assistant director
Masumi Kishimoto
Masumi Kishimoto is a native of Tokyo, Japan, who studied dance in Japan and the U.S. She also studied Physical Comedy under the direction of Gregg Goldton and Masumi was a featured member of Goldston Mime Company. She has choreographed pieces that combine Physical Comedy and Dance for performances at the Puffin Room, Movement Research at Judson Church, Theater for the New City, The Ailey Studio Theater and La MaMa. As a dancer, she worked with various choreographers such as Yana Schnitzler, Daria Fain, Ayako Kurakake in NY, Pennsylvania, Germany and Japan. She has been a member of Racoco Productions since 2010. Masumi is a nationally certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, AmSAT, ACAT. She performed as a Racoco dancer and she also taught Alexander Technique at the Jung Center in Houston in 2025.
performers
FINA
FINA is an independent interdisciplinary performance artist, actress and dancer born and raised on the German countryside, currently living in New York City.
Her various backgrounds coming from a family business in agriculture, studying health science at Technical University of Munich (Germany) to acting programs at Copenhagen Film and Theatre School (Denmark) and The Neighborhood Playhouse (US) led to her creative “awakening” - a journey of self discovery and healing. FINA works in community rehabilitation and cares about finding artistic ways to support people with disabilities.
Her deep urge to create holds curiosity and passion about every step of the process - often experimental, immersive, improvised. FINA worked internationally in various theatre, film and dance productions and recently devised and performed in "Sacred Monsters” at Theater for the New City. She is collaborating with racoco and the OakKAO collective.
Meghan Schardt-Gensberg
Meghan Schardt-Gensberg, a native of Miami, Florida began her pre-professional training with Carol Ravich at Ravich Ballet. She is a graduate of New World School of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance. In Miami, Meghan performed with Miami Repertoire Ballet Company, Ballet Randolf, and Freddick Bratcher and Co. She moved to New York City and continued to study intensively with Sara Neece, her mentor and dear friend. She’s fortunate to perform with Jenn Frank and Co., Memento, Octavia Cup, Bryon Carr Dance, Jenn Sims (Biennale Venice, Art Basel film project- The Dress) Hawai’i Ballet Theatre (guest artist), Mix’t Co., Becky Radway Dance Production and Yuka Kuwazu’s Danse En L’Air. She has danced with Racoco since 2015.
Toby Billowitz
Toby Billowitz has danced with many choreographers and companies, including Jordan Fuchs, Artichoke Dance, Freefall, Jill Sigman/thinkdance, and Ben Munisteri. He has puppeteered at drag shows, NYC Halloween parades, at BAM and around the country with Phantom Limb, and on Broadway in War Horse. In December, Toby returned as Pizza Rat in the third year of No Cheeses for Us Meeses, an irreverent cabaret tribute to The Muppet Christmas Carol. He is currently rehearsing and performing with Vicky Virgin. He has enjoyed involvement in Racoco projects since 2015, even when he spent a performance trapped in tightly wound paper when the rest of the dancers abandoned the movement score and left him. He doesn’t still have nightmares about that. At all.
collaborators
Chris Becker
Composer Chris Becker creates chamber, electronic, and improvised music for dance, film, and mixed media installations, and has received grants from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Meet the Composer, and the American Music Center (now New Music USA). He composed the score for choreographer Rachel Cohen's evening-length work If The Shoe Fits, named one of the best dance performances of 2005 by The New York Times dance critic John Rockwell. Becker’s collaboration with painter and video artist Lillian Warren and dancer Annie Arnoult, Who You Once Were, was performed to sold-out audiences in August 2019 at Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX. Becker has also composed music for choreographers Sasha Soreff (The Other Shoe, Ailey Citigroup Theater, 2009), Adrian Jevicki (La Spectra, The Tank, 2009), Rebecca French (The Rite of Summer, Cullen Theater, Wortham Center, 2015), and Blakeley White-McGuire (Devotion, Bell Works, 2021). In 2022, Axelrod Contemporary Ballet Theater commissioned Becker to compose music for The Lost Princess of Oz, a ballet based on the stories of L. Frank Baum, which ran for eight performances at The Pollak Theater at Monmouth University.
