodied white supremacy Kai co-founded Practice Progress. Practice Progress’ work has included MASSMoCA, University of Alberta, Trisha Brown Dance, Gibney Dance, Ohio State Dance Department, University of The Arts Amsterdam, and University of Texas, Austin Dance.
Kai’s written work includes: I’m Breaking Up With Dance, I Can’t Heal In The Same Relationship That Hurt Me, published in Iss ...
Kai Hazelwood is a transdisciplinary Disabled, Black, and Queer body-based artist, researcher, and embodied healing practitioner.
Kai is the founder and director of Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven collaborative arts project celebrating queer identities and centering disabled and chronically ill QTBIPOC. Kai and Good Trouble Makers have been supported by Arts Omi International Arts Center, The cities of Los Angeles and West Hollywood, California Institute of Contemporary Arts, Pieter Performance, The California Arts Council and DAS Graduate School.
To foster communal healing for QTBIPOC and unravel embodied white supremacy Kai co-founded Practice Progress. Practice Progress’ work has included MASSMoCA, University of Alberta, Trisha Brown Dance, Gibney Dance, Ohio State Dance Department, University of The Arts Amsterdam, and University of Texas, Austin Dance.
Kai’s written work includes: I’m Breaking Up With Dance, I Can’t Heal In The Same Relationship That Hurt Me, published in Issue 5 of Imagining: A Journal published by Gibney Dance and edited by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. As well as On Grief At The End of The World published for a special issue of Performance Philosophy. She is working on her first book Shedding: A Playbook.
Mars Garcia is a genderqueer choreographer, visual artist, dancer, designer and stage manager. With a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, they have performed throughout New York City, Los Angeles, and abroad in France, Spain, and Germany. Their immersive performances challenge audiences to participate in communal reckoning, activating the power of community, and spotlighting queer resilience.
Mars Garcia is a genderqueer choreographer, visual artist, dancer, designer and stage manager. With a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, they have performed throughout New York City, Los Angeles, and abroad in France, Spain, and Germany. Their immersive performances challenge audiences to participate in communal reckoning, activating the power of community, and spotlighting queer resilience.