Our Mission
Bridge Live Arts creates and supports equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change.
Our Story
In 2007, Hope Mohr founded Hope Mohr Dance (HMD) and expanded the company in 2010 to include The Bridge Project. This activist curatorial platform built community among artists across genre, geography, and perspective. "The Bridge Project is a small ray of hope in a troubled world. Creating spaces for debate, dissent, connection, and collaboration, the Bridge Project offers a model for how to build arts community." - Jack Halberstam (Columbia University Professor of Gender Studies and English, Author of The Queer Art of Failure, featured participant in 2017 Bridge Project: Radical Movements: Gender and Politics in Performance).
HMD/The Bridge Project intentionally transitioned in 2020 away from a founder-led, hierarchical structure inviting Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero, employees at the time, to partake in a Distributed Leadership process to re-envision the organization’s structure with Mohr. With the support of a year-long consulting process with LeaderSpring’s Safi Jiroh, HMD/The Bridge Project’s Board of Directors, and numerous community artists, the organization shifted into co-directorship and co-curation.
In 2022, as a reflection of our organizational shift, we announced our new name: Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.), developed through a collaborative process with a team of creatives and input from our larger artistic community. Our new shared leadership structure features co-directorship over programs and operations, a reimagined Board of working artists, and a paid curatorial Artist Council. B.L.A. continues to evolve and emerge, staying present in the possibilities of shared leadership and equitable structures for employees and artists, acknowledging that our work is specific to our community and needs, and is an ongoing process.
Change happens when we move together.
As B.L.A., we continue to present performance, embodied practice, and public dialogues that embrace social justice. We draw from the wisdom of our bodies and our dance lineages to support movements for greater equity. We find joy in deepening inclusivity in our organization. We experiment with different permutations of leadership and employ financial transparency to fuel and grow artist power.
Our Values
We value the wisdom inherent in all bodies. We celebrate the embodied expression of people of all different abilities, with different bodies, and from different cultural traditions. We value sensation as a teacher and moving as a form of thinking. We honor the innate value of dance.
WISDOM OF THE BODY
We believe that dancers and dance makers should have a seat at the table in cultural and political conversations. We put dance in dialogue with movements for social change and with other artistic disciplines. We value socially engaged dance.
DANCE IN DIALOGUE WITH THE WORLD
We believe that artists must play a central role in creating an equitable and just society. We believe that artists are uniquely qualified to effect change and envision a better future.
ARTISTS AS VISIONARY AGENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
We believe in the inherent value of creative process. We believe in including audiences in conversations about art. We believe that difficult conversations are a generative space. We believe that creating spaces for debate, dissent, connection, and collaboration builds inclusive and resilient communities.
EXCHANGE
We aspire to become a fully inclusive, multicultural, anti-racist organization in order to contribute to a transformed society. We are committed to anti-racism work as an ongoing, never-ending practice.
ANTI-RACISM
We work toward racial, cultural, and aesthetic equity through our public programs and internal structures.
We believe that no one is free until everyone receives what they need to thrive.
EQUITY
