2024-2025 Fellows
The 2024-2025 Collider fellows includes a dynamic group of artists at the forefront of their fields: director and transdisciplinary artist Celine Daemen; improviser and composer Kengchakaj Kengkarnka; performer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón; creative director and choreographer Brandon Powers; multidisciplinary director and creator Annie Saunders; and theater, dance, and installation artist Andrew Schneider. Their work during the Collider residency promises to push the boundaries of artistic innovation, fostering collaboration and new forms of expression that resonate within and beyond the arts and technology sectors.
2024-2025 Collider Fellows & Onassis ONX Members:
Celine Daemen (ONX Member through Lincoln for the year)
Celine Daemen is a director of transdisciplinary art. Her work develops at the interface of theatre, music, visual arts and digital media.
She creates immersive experiences that invite the audience on a journey inwards and take them to a place where personal associations arise in response to universal philosophical questions.
In 2018 she graduated from the directing course at the the Institute of Performative Arts Maastricht. In 2022 she founded her own studio ‘Studio Nergens’ in which she collaborates with various artists, like Art Director and tech dramaturg Aron Fels who has been involved since the beginning.
Over the past few years, Celine Daemen and her studio have garnered significant international attention with virtual reality operas, where visitors, wearing VR headsets, explore immersive musical scenes by walking. She has won several prestigious international awards. In 2022 her VR opera "Eurydice" received the Reflet D'Or for the best immersive experience at GIFF in Geneva. In 2023 her VR opera "Songs for a Passerby" received Venice Immersive Grand Prize for the best immersive experience at the Venice Biennale in 2023.
Her work has been showcased in various renowned venues around the world, ranging from theater and film festivals to concert halls and museums, like SPRING performing arts festival in Utrecht, the Eye filmmuseum, Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Concerthall De Doelen in Rotterdam and The Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, Sonica Festival in Glasgow, South by South West in Austin, KFA in Kaohsiung and BIFAN in Bucheon.
Kengchakaj (ONX Member through Lincoln for the year)
Kengchakaj is a Bangkok-born, New York-based award-winning pianist, improviser, and electronics experimentalist. Kengchakaj's practice engages with improvising sounds that draw inspiration from ancestral soundscapes, knowledge, and modes of collaboration and expression rooted in Southeast Asian tradition and lineage. He is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, a Fulbright Scholarship recipient, and a Gold Award Lumen Prize winner with Nitcha Tothong. Kengchakaj was a 2023-2024 CultureHub artist in residence, New Museum’s Y10 NEW INC member, Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow, Babycastles artist in residence, and participated in Nusasonic’s Common Tonalities project. His projects have received development funds from Queens Council on the Arts, City Artist Corps, Rhizome micro-grant, and Processing Foundation.
Annie Saunders is a multidisciplinary creator and director of site-specific experiences, and has created award-winning multi-platform projects for major arts institutions including The Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as site-specific projects in disused spaces set for demolition and experiential campaigns for multinational brands. Her recent work includes DANGER SEASON, a series of large-scale diorama installations about extreme weather with live performers, situated two blocks from the Republican National Convention, in collaboration with Climate Power, Extreme Weather Survivors and m ss ng p eces. Her site-specific audio piece CURRENT won the Tribeca Festival's Best Immersive Creative Nonfiction, and her installation The Home received an Honorary Mention in Sound Art from Ars Electronica, a D&AD Yellow Pencil (Creative Excellence; Spatial and Installation Design) and UK APA awards for Best Experiential Project and Best Use of Technology for Good. She is a member of the inaugural ONX Studio (NEW INC/Onassis Foundation), and an alumnus of the Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater. Saunders is the founder and artistic director of site-specific performance company Wilderness, and her experimental project The Wreck for Opera Omaha was called ‘ingenious...a persuasive expression of complex female feeling,’ by the Wall Street Journal.
Angélica Negrón (ONX Member through Lincoln for the year)
Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Angélica is known for playing with the unexpected intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds.
