🎠NEW! Miami Theatre Newsletter
Pioneer Winter Collective (PWC) has unveiled the artists selected for the 2026 cohort of its Creative Connections artist accelerator program. Eight Miami-area artists will participate in this year’s program: Nina Osoria Ahmadi, Darryl Jeffrey Brown, Alexa Caravia, Iman Clark (aka Nami Flare), Nicole Combeau, Nadege Green, Arsimmer McCoy, and Mr. Mostacho.
🎠NEW! Miami Theatre Newsletter
Pioneer Winter Collective is a nationally acclaimed Miami-based dance-theater company known for creating queer, intergenerational, physically integrated (disabled and non-disabled performers), and experimental work that reimagines the possibilities of dance.
Creative Connections is PWC’s artist accelerator program, launched in 2022. Artists receive an honorarium, fellowship, and optional mentoring or coaching support all to lift existing research, rehearsal, administrative and/or production time. There is no expectation of project completion; the program is designed to lift and support existing artistry and momentum. To date, thirteen Miami-area artists have participated in Creative Connections.
Creative Connections 2026 projects will span dance, poetry, visual art, community engagement, film, photography, and more.
“The larger mission of Pioneer Winter Collective is not product-based or commodity-oriented, but centered on long-term, deep community engagement and sustained artist support,” shares Pioneer Winter, Founder + Artistic Director of PWC. “With Creative Connections, the belief is simple: when artists are resourced and trusted, the impact reaches far beyond any single performance or exhibition. My hope is that this kind of commitment creates lift at key moments-offering artists ease, clarity, and momentum for the work already underway-while strengthening both individual practices and the broader Miami artist community.”
Creative Connections 2026 Artist Bios
Nina Osoria Ahmadi (they/any) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator from Miami, Florida, of AfroCuban and Iranian descent. Their practice spans photography, performance, video, drawing, and pedagogy. Their early work investigates layered identity, particularly cultural inheritance and gender fluidity. Their practice is informed by Afro-diasporic spirituality and performance practices, and trans liberation. Their current practice involves cultural curation and community programming. Ahmadi holds a degree in Art and Education from NYU’s Gallatin School of individualized study and currently teaches art to elementary students in Miami. Their work has been exhibited in Miami, New York, New Jersey, DC, Iowa City, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Houston, and Valencia, Spain.
Darryl Brown (he/him) was first exposed to dance at a cultural art center in Miami, Florida with a Caribbean dance company that focused on Horton technique. He left Miami to attend college in Atlanta at Morris Brown College and ended up dancing with most of the students at Morehouse and Spelman, taking ballet classes and participating in their homecoming, events, and King and Queen ceremonies. One of his teachers there was a former member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and encouraged him to try out for the Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco) where he became a training company scholarship recipient. He also studied Horton with Faye Snow in Philadelphia. Once he returned to Miami, he joined Karen Stewart at Miami Dade North College and taught modern dance classes and choreography. Soon after, he began to dance with Momentum Dance Company under Thelma Iles for three seasons. He also danced in production companies, Rhythm City and Energy Dance Productions. Pre-Covid, he was the leader, choreographer, and dance teacher of the dance ministry at his church. He takes inspiration from music and the feelings and emotions that reflect his current state of being in conjunction with his surroundings. His process is storytelling, or to take the dancer and the audience on an excursion to return to a more enlightened reality. Darryl currently co-facilitates Pioneer Winter Collective’s weekly Recovery in Motion workshops.
Alexa Caravia (she/her) is a visual storyteller drawn to revealing our shared humanity through narrative cinematography. For Alexa, filmmaking is a way of entering different microuniverses-listening, observing, and documenting the subtle moments that connect us. She gravitates toward an observational approach, letting stories unfold naturally as people move, speak, and interact. Her process is grounded in trust, creating an environment where people feel at ease and able to be themselves on camera. The result is work that is intimate, unforced, and alive with the textures of real life. Her work moves across borders and perspectives. Over the past 15 years, Alexa has shot narrative films and documentaries across five continents. Each location, each encounter, has reinforced a fundamental truth: despite differences in culture, language, or circumstance, human stories-and the emotions that drive them-are universal. Filmmaking has taught her to see closely, listen deeply, and respond with empathy and patience, strengthening both her craft and her connection with the people she films.
