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 ARCOS


ARTIST SUPPORT

ARCOS offers support and mentorship to independent dance artists in Austin throughout the process of supporting their practices and projects, providing logistical and creative guidance. Current programming includes the ARCOS Presents production mentorship.



ARCOS is committed to relational, rather than transactional, practices of sharing resources, knowledge, and care in artmaking. ARCOS Presents awardees receive financial support, including an artist stipend, production budget, studio rehearsal space, technical inventory access, and performance venue. Additionally, mentorship provides awardees creative thought-partnering, production and technical support, and community outreach guidance.

ARCOS Presents 2026 supported artists are Venese Alcantar and Omar Mousa, for their project SalSāl (Clay That Makes Sound), and Lichen Bouboushian for their project Rupture: Sneak. This year’s finalists were Leo Briggs, Angel Cadavid Hernandez, and TeeDee Simons.

venese medovich alcantar is a Mexican- Indigenous movement practitioner, scholar, and educator researching transgressive rituals through embodied practice. Their work challenges gender norms and femme archetypes while expanding perceptions of the body as landscape, engaging themes of corporeal wit, anthropomorphic expression, and birthing/composting. Venese’s work has been presented at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Elisabet Ney Museum, MASS Gallery, and The Blanton. They’ve collaborated with Angelica Montiero, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, ARCOS,Performing Justice Project, and Girl Forward. As a Pantera artist-in-residence, they taught at Kazan University of Culture and Art in Russia. Venese holds an MFA in Dance and Social Justice from the University of Texas at Austin and has published writing on embodied ritual as an interventional tool for the violenced body.

Omar Mousa is an acclaimed Palestinian-American filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. With a diverse background spanning from serving as the media coordinator for UNESCO in Paris to working on cultural and arts festivals worldwide, including Dubai, Jordan, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Poland, Omar brings a wealth of international experience to his craft. In 2009, he chaired the jury for the prestigious Malta International Dance Folk Festival. Settling in the United States in 2010, Omar has since made a significant impact as a filmmaker and media producer, specializing in both personal and artistic short films for the festival circuit and commercial projects across various platforms. As the CEO and Founder of Omar Mousa Picture Production Company since 2015, he provides comprehensive media services to tech companies, startups, and other businesses throughout Central Texas. His debut feature-length documentary, "Izzy Cox: Fragments of a Life" showcases his storytelling prowess and commitment to cinematic excellence.


SalSāl (clay that makes sound)
SalSāl (clay that makes sound) is a surrealist dance-for-cinema that emphasizes the body as the site for change. In this process, we are inviting volatility through rupture and repair, slippage, and coming to shape as counterpractices to the heartwrenching silence (represented by the American LawnTM/sod) and immobilization against the ongoing genocide, abduction, and violence of folx living at the access of difference. We ponder what it means to be a criminalized body by default through the rejection of prescribed American normalcy. What does it mean to be an ungovernable body? How are we refuting erasure through our artistic stance? SalSal is a contemplation on the body in protest as well as a celebration of our collective resiliency. We hold the core understanding that we all come from the clay; we are relatives. Just as a body would not ignore a hurt limb, a society shouldn’t ignore immense suffering and must move towards change.



Lichen Bouboushian is a trans non-binary performance artist originally from rural Texas, with a history of practice in Chicago and New York City, and family ties to Lebanon and Armenia. Their transdisciplinary practice spans postmodern dance, noise/experimental music, social practice, and performance art. Bouboushian creates emotionally jarring juxtapositions of text, experimental voice work, and somatics-based movement practices. Through this voice/body work, they dive into ethical quandaries and critical dialogue about complex social histories. Bouboushian seeks to trouble and uncover what is unsaid and untouched, but often shared and understood.

Rupture: Sneak
Rupture: Sneak shares stories across three generations: my grandfather’s childhood in occupied Armenia after the genocide, my father’s forced migration to the US due to the Lebanese civil war, and my life as a first-generation american. Through embodied explorations of compression, I posit our socially “small” positioning (our less “valuable” social role as victims of empire) as a tool for navigating oppressive structures. I build an unstable nest in the set, a pile evocative of a bombed-out building in Beirut, and slowly unravel it to glean what it may offer me; it acts as both my home and obstacle.

2026 external application reviewers are alums of previous ARCOS production mentorships who are no longer based in Austin:

Lizzy Tan is a dance artist and movement director based in London. Her creative practice and solo performances centre on the philosophy of image and representations of the femme performing body. Her solo and collaborative works have been performed in the US, UK, and Germany at The Place’s Resolution Festival, Assembly Festival at the Edinburgh Fringe, London’s VAULT Festival, Camden People’s Theatre’s ‘Calm Down, Dear’ Festival, Cohen New Works Festival, and Dance Source Houston’s ‘Mind the Gap.’ (IG @liztan_)

Michael, a Black male bodied artist with an Afro, large beard, in a shirt and sports coat smiles at the camera from behind large glasses.
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist who critically engages Black cultural pasts to “rhythm dream” of futurity. His work has been supported by NCCAkron (OH), FringeArts (Philadelphia), and Fusebox. In New York, he’s performed at Carnegie Hall with quartet Sō Percussion, presented at Amant with rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr., and shown at the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art with artist Aryel René Jackson. Love was a 2021-23 Princeton University Arts Fellow. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College. (IG @dancermlove)


Sanchita Sharma: Routing / Al Hamauei: My Body, Your Choice (2025) Adrian José Flores: Mestizo / Anna Bauer: delicates / The Clubhouse: The Tale of the Swamp Witch / Nandini Majumdar: Empty Beat (2025) Kelly Goetz: Menstruator / Ciceley Fullylove: Rhythm & Grooves (2024) Angelica Monteiro: Narratives of the Migrant Body (2023) Michael J. Love: Dope Fit! (2019) anxious 20yr olds: This Isn't New (2017)
Past ARCOS Presents awarded artists include:






This project is supported in part by the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

Fiscal Sponsorship

Previously, ARCOS served as a nonprofit fiscal sponsor primarily to Austin-based artists by providing financial management and administrative support for municipal arts grants. Since the City of Austin Cultural Arts Division launched revised funding programs that no longer require fiscal sponsorship for application, this is no longer one of ARCOS’ currently offered forms of arts service. 


Past fiscally sponsored artists and projects include Magdalena Jarkowiec’s In Here at Fusebox Festival (2018) and Us Kids Are Alone In The House at Salvage Vanguard Theater (2016), Millie Heckler’s SoulFunktion Yes Body summer dance parties (2018), Esther Bramlett’s Articulate Austin Series (2019), and Michael J. Love’s virtual-hybrid Beatbox Series (2020-21).