Residencies and commissions include WNYC’s The Greene Space (a 4-part variety show/multimedia exploration of sound and personal history), the NY Botanical Garden (an immersive site-specific work for electronics and 100 voices), and Opera Philadelphia (a drag opera film in collaboration with Mathew Placek and Sasha Velour). Her work has been commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, and Roomful of Teeth. Angélica’s original scores for HBO include the docuseries "Menudo: Forever Young" and "You Were My First Boyfriend" directed by Cecilia Aldarondo.
Recent premieres include works for Dallas Symphony Orchestra (featuring Lido Pimienta as a soloist), Santa Rosa Symphony & Eugene Symphony (First Symphony project), and her Carnegie Hall debut, commissioned and performed by Sō Percussion. As the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Angélica composed a new work synchronized to the setting sun, inspired by solar pulses captured by NASA, for EnsembleNewSRQ.
Angélica regularly performs a solo show and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún. Performances include the Big Ears Festival 2022 and various engagements in New York City, San Juan, and nationwide.
Her musical education includes early studies at El Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico under Alfonso Fuentes—while making waves as a member of San Juan’s local DIY music scene—and later studies both at NYU under Pedro da Silva and The Graduate Center (CUNY) under Tania León. An educator herself, Angélica became a teaching artist with NY Phil’s Very Young Composers program (2013-2021) and with Lincoln Center Education (2014-2018), guiding young artists in creative composition projects.
Angélica lives in Brooklyn, where she’s always looking for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.
Brandon Powers is a creative director + choreographer who creates experiences across physical and virtual space. Blending his background in contemporary dance, theatre, and immersive technology, his work focuses on capturing liveness in the digital, building interdisciplinary communities, and shifting culture towards a more embodied future. Brandon harnessed his knowledge as a movement practitioner to devise Embodiment Design, a methodology for designing more human-centered XR experiences. His projects span technologies and forms incorporating AI, extended reality, and live performance including Queerskins: ARK (Venice International Film Festival, Cannes XR), Frankenstein AI (Sundance Film Festival), Duet (New York Live Arts), and Kinetic Diffusion (FilmGate Interactive, New Images). Additionally, he created live work at La MaMa, HERE, Ars Nova, Performance Space NY, and the Ace Hotel Brooklyn. On TikTok, Brandon has grown a community of over 70,000 inviting audiences into the process of creating theatre and dance. He founded constellation, an immersive strategy and production studio building engaged digital communities and multi-platform experiences for theatrical properties. Brandon is on staff at Musical Theatre Factory, where he leads MTFxR, a program supporting the development of XR musical theatre experiences. He is a Onassis ONX Studio member, NEW INC alum, and has spoken on the intersection of arts and technology across the world at New Images, TCG National Conference, Verizon’s 5G Lab, Lincoln Center and more.
Andrew Schneider is mostly interested in how humans telling stories about ourselves to each other can make us better at being humans. And how much the second law of thermodynamics and grief have in common.
He is an OBIE Award-winning, Drama Desk-nominated performer, writer, director, and interactive-electronics artist creating original works for theater, dance, sound, video, installation, and public art since 2003.
Andrew’s work uses new and old, high and low tech—from Wave Field Synthesis arrays and Volumetric Lighting displays to literal smoke and mirrors. He is interested in the edges of human perception, using science as a blueprint for staging, and above all, the question of—how does it make you feel?
Original works include: NOWISWHENWEARE (2023 - BAM and ongoing tour); »REMAINS« (2020 - Radialsystem, Berlin) commissioned by the Sasha Waltz & Guests Dance company; NERVOUS/SYSTEM (2018 - BAM Next Wave); AFTER (2018 - Under the Radar, The Public Theater); YOUARENOWHERE (2015 OBIE award, 2016 Drama Desk nom); DANCE/FIELD (2014 - Roulette); TIDAL (2013 - River to River); and WOW+FLUTTER (2010 - The Chocolate Factory Theater), among others.
Andrew is a member of the arts incubator ONX, the Digital Future’s cohort at Jacob’s Pillow, was a Sundance “Art of the Practice” fellow, and has received a fellowship from the Junge Akademie / Akademie Der Künste in Berlin (2022). He teaches a recurring class on original-flavor reality at the Interactive Telecommunications Program and mentors for Theater Mitu’s Hybrid Arts Lab. Wooster Group company member 2007-14. More at www.andrewjs.com.