Crescent Moon Theater Productions

POLINA MIRZAD - Artistic Director

Polina Mirzad is an award-winning theater artist, producer, director, and performer whose work lives at the intersection of imagination and activism. With a lifelong passion for magic, storytelling, and social change, Polina creates original, emotionally resonant performances that invite audiences into wonder, reflection, and transformation.

Polina holds a BFA in Theater for Social Change from Concordia University and an MFA in Creative Inquiry from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She has trained and performed with The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, working closely with mentor Rhodessa Jones from 2008-2018. In 2016, she produced CounterPulse’s inaugural Blessed Unrest Festival, uniting over 30 artists at the intersection of art and social justice.

In addition to her work with Crescent Moon, Polina curates the arts and performance programming for the annual Bioneers Conference, and regularly performs as her absurdist alter ego Dr. Schmidt, a rogue scholar with 49 PhDs and a penchant for heartfelt mischief.

Polina’s work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theater Bay Area, and others. Across her work, she is interested in how art can amplify stories too often left unheard, bring people into meaningful relationship, and create spaces where difficult realities can be held with curiosity, imagination, and humanity.

Her most ambitious (and beloved) project yet: raising her two-year-old son with her husband among the redwoods of Northern California.

Melusina Gomez

Melusina Gomez is a multifaceted artist, teacher, Curandera and the founder of Metzmecatl: Moon Rope Theatre, a Bay Area physical theater company. Melusina’s creative work engages the intuitive and dreaming mind, cultivating ritual and enchantment while addressing the wounds, longings, and unvoiced expressions of the soul in post-colonial, modern culture. She holds a MA in Experimental Performance from The Experimental Performance Institute at New College. Melusina’s mission is to bring pathos, humor, abstraction, beauty, tension, and the enchantment of make-believe to the stage, in the hopes of helping to add a little more magic, and a little more healing, to our world.

Shmee

S. Shmee, MA is an intermedia artist, storyteller and educator whose work is driven by a commitment to the creative process and the potential it holds for enrichment. In partnership with kind collaborators at non-profit and community arts centers, Shmee offers art-based interventions at public events and alongside therapeutic and rite of passage practices. These programs use mindfulness, embodiment, and creative play for self-inquiry, story weaving and community building. Shmee’s original works have been seen at the Bioneers conference, the conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams, SF Fringe Festival, Cucalores Film Festival, and Figment Arts, among others. In addition to facilitating original and enchanting programs, Shmee supports higher education through curriculum development as adjunct professor, teaching artist, and administrator. With a BA in Film Studies and MA in Depth Psychology, Shmee’s passion for storytelling spans from personal narrative to cultural mythology and fosters a commitment to the myriad of tales of our time.

Shannon Gray

Shannon Gray can be found passing the time doing what many would consider rolling, climbing, releasing, gliding and creating. She enjoys things which consist of water, mud, trapeze bars, sand, and beautiful sounds. Merging the worlds of circus and dance, Shannon Gray has spent the last fifteen years developing her love of movement and curating her unique and expressive style. She draws specifically from somatic studies, dance, yoga, the practice of Authentic Movement and her MA in east-west psychology. Specializing in dance trapeze, she emphasizes a rich connection between the ground, apparatus, and air, dancing in ways which unfold a story more then tricks. Her movement quality revolves around release-based movement, contrast, and the emotion/physical connection. Born in Montreal, she has traveled extensively- collaborating, performing and teaching. No matter the venue and event- dancing in harness off a high rise building, improvising with live musicians in a secret, underground loft, or suspended over the ocean on a 100 ft. zipline- Shannon brings a rare kind of honesty and emotional intensity to all of her work. She currently lives north of San Francisco where she is commencing her new work, The Sentience Project- a film reflecting the examination and embodiment of injury, dreams, sentience, and the natural world.

Rhodessa Jones

Rhodessa Jones is Co-Artistic Director of the acclaimed San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, director, and writer. Ms. Jones is also the Founder and Director of the award-winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women/HIV Circle, which is a performance workshop designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women and women living with HIV. Ms. Jones has been a Visiting Professor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California (2015), and an Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014), as well as the Keynote Speaker for Commencement at the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, Ms. Jones was awarded the 2015 Theatre Practitioner Award by Theater Communications Group, which recognizes “a living individual whose work in the American theatre has evidenced exemplary achievement over time and who has contributed significantly to the development of the larger field.” Ms. Jones is also the recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship to support her work, and has been honored with an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts.

Sammay Dizon

SAMMAY (Samantha Peñaflor Dizon) is a Bay Area-based choreographer/producer and interdisciplinary performance artist of Kapampangan, Ilokano, and Bikol descent born and bred in Carson, CA/Tongva Territory and now reclaiming space in San Francisco, CA with honor and gratitude to the Ohlone. She holds a B.A. in Media Studies and Sociology and minors in Dance & Performance Studies and Global Poverty & Practice from University of California Berkeley. SAMMAY is a kinetic storyteller who engages her body as a vessel for spiritual intercession and envisions a future in which our indigenous traditions co-exist with(in) our urban landscapes. When she is not deep in creative collaboration, she is either facilitating writing or movement workshops or teaching through San Francisco Ballet's Dance in Schools and Communities Residency Program in San Francisco Unified School District.

SAMMAY has performed in the works of Jack Gray, Rhodessa Jones, Alleluia Panis, Kim Epifano, and has been featured through Diego Rivera Art Gallery, RAW Artists, and Dance Mission Theater’s D.I.R.T. - Dance In Revolt(ing) Times Festival among others. SAMMAY has taught throughout the Bay Area and was a guest artist through Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU where she taught for DANCES WITH WOLVES: Indigenous Contemporary Dance Master Class Series and performed in the first ever Indigenous Dance Forum in April 2016.

POLINA MIRZAD - Artistic Director

COLLABORATORS

Melusina Gomez

Shmee

Shannon Gray

Rhodessa Jones

Sammay Dizon

SUPPORTING FOUNDATIONS