Where to Next? A Residency for Watching and Talking

Born in 1991 in Angeles City, Philippines. Actor, dramaturg, and educator. Ness earned an MA in Global Arts: Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices from the Tokyo University of the Arts through the MEXT Scholarship Grant. She is a member of Salikhain Kolektib, an interdisciplinary collective integrating art, research, and community engagement (GUDSKUL Collective Studies, 2022). She recently toured internationally with Japanese contemporary theater company chelfitsch, performing in Toshiki Okada's "Window of the Spaceship In-Between" (2023-2024). Her dramaturgical work includes Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) and Kyoto-based theater company BRDG's collaboration, "Sari-Sali: Portal Cafe" (Manila, 2024). Notable film performances include leading roles in Raya Martin's "How to Disappear Completely" (MoMA 2017, Locarno 2013) and "Now Showing" (Cannes 2008).
www.nessroque.com

Melbourne (Australia) / Singapore
Producer

Carmen Lai is a Melbourne-based producer from Singapore working across contemporary performance. She is particularly interested in artists and practices from the Asia-Pacific region, as well as works exploring Asian diasporic experiences. She is currently a Producer at Performing Lines, Australia’s leading performing arts producing organisation, supporting visionary independent artists including A Daylight Connection, Beat Entertainment, Joe Paradise Lui and Joseph O'Farrell (JOF) to develop and present new works. Previously, she was Program Coordinator at Asia TOPA, Australia’s major triennial festival of Asia-Pacific performance. Carmen studied Contemporary Arts, majoring in Theatre, at the University of Tasmania in Australia and Chung-Ang University in South Korea.
https://www.instagram.com/car.____.men

Singapore
Filmmaker, Visual Artist, Producer

Dave Lim is a visual artist, filmmaker, and arts producer based in Singapore. His work contemplates the form, transmission, and construction of truth. As an independent producer, he produces shows primarily fostering interdisclipinary collaboration between literary and visual arts sectors. He is part of 2 collectives, DASSAD and MPEG. His works have been featured in international film festivals and exhibitions. Notable accolades include Official Selection at Singapore Int’l Film Festival (2025), Best Documentary, National Youth Film Awards (2021), Merit Award, NTU Global Digital Art Prize (2019). He graduated from Yale-NUS with a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in Urban Studies in 2019.
www.davelim.art

Montréal (Canada)
Actress, Theatre Director, Curator

Florence is trained in theater studies and acting. She began working on the production team of Festival TransAmériques (FTA) in 2022 and founded the multidisciplinary collective BOUCANE in 2024. The collective produced Les funérailles de mon Sugar Daddy (2024) for the YOU ARE HERE program at Théâtre des Écuries and All You Can Eat / Buffet à volonté (2025) for the Phénoména Festival. Florence joined FTA’s programming team in 2024. In collaboration with co-artistic director Jessie Mill, she curates the Festival’s Playgrounds series (public talks, free performances and workshops) and its much-loved party and music program. In 2026, she co-created the card deck Charlablala, a playful critical assessment tool for the performing arts. As an artist and curator, Florence seeks to foster spaces for connection that go beyond what institutional capitalism and the patriarchy impose on us. She lives in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal), an Indigenous territory that has never been ceded by treaty.

Da Nang (Vietnam)
Dancer, Performer

Hoài Thương currently lives and works in Hoi An. Originally a street dancer in popping, she began participating in contemporary art through the performance X-Project by choreographer Ngô Thanh Phương (MORUA). Afterwards, she continued working on the project to construct the performance Rối Mơ (Life Puppet show), where Thương was guided and experimented with various art forms, from contemporary puppetry, indigenous music, live cinema theatre, to visual arts, etc. Currently, Thương is an independent artist; her practice is a journey of positioning herself in the role of a witness. Through this, she examines her own process of looking and seeing in daily life alongside internal transformations.
https://www.instagram.com/alemensboo

Makassar (Indonesia)
Producer

Ibe S. Palogai is a producer, writer, and artist whose practice is grounded in walking as an artistic methodology. His work explores space, historical archives, urban landscapes, and the intersections of personal and collective memory. In 2018, he participated in a writers' residency in Leiden, the Netherlands, supported by the Indonesian National Book Committee. His latest poetry collection, Life Goes On and We Have Forgotten Why (Hidup Tetap Berjalan dan Kita Telah Lupa Alasannya, GPU, 2024), was longlisted for the Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa Literary Award.
https://www.instagram.com/ibespalogai

