Issuu

(you are not a stone, bird!)

Welcome, or welcome back, to CASTLES! It is my deepest privilege to have the opportunity time and time again to write to you and pour my heart out about this project. This is my second year as the Curatorial Manager for CASTLES, and each iteration grows my appreciation for the passion, empathy, and artistic ability of Kat Purcell and the growing cohort of Artists involved in CASTLES.

This project was inspired by the work of Creative CityMaking, a project spearheaded by Wendy Knox and Intermedia Arts in 2012. Each Artist from the CASTLES 2025 cohort collaborated with a community organization of their choice to continue their exploration of the world of CASTLES, dive deeper into their vignette, and attempt to answer the question “How far can we reach our hands?” Each Artist formulated, dreamed, schemed, investigated, and they have procured an evening of unforgettable work in the form of a gallery exhibit and a public performance. Our team has pushed boundaries, broken the rules, and will continue to build our CASTLE.

Special thank yous to Intermedia Arts, whose legacy is held tight on my heart, and whose work many community members like myself have attempted to preserve and embody. Special thank yous to all CASTLES cohort members who have touched this project previously, there are so many of you and you reach into the most delicate pockets of the Twin Cities and beyond. Special thank yous to Ricardo Levin Morales allowing us access to his studio, knowledge and mindset. Special thank yous to 825 Arts, what was once a dream shared is now a reality. Special thank yous to all those who have held us, in faith, in practice, in space. We promise, you will hear us!

Let’s revel in the revolution, I’ll see you there.

Simone Bernadtte

About CASTLES

Since 2018, CASTLES has developed as a collaborative script and living archive. In 2025, Vignette Artists deepen the work by engaging community partners; process and performance remain inseparable.

Order of Performance

How Many Hands — snem Desellier in collaboration with Leila

Stones Don’t Need Hope — Taiwana Shambley

The Body Does Not Have Boundaries that Cannot Be Broken — Chavah Gabrielle in collaboration with Heaven Sha’Rae

Create Your Own Legal State of Exception — Gloria Collyard

Leap Outside And Dance Above It All — Jessica Garraway

Before and after the performance please explore the exhibit components.

Creative & Technical Team

Curatorial Manager: Simone Bernadette

Stage Manager: Ansel Langmead

Financial Advisor & Playwright: Kat Purcell

Lighting Designer: KD Deutsch-Frost

DJ: Yhante Vanity

Sound Designer: Maje Adams

Gallery Team: León Currie, Johanna Keller-Flores & Lu Chen

Communications Manager: Sara Abdelaal

Show Advice Committee:

Alexandra Beaumont; Noël Raymond; Maya Washington; Nikita; C

Castles 2025 Artists

Taiwana Shambley

Taiwana Shambley is a Black trans woman with disabilities, a speculative fiction writer, and an award-winning teaching artist from St. Paul’s North End. She empowers queer, trans, and disabled youth—especially those from marginalized communities—through storytelling and her own writing. A 2023 Loft Literary Center/ MISA Excellence in Teaching Fellow and MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles, her work has been published by Zelt Publishing, the Academy of American Poets, Queer Voices Minnesota, and Belt Publishing. Learn more at taiwanashambley.com

Community Partner: Atlas Defense

Atlas Defense reimagines self-defense training by centering BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. Rejecting militarized approaches, their programs emphasize safety, adaptability, and community care. Founded by Marc-Manuel, a former marine and security contractor, Atlas uses lived experience and decolonial practice to help students feel safe on their own terms—trusting instincts, with or without a weapon.

Chavah Gabrielle

Chavah Gabrielle is a literary & performance artist, astrological scholar, & community organizer. They are the author of “Bodies I Am Willing to Worship” & the 2018-2019 St. PaulYouth Poet Laureate. They leverage their writing & community presence with the intention of drawing attention to the nuances of intersectionality. With a playfulness in relationships, rhythm, & syntax, their work showcases thematic elements of the natural world, Black liberation, bodies, feminist ideology, abolition, anti-capitalism, & their own experience. Chavah envisions a world free of the brutalities of oppression & believes the only way to build this world is together.

Community Partner: OurJustice.

Our Justice works to ensure that all people and communities have the power and resources to make sexual and reproductive health decisions with self-determination.

Chavah will be working in Collaboration with:

Heaven Sha’Rae

Heaven Sha’Rae is a Minnesota native who began dancing at age 2 as a praise dancer at her family’s church in St. Paul. She trained at Art of Dance before joining TU Dance’s Pre-Professional Program, where she studied until 2019. Expanding her artistry, she began modeling and performing spoken word, and in 2022 set her first professional piece at Southwest High School under the mentorship of Erin Brown—an achievement that earned her a place in the school’s Dance Hall of Fame in 2023. As of May 2024, she completed her first year in TU Dance’s Cultivate trainee program.

Castles 2025 Artists

snem DeSellier

snem is wiggly idea working between movement, design, language, and performance. their making is often in response to a world scared of death, autonomy, reverence and inbetweens. they love to be in conversation they love to be in messes they love to experiment and iterate and unlearn and relearn and get moving and go slow. they move within a white body through mad/disabled fat trans lenses, raised in western massachusetts along a long tidal river, and now amid these joining rivers. they are here for the misaligned misattuned immeasurable ones.

