Connecting arts and health in community!
DanceStream Projects is a community-based creative collective in New York City, founded by dancer, researcher, creative aging teaching artist and advocate, Magda Kaczmarska. DanceStream Projects has a mission to spark brain health and build creative community through dance and movement. DanceStream Projects is dedicated to building healthy, expressive and inclusive community through transdisciplinary partnerships that center the vehicle of dance as a catalyst for systems change.
DanceStream Projects brings together artists, researchers and communities as active collaborators in creative and educational projects that build spaces of belonging, amplify collective stories while fortifying wellbeing. Inspired by the concept of “upstreaming” health DanceStream Projects provides direct allyship and empowerment to communities bridging the arts and health. We believe that dance is a universal language and that the arts, and specifically dance, are an integral part of the health care ecosystem. By engaging in co-creative arts practices, we are expanding our capacity and agency for promoting our individual and community health. By engaging in the arts, we are putting our brain health into our hands and our bodies.
Our Vision
Each one of us possesses the ability to harness our creative expression to support building meaningful communities around us. DanceStream Projects works with individuals, communities and organizations to amplify creative expression, build community and empower individuals by shifting the power of knowledge, expression and agency into their hands, minds and bodies. Together we build creative community and spark brain health!
DanceStream Projects engages communities through diverse creative and educational projects.
Artist Statement
DanceStream Projects brings together transdisciplinary perspectives that center the role of creativity in cultivating community and wellbeing. Through the vehicle of dance as a universal language, we connect and co-create experiences that facilitate community belonging and expression. Inspired by the dance that takes place within our own brains when we engage in group improvisation, DanceStream Projects cultivates creative conversations that bridge our minds and our bodies. We balance the critical and logical with the ruminative and imaginative, challenging narratives of value based on product over process, object over experience, understanding over feeling. Together we bring together experts in lived experience to co-create new narratives and build communities we all want to age into together.
Meet our founder
MAGDA KACZMARSKA is a dancer, researcher, creative aging teaching artist and advocate based in New York City. Magda received her MFA in Dance Performance & Choreography and her BS in Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics from the University of Arizona. Magda has dedicated her career to utilizing the vehicle of dance and movement to amplify and support intergenerational creative community and has over 20 years of experience as a community-based dance artist. Her transdisciplinary work leverages a dual background in neuropharmacology and dance to build bridges and empower individuals and communities to be active agents in their creativity and wellbeing. Through all her work, she seeks to foster safe, creative and inclusive spaces for discovery, agency and meaning. She believes all of us possess the ability to harness our creative expression to support building meaningful and healthy communities around us.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Magda’s work draws on her classical folk, ballet, modern and jazz training and blends it with post-modern and improvisational techniques to explore infrastructures of language and identity. Her solo and collaborative performance work has been presented at festivals, galleries and theatres in the US, Switzerland and Taiwan.
Before relocating to New York, Magda served as co-founder, choreographer and performer with Evolve Dance~West, a non-profit dance company which sought to expand accessibility to dance in southern Arizona. Through Evolve Dance~West, she offered community based creative movement programs for diverse communities, including a subsidiary Dance for PD® program in Arizona, programs with the Alzheimer’s Association and Owl and Panther, an organization supporting intergenerational refugees and survivors of trauma. In New York City, she worked as a lead teacher and performer with Dances for a Variable Population (DVP) supporting hundreds of older adults in exploration of strong and creative movement. Together with DVP founder, Naomi Goldberg Haas, she designed and developed a professional training program for their creative aging program, Movement Speaks®.
In 2019, Magda founded DanceStream Projects, to expand her vision to build healthy, expressive and inclusive community through transdisciplinary partnerships that center the vehicle of dance as a catalyst for systems change. DanceStream Projects has a mission to spark brain health and build creative community through dance and movement. DanceStream Projects is a creative collective that brings together artists, researchers and communities as active collaborators in creative and educational projects that build spaces of belonging, amplify collective stories while fortifying wellbeing. Inspired by the concept of “upstreaming” health DanceStream Projects provides direct allyship and empowerment to communities bridging the arts and health.
Devoted to building evidence base, while expanding public and professional education in best practices in creative aging practice globally, Magda balances her work in intergenerational community-based dance with engagement in advocacy in several sectors. She mentors future leaders in the creative and health sector through a regular partnership at the Fordham Ailey School of Dance in New York City and the Arts in Medicine Fellowship in Lagos, Nigeria.
