Portsha Terae Jefferson has a 25 year history of performance, choreography, research & travel passionately rooted in African/Caribbean dance, drumming and spiritual traditions. Hailing from a blazed Dance trek, her Dancestory is truly emblazoned by that of Ancestral commission. She began her formal training at the age of six at the Marsha Woody Dance Academy. From Beaumont, Texas to the Bay Area, Ms. Jefferson also revered as, “Zetwal Ashade Bon Manbo” has cultivated a trajectory of Dance excellence, dynamic performance and a cultural legacy of training, education and cultural exchange. Often nurtured by Bay Area Dance luminaries Lynn Coles and Blanche Brown to name a few, to Haitian Dance Masters such as Pioneer Vivianne Gauthier with consistent training at Ecole Nationale de Artes [ENARTS], transcended through the establishment of Rara Tou Limen Haitian Performing Company in 2004.

As a cultural practitioner and visionary, Ms. Jefferson’s dedication and exploration of Haitian culture have brought her to Haiti, where she has traveled throughout the country to research regional dance, rhythms and musical traditions since 2003. Specific interest and concentration of study took place in Gonaives at Lakou Badjo, where Nago (Yoruba) traditions are preserved, and at Tanp Souvenance Mistik, a Vodou community that celebrates its Rada (kingdom of Dahomey) heritage. Ms.Jefferson’s visionary Artistic leadership and RTL Company’s unforgettable presentations, classes, workshops, festivals, cultural exchange trips, and retreats, have garnered her the attention as respected colleague and established cultural gatekeeper, forging new trailways through ancient traditions — staying true to the sojourn carving pathways for many to flourish crossing boundaries and dimensions in the Dance.

She has presented at the Black Sacred Arts Conference at Yale University, the KOSANBA Conference in Miami, and the Rex Nettleford Conference in Kingston, Jamaica. Her teaching spans internationally, including the University of Panama, while her embodied practice has led her to Cuba, and Jamaica, where she has shared Haitian dance within community and cultural spaces. Her work is further enriched by ongoing cultural exchange and research in Haiti, Cuba, and most recently, Benin.

Ms. Jefferson has served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and with the Conservatory for Contemporary Dance Arts, and as an artist-in-residence across Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and San Francisco Unified School Districts. A passionate advocate for education and youth development, she has contributed to numerous arts education initiatives and has shared her work at colleges, universities, and studios including Stanford, Miami Dade College – Kendall, UC Santa Cruz, Dance Mission Theater and the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts. She also serves as a Cultural Arts Specialist with Oakland Parks and Recreation

Gina Athena Ulysse (b 1966) Haiti/United States is an artist-scholar, Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Rasanblaj Praxis Project Lab (RPPL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Concerned with the visceral in the structural, her questions engage geopolitics, historical representations, aesthetics and the spiritual in the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions. In the last two decades, her rasanblaj approach (the gathering of ideas, things, people, and spirits) to her multidisciplinary art and writing practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She has performed at The British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Cabaret Voltaire, Gorki Theatre, House of World Cultures, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon, among other venues. She has held residencies at the University of Buffalo, Oregon State, University of Zurich, as well as the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy. In 2020, she was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney. In 2024, she was invited to participate in the Biennale de Dakar. She is a 2025 MacDowell fellow. Her major publications include the forthcoming A Year and A Day. Leonore Mau and Haiti (Oct 2025, editor with Dora Imhoff and U5), a polyphonic inquiry into the photographs Leonore Mau (1916-2013) took in Haiti during the 1970s; Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (2015); Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) – long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and recipient of the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award – and  A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics(2023). She was the invited editor of e-misferica’s Caribbean Rasanblaj (2015), the Hemispheric Institute’s Journal for Performance and Politics. Her visual art has appeared on the covers of Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, Frontiers, and Meridians Journals.