Recent commissions include his piece for unaccompanied cello, A Gift From The Bower, which premiered April 23, 2023, as part of an outdoor exhibition conceived by nationally renowned artists James Surls and Charmaine Locke, and installed in a series of natural galleries formed by small clearings in the woods of Southeast Texas. In 2025, Becker received a Let Creativity Happen! grant from the Houston Arts Alliance to support two Houston performances of his and Cohen’s multidisciplinary collaboration, Assemblage. In March 2026, Becker’s re-imagined version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” for string quartet will accompany a new duet, created by Blakeley White-McGuire and performed by White-McGuire and Daniel Fetecua at the Festival of the Arts, BOCA.
Becker has scored several award-winning films for multimedia artist Jil Guyon, including Widow’s End, which screened at the 2022 Dance On Camera Festival at Lincoln Center.
Becker also writes about visual art, music, dance, and theater for several print and online publications, including Houstonia, Glasstire, Arts and Culture, Texas, and his Substack, Night and Day. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Freedom of Expression: Interviews with Women in Jazz, a collection of in-depth conversations with 37 female jazz musicians, and a contributor to Punk Ethnography: Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies.
Olek
OLEK's art pushes the boundaries of fashion, art, crafts, and public art, fluidly combining the sculptural and the fanciful with the old-fashioned technique of crocheting. An active supporter of women's rights, sexual equality, and freedom of expression, OLEK has traveled the globe for their community-based projects; Love Across the USA is a series of public murals depicting inspiring women from history. OLEK's sculptures and performances have been exhibited worldwide, including Art Basel and Wynwood Walls in Miami, the Brooklyn Museum in NY, and The Smithsonian in Washington DC. Their work is in the permanent collections at URBAN NATION Museum for Contemporary Urban Art in Berlin, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Avesta Art Museum in Avesta, Sweden, and the New York Historical Society, and several private collections, including those of Antonio Banderas and Mike D from the Beastie Boys. OLEK's work has been covered in numerous publications, including the Smithsonian Magazine, Creators (VICE), the Huffington Post, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine. OLEK has been named one of the top artist Instagram accounts to follow by Christie's and Art Net, and Artsy name them as an artist giving knitting a place in art history.
Lynn Wright
Lynn Wright is composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist based in Brooklyn. His music incorporates free improvisation, musique concrète, lyrical songwriting, and jazz-infused scores. His work for film and television has appeared on the BBC, PBS, Netlfix, and ABC, and at Sundance, Cannes, The Venice Film Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the Berlin Film Festival. He has performed or collaborated with Algis Kizys, Victoria Miguel, Christiane Hommelsheim, Andrea Belfi, Chris Becker, Helga Davis, Lewis Barnes, Norman Westberg, Laura Ortman, Raphaele Shirley, and Alexander Hacke, among others. His most recent work is This Is Where, an improvised dark-ambient collaboration with Norman Westberg and Algis Kizys
Stephanie Beck
Stephanie Beck earned an M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a B.A. in Art History from the University of Virginia. Stephanie has presented a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia International Airport, and two-person exhibitions at Florida State College, Jacksonville, FL and Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre, France. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; International Print Center, New York, NY; and Cite de l’architecture et du patrimonie, Paris, France, among others. Stephanie has participated in various artist residencies including an exchange program in Le Havre, France, the Artist Studios program at the Museum of Arts and Design, and residencies at the Center for Book Arts and Triangle Arts in New York, NY. She also has collaborated on set and prop design with New York-based dance company, Racoco Productions. Stephanie currently lives in Queens, NY and is a resident artist at ChaShaMa’s Space to Create in Brooklyn, NY.