Iman Clark aka Nami Flare (she/her) is a Miami based traveling burlesque performer and teaching artist. In 2020, she earned a BFA in Dance from The Ohio State University and a year later was lured into the tantalizing world of burlesque. Ms. Flare is a graceful seductress who lures people in through her embodiment of grace and sensuality. She brings burlesque to the forefront to take audiences on a journey that explores expression, identity, and self awareness. She is an award winning artist holding titles such as #14 Most Influential Burlesque Performer in the World, “Grand Master Funk” 2025, Runner up for “Best Debut” at Burlesque Hall of Fame 2025, Duchess of Viva Las Vegas 2025 and Mx. Ebony Burlesque Atlanta 2024, continuing the legacy of melanated performers who came before her. She is proudly a “Shimmyin’ Nomad”, shaking up the stages from coast to coast! Bringing the heat all the way from Miami, “The James Brown of Burlesque”, “The Sacral Charmer” who needs no armour. Ms. Flare has participated in Pioneer Winter Collective’s site specific project Grass Stains in 2022 and 2024.
Nicole Combeau (she/her) is a Miami-based lens-based artist and educator. My work explores questions of belonging, inheritance, and migration. I approach photography as a way of slowing down-paying close attention to gesture, repetition, and presence, and to how memory lives in bodies and shared spaces. Through long-term photographic projects, collaborative portrait sessions, and book arts-based installations, I work with expressive and participatory methods that shape not only what I make, but how I work with people. Much of my practice centers family relationships and intergenerational exchange, with a particular focus on elders and the quiet rituals through which cultural knowledge is carried forward.Education and access are deeply intertwined with my studio work, and these ways of working inform one another. I serve as Program Coordinator for Creative Aging at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where I design and lead free, multi-week art programs for adults 55+. Across my teaching and facilitation, I’m committed to democratizing art education and building spaces grounded in trust, care, and relational learning. My work often extends beyond traditional exhibition formats to include collaborative bookmaking, community activations, and site-responsive installations using fabric and alternative photographic processes. Lately, I’ve found myself drawn to film and time-based work as a way to build worlds-holding duration, atmosphere, and collective memory in ways that feel expansive and alive. I’m currently an artist-in-residence at Bakehouse Art Complex and a two-time Oolite Ellies Award recipient. Across everything I do, I think of art as a living archive: something shaped slowly, held with care, and sustained over time.
Nadege Green (she/her) is an award-winning journalist, curator, and researcher. She is the founder of Black Miami-Dade, a history and creative studio that honors Miami’s Black past. Black Miami-Dade shares a fuller story of Miami-Dade’s history through storytelling, research, archiving, art, community programs and publishing. Black Miami-Dade was named one of the best things about Miami in 2025 by the Miami New Times. And it is one of the most followed Black history platforms in the state of Florida. Green is a memory worker, and it is through this lens she approaches her creative practices agnostic of medium. She was the inaugural scholar in residence at the University of Miami’s Center for Global Black Studies and was a distinguished Writer in residence at New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture. Green is currently a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and an archivist in residence at New York University’s Hemispheric Institute. In her spare time, she is a collector of rare Black books and magazines. A child of Haitian immigrants and former farmworkers, she was born and raised in the county of Dade.
Arsimmer McCoy (she/her) is a poet, performance artist, and interdisciplinary artist from South Florida, celebrated for her award-winning storytelling and dynamic public programming that weaves poetic narrative with civic memory. Her practice centers on cultural preservation, environmental stewardship, and intergenerational care as acts of community justice. She has been an artist-in-residence at ACA, Locust Projects, Oolite Arts, AIRIE, and Pioneer Winter Collective. In 2024, she performed at the Venice Biennale for the European Cultural Center’s Personal Structures exhibition, and in 2025, curated a collaborative solo work at Locust Projects. Her writing appears in Artsy, Rootwork Journal, The Lighthouse Review, and Burnaway Magazine. Institutions, including Pérez Art Museum Miami and Bakehouse Art Complex, have commissioned McCoy’s voice and curation. Her latest project, A Spell to Grow a Garden, a zine collaboration with EXILE Books and MAVEN Leadership Collective, features her poetry and photography. She is a Marjory Stoneman Douglas Poetry Award winner and a recipient of the 2025 Miami-Dade Arts & Environment Award.
Mr. Mostacho (he/they) is a queer brand, where wearable sculpture, makeup, and performance fuse into living art. My practice is rooted in crafting identities from fabric, paint and movement – each appearance is a new mythology, a playful rebellion against the “normal standards”. I design and embody characters that exist between fashion, art and fantasy, inviting audiences into surreal, immersive worlds.