XIMENA GARNICA & SHIGE MORIYA

Ximena Garnica (Colombian-born) and Shige Moriya (Japanese-born) are an artist duo who have worked together for over two decades as multidisciplinary artists, choreographers, co-artistic-directors, and artistic instigators at their live-work art space, CAVE, in the area currently known as Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York City. Ximena and Shige lead the LEIMAY Ensemble, a group of national and international dancers who create body-centered works around the principle of LUDUS, a practice that explores methods to physically condition the body and develop a sensitivity to the “in-between space.”

Ximena and Shige are immigrant artists. Ximena grew up as an actor and holds a degree in theater direction/dance. Shige grew up in a family of visual artists and attended architecture school. Ximena and Shige worked together to found LEIMAY (incorporated in 2003) as young undocumented immigrants who were passionate about creating a space for art to exist amongst the barriers and challenges they felt as new residents of NYC.

Their collaborative works include performance, sculptural, video, mixed-media, and light installations as well as photography, training projects, stage performances and publications.

LEIMAY’s works have been presented at venues such as BAM Fisher, The Brooklyn Museum, Japan Society, Watermill Center, and Asian Museum of San Francisco, as well as internationally in Japan, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Mexico and Colombia. LEIMAY has received continued support from NEA, NYSCA and DCLA, among other private foundations. They’ve maintained collaborations with renowned artists (Robert Wilson and Ko Murobushi) and were nominated for Alpert and US Artists Awards. LEIMAY’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Theater Drama Review (TDR), The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic, among others. Ximena received the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors, and was recently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Riverside.

The word LEIMAY is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn, or the transition between one era and another.