Co-founder, Artistic Director, Choreographer, Community Workshops

Michael Spencer Phillips is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and master teacher based in New York City. After 20+ years as a professional dancer in New York with modern dance luminaries Merce Cunningham, Pascal Rioult, Robert Battle, Bill T. Jones, and Jennifer Muller; and having performed in over 25 countries around the world, Phillips co-founded Site-Specific Dances along with his architect husband Dino Kiratziids, as an interdisciplinary performance collective that merges dance, music, and video to create performances as well as immersive media installations. Drawing inspiration from pioneers of site-specific modern dance such as Trisha Brown, Anne Halprin and Pina Bausch, Phillips expands notions of site-specificity to address not only sites but also the social and political entanglements presented in particular locations.  

Phillips has created commissioned works for Carnegie Hall, Universal Records, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, UC Berkeley, PLX Festival in Sweden, Ariel Rivka Dance, The Silesian Dance Festival, LangLab, The Open Look Festival, Notre Dame, University of Michigan, Interlochen, the Ailey School, Lehigh University, and Traverse City Dance Project. Phillips and Site-Specific Dances have received support from Tauck Ritzau Innovative Philanthropy, ArtBridge, Stonewall Community Foundation, ArtsEverywhere Canada, Musagetes Foundation, The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Bloody Sunday Trust, The Museum of Free Derry, and The Swedish Arts Council. 

Teaching dance is one of the core elements of Phillips’ dance practice and has become increasingly important in his community dance projects, including MOVEMENT BRIDGE. Phillips has over 25 years of teaching and education experience and has taught masterclasses and workshops at many of the world’s leading universities, conservatories, and training programs. He has developed dance programming for the New York City Public School System.  He has led movement workshops for non-dancers in underserved and underrepresented areas including prisons and juvenile detention institutions.  In 2021, he developed ‘Dance Landscapes’ as the teaching arm of Site-Specific Dances. The program brings his unique movement classes and media works to K-12 institutions – introducing students to the connectivity of the language of modern dance to environmental issues. Phillips draws on the background in the community engagement workshops that form the backbone to many of his projects. 

Phillips holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Michigan and was honored with their alumni  “Emerging Artist” Award. He received further training from The Merce Cunningham School, The Martha Graham School, and The Paul Taylor School. He has also been a panelist for the New York State Council for the Arts, The Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, the NYC Department of Education, and has done media appearances and press for CBS News,  the BBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post; always being interviewed for his expertise on the topic of the state of dance and the arts in the United States and abroad.

Phillips utilizes his most comfortable language – movement – as a battle hymn for environmental and social change, while pushing the limits of what interdisciplinary performance can be, and how we might present it through media in new contexts.

Co-founder, Artistic Director, Research, Curator, Set Design, Drawings and Animations

Based in New York City, Dino Kiratzidis is an Associate at the New York-based architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. He is also one of the two Artistic Directors of Site-Specific Dances, a non-profit media/performance company exploring projects at the intersection of performance and place, and founded in 2022 with choreographer Michael Spencer Phillips. At DS+R, he has focused on concept and schematic development for projects in the performing arts, museums, institutional buildings and memorials. His work with Site-Specific Dances develops a discursive engagement with sites through analysis, drawings, video, and digital animations. His work makes sense of sites as they are, and speculates on their ‘theatrical potentials’. He also leads the design of S-SD’s stage performances and media installations. He studied at Yale School of Architecture, receiving a Master of Architecture degree. He has been an invited reviewer at Yale University, Pratt Institute and The University of Pennsylvania, and taught design studios at UPenn and Yale (with Joel Sanders and Tom Wiscombe, respectively).

Prior to working at DS+R, Dino was a designer at CoopHimmelb(l)au in Vienna and sharpCITY in Johannesburg. He was born in 1984 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was first exposed to the ethos of community-based design during his time at 26’10 South, a research-based design studio in Johannesburg. As a participant in the Johannesburg Drill Hall edition of Cascoland, a collaborative project that ‘re-activated’ a neglected part of the inner city of Johannesburg, he saw first-hand how thoughtful site activations can catalyze positive changes in the urban environment. His work spans buildings, landscapes, memorials, exhibitions, activations and performances. His current independent research explores productive overlaps between performance and architecture/urban design.

Videography, Editing

Emma Kazaryanis a multimedia artist, journalist, and filmmaker based in New York City. She has worked on wide-ranging topics including geopolitics, conflicts, arts, culture, sports, and business. She has contributed to numerous film projects for HBO, ABC News, Al-Jazeera, Conde Nast, the United Nations, and other publications. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Photography from Baruch College, CUNY.

Merging art and journalism, she combines different forms of media to tell a compelling story. Her experimental multimedia video Heroin Highway was a part of a group exhibition The Curse of Geography organized by ArtsEverywhere publication and the Art Gallery of Guelph in Canada. Her recent film Waltz Noir, created in collaboration with Polina Nazaykinskaya and Michael Spencer Phillips, premiered at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and was selected for the 2020 Quiet City Film Festival in New York.

In 2020 she joined Site-Specific Dances as a videographer and editor.

COLLABORATING COMPOSER

-To/From, Megaflora Interviews Soundscapes

COLLABORATING COMPOSER

-Fenix, Megaflora

COLLABORATING COMPOSER

-Movement Bridge (Northern Ireland)