Tokyo(Japan) / Shenzhen (China)
Artist, Performance Maker

Born in Shenzhen, China, in 2001. Jingwei Ou is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Global Art Practice at Tokyo University of the Arts.
Drawing on her experience of living across different places, Ou explores the sense of floating and identity issues that arise from displacement. With a background in theatre studies and dramaturgy, she creates works with lecture performance and performative installation. Combining personal story with field research, interviews, and traces of place, she constructs speculative narratives that move between reality and fiction.Her recent work attempts to rethink the histories of different parts of Asia and the echoes between them from the perspectives of ports and maritime communities.
https://www.instagram.com/jingwei.oo

Manila (Philippines)
Theater Actor, Director, Creative Partnerships Officer

Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan is a Filipina theater actor and artist-facilitator whose practice centers on performance, collaboration, and community engagement. She has been a member of the Tanghalang Pilipino Actors Company for over a decade, performing in productions that explore Philippine history, identity, and contemporary social issues.

As an artist-facilitator, she works with Tanghalang Pilipino's Kamalayang Pilipino Workshop in the Arts (KAPWA), contributing to skills-transfer programs for aspiring artists and communities across the Philippines. She is also an alumna of Center Stage's Artist in Residence Program in New York, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC, where she engaged with international theater practitioners and expanded her perspective on cross-cultural performance-making. She continues to create work rooted in curiosity, exchange, and the transformative possibilities of artistic collaboration.
https://lhorvienuevo.wixsite.com/actor

Phnom Penh (Cambodia)
Dancer/Choreographer

Puthik Dy is a Cambodian dance artist whose practice is rooted in Khmer classical dance and contemporary performance. He uses his body and artistic views as a vessel to create beauty which express and address societal issue surrounding gender, environmental and mental health awareness.
Since 2016, he has trained and performed with Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA, Cambodia’s first gay dance company. With the company, he has presented work nationally and internationally, including performances in India and Hong Kong.
His debut choreographic work, “HOME?”, explores home as a place, a person, and a process of self-acceptance. Drawing from dreams, family history, post-genocide memory, and queer experience, the work reflects on what it means to belong to oneself.
He also continues his artistic development through masterclasses with renowned choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro.
https://www.instagram.com/thiiiiik

Barcelona (Spain)
Theatre Director, Assistant Director, Actress

She works in theatre, mainly as a creator and performer. She holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication and has continued her training in the performing arts at Scuola Cònia, the Obrador of Sala Beckett, and Pompeu Fabra University.
She has directed Un tall, dos terços (Sala Beckett) and co-directed Papers de la Guerra (Biblioteca de Catalunya). She worked as acting director for The second woman (Festival Grec, Teatro Central de Sevilla, Teatros del Canal). As an assistant director, she specializes in creative processes— regularly collaborating with creators such as Jordi Oriol, Anna Serrano, Col·lectiu VVAA, Andrea Jiménez…— and has also worked on projects at Teatre Lliure, TNC, Sala Beckett, CDN.
In the audiovisual sector, she collaborates with Elena Martín and Irene Moray, and provides acting coaching for actors, non-actors, and children.

Taipei (Taiwan)
Theatre Director

Shigeta Seiji holds an MFA in Directing from the Graduate School of Theatre Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts.
He is currently the artistic director of the theatre company Boundary Creative (界址創作) and was a participating artist in the 2023 National Theater & Concert Hall (NTCH) Artist-in-Residence Program – Gap Year Project. From 2020 to 2022, he served as co-curator of the Yuchi Theatre Festival.
Through theatre as a medium, Shigeta explores social issues, gender, and identity. His works center on the fluidity of identity and inner contradictions, examining subjectivity and self-perception from diverse perspectives. He emphasizes the fluid relationship between space and narrative, using the poetry of emptiness and spatial restraint as both a limitation and a creative challenge in his artistic practice.
https://www.behance.net/efccfa18

Kobe (Japan) / Brooklyn, NY (the US)
Movement Artist

A movement artist from Japan, who works with the body as a medium to explore the underlying logics of nature — shared across micro-organisms, planets, and human beings alike. Drawing from Eastern philosophy and its ecological perspectives, their work seeks to extract and translate cosmic phenomena that give form to our invisible experiences, offering insight into psychological patterns, particularly those defined as mental illness.
https://sumiremuratsu.com/