She serves as a representative to the UN with Generations United and is on the executive committee of the UN NGO Committee on Ageing. She serves on the Dance and Disability Taskforce at the National Dance Education Organization, to support access, equity and inclusion in the dance education community, for which she received the Executive Director Award in 2021 and President’s Award in 2022. As an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute, Magda builds collaborations around the globe to design and expand access to creative aging programs that support brain health, belonging and artistic expression across the lifespan.
Meet our staff and collaborating artists
MAURA MCDONAGH (they/she) is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley - Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute pursuing a designated emphasis in Computational Biology. Working in the lab of Dr. Sergio Baranzini at the University of California, San Francisco studying the role of the gut-brain axis in multiple sclerosis. Maura earned a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering with a double major in Communication Arts (Radio/TV/Film) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Maura is passionate about brain health across the lifespan and justice in secondary and higher education.
Maura has been a part of the Stories in the Moment Dance Research Study serving as the Program Coordinator. They enjoy working with families of people living with dementia and learning how the creative self can be unlocked through movement.
HILARY BROWN-ISTREFI is a Hilary Brown-Istrefi is a Canadian-American dance artist and arts worker, who is a graduate of École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. Originally from Toronto, now living in Far Rockaway, NY, since 2009, she has performed in the works of international dance and visual artists including Bouchra Ouizguen, Jillian Peña, Melissa Riker, Doug Elkins, Linda Tegg, and Candice Breitz.
In 2013 she co-founded the award-winning performance collective, Same As Sister (S.A.S.), with her twin Briana Brown-Tipley. Their commissions have been presented internationally at The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance; Base: Experimental Arts + Space; MOMus – State Museum of Contemporary Art; Danspace Project; Centre d’Art Marnay Art Centre; BRIC Arts | Media House; and New York Live Arts, among other venues. Brown-Istrefi initiated the choreographic platform, HB² PROJECTS in 2017, to expand her collaborations in performance. HB² has presented work as a resident artist with West Harlem Art Fund’s Visual Muze Residency on Governors Island; Norte Maar’s Dance at Socrates Residency at Socrates Sculpture Park; and Exploring the Metropolis’ Choreographer + Composer Residency at Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning.
For more info visit: sameassister.squarespace.com + hbsquaredprojects.com
LAMY ISTREFI is a a New York City based drummer, percussionist, composer, and conductor, originally from Mitrovice in the Republic of Kosovo. Istrefi attended the University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz (KUG) in Austria, before moving to the United States. He is currently a member of Grammy Award-winning saxophonist and composer, Joe Lovano’s Classic Quartet, for which he has toured internationally to perform at such prestigious festivals and venues as Coltrane Day; Jazz Forum; Jazz Standard; Monterey Jazz Festival; Healdsburg Jazz Festival; Blue Note Milano; Bimhuis Amsterdam; and Bergamo Jazz Festival.
Istrefi has also performed and toured with legendary and prominent musicians in the jazz and free music scenes in NYC and abroad including Mark Murphy, Shelia Jordan, Dennis Irwin, Butch Morris, Juini Booth, Mino Cinelu, Judi Silvano, Jay Clayton, Greg Tardy, Eddie Henderson, Josh Evans, Duane Eubanks, James Hurt, Leo Genovese, and Esperanza Spalding. For his independent projects he continues to collaborate with a notable and diverse group of musicians: The Lamy Istrefi Quartet featuring saxophonists, Dave Liebman (National Endowment for the Arts’ 2011 Jazz Master), George Garzone, and bassist, Ben Street, as well as Musical Minds Orchestra (MMO), a conceptually based free improvisation ensemble that he founded in 2010. MMO collaborated with HB² PROJECTS to present the interdisciplinary performance, New York Sketches: So The People Came, during the Exploring the Metropolis’ 2017-18 Choreographer + Composer Residencies, in partnership with the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. smallslive.com/lamy-istrefi-jr
YUAN LIU is a Chinese-born filmmaker based in New York. She has a background in scientific research and production design. She supported the world-renowned contemporary artist Caiguoqiang (2008 Beijing Olympics, “I Want to Believe” Guggenheim Retrospective). She draws on her interdisciplinary background as inspiration for writing, directing, and producing. Yuan’s approach to cinema is a letter written to the subconscious self. She is interested in magnifying surrealism in visuals in a free form. Primarily music driven, each of her film pieces is a type of mathematical contemplation on the social cachet behind one’s individuation, and especially of those embodying a quixotic way of life.