Community Partner: Women’s Environmental Institute (WEI)

Women’s Environmental Institue (WEI) is a non-profit organization that “works for environmental justice through agricultural, food, racial, and gender justice strategies -one community at a time, one farm at a time, one person at a time, and all of us together”.

snem will be working in collaboration with: Leila is a traveling farmer, researcher, mover, and noise maker from Chicago. Their work revolves around food, community collaboration, and place-making through water bodies, soil, and goldenrod. They love to explore the ways that farms and land projects can be ecosystems for experimentation, resistance against capitalist systems and conformity, queerness, and cultural identity. Scheming towards routes of food sovereignty, they believe that our connection to ancestral taste-memory

Gloria Collyard

Gloria Collyard is a multimedia and performance artist based in the twin cities. They focus on creating live performance, projections, photographs, movies, live broadcasts, and music. They work in the service industry and also like making music videos for local bands. They enjoy archiving productions and creating promotions for local performers as well. She loves you dearly and everyone desiring revolution and the end of empire.

Community Partner: Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee: MIRAC.

MIRAC is an all-volunteer, grassroots, multiracial, and multinational immigrant rights mass-movement organization. MIRAC fights for legalization for all, an end to immigration raids and deportations, an end to all anti-immigrant laws, and full equality in all areas of life.

Jessica Garraway

Jessica Garraway has been an educator in Minneapolis Public Schools for nearly a decade and is active in the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. A founding member of the Black Cat Workers Collective, she has organized, written, and performed on issues of wealth disparity, racism, colonialism, women’s liberation, labor, and the environment for over 10 years. Jessica has also been active in campaigns against pipelines such as Keystone, Dakota Access, and Line 3, as well as organizing efforts addressing police violence and reimagining public safety after the George Floyd Uprising. Her current work focuses on bridging the labor and climate justice movements. She expresses herself through acting, poetry, and music.

Community Partner: Wild Path Collective

Wild Path Collective is an intergenerational, multicultural, and interfaith community commons where BIPOC, LGBTQ, women, poor, and immigrant communities reconnect with land held collectively. Wild Path engages in regenerative agriculture, cultural and healing practices, and supports entrepreneurs through cooperative models that reimagine land, wealth, and community development.

Creative and Technical Team

Simone Bernadette

Simone Bernadette (they/he) returns CASTLES as the Curatorial Manager for the second year in a row, and their third iteration of the work. Simone is a class clown Capricorn with an explosion of modalities over the last {redacted} number of years including curator, visual artist, farmer, tarot reader, movement artist, educator, singer, knitter, and town jester. The majority of Simone’s work aims to dismantle, reassemble, preserve, and redefine legacy. Simone is honored to return to the world of CASTLES, in it’s third iteration.

Kat Purcell

Kat is a nonbinary transexual performer, lighting designer, experimental producer, installation artist and theatrical director. They graduated from the London International School of Performing Arts in 2009. In the streets and in the theatre, Kat braces their shoulder to the work of cultivating new/old formations of community reliance alongside the many incredible caregivers that have been out here doing this work for years.

Maje Adams

Maje Adams is an independent vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer based in Minneapolis. The 27-year-old Nigerian-American fuses intense progressive rhythms, passionate vocals, and cavernous ambiances into a unique blend guided by emotional storytelling. As a sonic storyteller helmed by a three-octave vocal range, their eclectic sound crosses the gamut, taking hints from prog-rock, Midwest emo, and post-hardcore to indie folk, ambient, and Romantic-era classical.

Their solo work is led by The Color Cycle, an eight-album musical autobiography serving as their living diary of adulthood: 2015’s Greyscale EP, 2017’s Darker Blacks and More Vibrant Reds, and 2025’s The Amber Gaze.

When he isn’t in the studio writing heavy jams, Adams works in audio engineering and stage acting. Outside of their solo work, Maje is also the vocalist of Bay Area metalcore band A Nightmare In Ivory and bandleader of Minneapolis shoegaze septet The Ancient Sleeper.

Ansel Langmead

Ansel Langmead has a long list of roles; painter, stage manager, lighting designer, project/production manager, and dancer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ansel aims to create safe and supportive work environments for all marginalized peoples in their theater work, as well as align their art practice with their values of antiracism, decolonization, disability justice. Their visual art focuses on communicating their experiences as an autistic/white/queer/nonbinary person through intentional and experimental shape, texture, color, and medium. They graduated from the University of MinnesotaTwin Cities with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Dance in 2021.

Sara Abdelaal

Sara Abdelaal is a Minneapolis-based artist and communicator who moves between music, storytelling, and community. She is the Audience Engagement Director at Pillsbury House + Theatre, where she helps connect audiences with new plays, local artists, and neighborhood stories.

As a musician, Sara performs under the name RRA, weaving minimal synth, jazz, and Egyptian traditions into a sound she calls NeoMaqam Pop. Her work invites listeners to experience the freedom of electronic composition and the textures of heritage reimagined.

Whether through writing, sound, or strategy, Sara is drawn to creating spaces where people feel seen, connected, and inspired.

Kai “KD” Deutsch Frost

Kai “KD” Deutsch Frost (they/them) is a non-binary, first generation artist, storyteller, and technician specializing in lighting. Their recent Lighting Design work includes Close to Home by SharifaYazmeen at Pillsbury House + Theatre, CASTLES by Kat Purcell, Minnesota International Dance Festival, and at The Parkway for various concerts and comedy acts. KD freelances as an electrician and stagehand and has been seen at Walker Art Center, Artistry, and the Jungle Theatre. They can be seen around town crocheting in dark corners to pass the

Past support includes four residencies (Pangea World Theater, 20% Theatre’s Q-STAGE, Center for Performing Arts, Pillsbury House + Theatre Arts in Common), The Puffin Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board inaugural Creative Experiences grant and two Metropolitan Regional Arts Council grants. This current (2025) showing is supported by a Flexible Support grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.