Our Team
Heather Shaw, Director
With diverse experience as a filmmaker, choreographer, performer, and curator, Heather Shaw’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The World National Radio Show, IPA Press Arts, Bold Magazine, thINKing Dance, and more.
Heather is the co-director of the activist screendance documentary, Telephone, with Krishna Washburn. The first of its kind, Telephone celebrates the art form of audio description for dance, allowing blind and visually impaired people to be included fully in the joy of artistic expression. The film has screened across the country, including at Lincoln Center, Mill Valley Film Festival, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, New Museum Los Gatos, and Pacific Northwest Ballet. Telephone received support from New York State Council on the Arts, Puffin Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Town of Los Gatos, NYU Center for Disability Studies, and more. Through her work with Telephone, Heather has guest lectured at NYU, Berklee College of Music, Carnegie Mellon, Carleton College, and Rutgers.
Heather’s choreography has been featured at YAGP, California Dance Classics, ONYX Dance Co, spARC Dance Festival, Dance Mission SF, and more. In 2020, she was selected as one of five Project Tier choreographers from across the country for Regional Dance America’s NCI. She is currently the Artistic Director of Montage Contemporary Company and teaches ballet and contemporary at Montage Dance Studio and TDC of Los Gatos. She previously taught barre and fitness at Equinox, Pure Barre, and on the FOX Studios lot.
As a dancer, Heather performed professionally with MKM Bollystars and Daurden Contemporary Dance Theater in Los Angeles, and currently with ArcTangent Dance in San Jose, CA. In 2016, she participated in the Vertigo International Dance Program in Jerusalem through a MASA grant.
Heather received her early dance training at Santa Cruz Ballet Theater and TDC of the Bay Area. She is a graduate of the two year acting program at The Meisner Technique Studio in San Francisco and holds a BA in Philosophy (with a Theater/Dance minor) from UC Berkeley.
As a curator, Heather has served as Performing Arts Manager at the Oshman Family JCC and Co-Curator of TEDxPaloAlto. Her artistic interests include exploring the intersection of movement, sentience, perception, cultural behavior, and aesthetics. She is the founder of Moonshot Creative Studios, LLC and is currently in the early stages of her new documentary, The Kid in Blue.
Alex Romania, Editor / Cinematographer
Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary performing artist, improviser, and filmmaker. Romania is a current Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, a 2024 Djerassi resident artist, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, a 2023 Center for Performance Research AIR, a 2018-2020 Movement Research AIR, and has held residencies at Old Furnace Artist Residency, Tofte Lake Center, Chez Bushwick, and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Some of Romania’s current projects include co-directing the film ‘RECKONING’ with Stacy Lynn Smith, the multidisciplinary opera ‘Face Eaters’ (Chocolate Factory Theater, May 2024), co-directorship of the experimental documentary ‘Patch the Sky with Five Colored Stones’ conceived by choreographer Daria Faïn, a collaborative short film entitled ‘Mira, Mira, Mira!’ with Daniela Fabrizi and the Re Hecho community in the LES. Romania has presented internationally at spaces such as Grace Exhibition Space, Abrons Arts Center, Encuentro, Casa Viva, UV Estudios, Sub Rosa Space. Romania has performed in various works by Kathy Westwater since 2013, and in the work of artists such as Simone Forti, Éva Mag, Eddie Peake, Andy de Groat, and Catherine Galasso. As a video collaborator and designer, Romania has had several video designs featured within works by Antonio Ramos, and has worked on film projects with Marin Media Labs, TAAMAS / Sarah Riggs, Trixie Films / Therese Shechter, Christopher Unpezverde Nuñez, Martita Abril, and Sarah White-Ayòn. Since graduating from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2013 with a BFA in Drama, Romania has enjoyed an exciting career in experimental live performance along with parallel work in independent film, video, and design. Romania is excited about how these adventures in deep experimentation may feed developing script-based films and plays, some of which include a budding memoir, and character-based extensions of previous work.
Photo Credit (image 1): Lauren Hoskins, courtesy of ArcTangent Dance
Image Description 1: Headshot of Heather (female, long brown hair, green eyes) looking at the camera, hands softly at one side of waist.
Image Description 2: Alex stares directly at the camera under a spotlight and against a black backdrop. Alex wears an olive green button-up shirt and has dark brown hair and facial hair.