Trillium Arts is delighted to announce Joy Davis and Eric Mullis as awardees of Trillium's fourth annual North Carolina Choreographic Fellowship Award. These extraordinary artists, who hail from Charlotte, NC, will be in residence at Trillium during May 2027. This husband and wife choreographic duo will be joined by an additional dancer and/or key collaborators to advance their exciting and timely project toward completion.

THE NORTH CAROLINA CHOREOGRAPHIC FELLOWSHIP (NCCF), launched in 2023, provides established North Carolina- based choreographers and their dancers with a full menu of resources and benefits including private lodging, rehearsal space, administrative mentorship, per diems and a $1,000 honorarium. If they so choose, NCCF awardees may opt to engage/interact with Trillium's growing cohort of regional and local artists. NCCF residencies are seven to nine days in length, providing space and time to deepen creative endeavors and rejuvenate in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains.

Following an open call application process in the late winter, a panel reviewed a robust and competitive set of applications. The panel, comprised of arts industry leaders, Trillium Arts Board members and a former NCCF awardee, selected Joy and Eric based on a variety of merits, including as artists who are at a catalytic point in their career and are actively incubating a new project for future public presentation.

MEET THE AWARDEES

JOY DAVIS
Website: joydavisproject.com
Instagram: @joyproject

Joy Davis is a dance artist, educator, producer, and mother. She is a Senior Countertechnique® Teacher and holds an MFA in Choreography & Performance from Smith College. Joy has been on faculty at Boston Conservatory at Berklee since 2016; is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Davidson College, She has taught on faculty at Harvard University, Smith College, Wesleyan University, and UNC Charlotte; and as a visiting teacher at the Juilliard School, American Dance Festival (ADF), and One Body One Career Countertechnique® Intensive. Joyproject is a platform for creation, collaboration and production, having created numerous independent works, commissions for colleges and dance companies throughout the US, with a Fly ATL 2026 premier of The Precious Everything with collaborator Ginny Coleman. Together with Alexander Davis, Joy co-founded The Davis Sisters (TDS), creating works of dance theater and comedy supported by The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard, Boston Center for the Arts, the MFA Boston; and recent touring to XFest at SIUE and Fact/SF Summer Dance Festival. Now based in Charlotte, NC, she is a recipient of NC Choreographers Residency, ASC Creative Mecklenburg, and collaborates with husband, Eric Mullis. Together they have recently founded Dance Lab/CLT, a platform for professional training and experimental performance curation with a forthcoming 2026 workshop & performance production of Rosie Herrera Dance Theater. Joy cherishes the integration of artistic and family life.

FELLOWSHIP PLANS:
During the residency, I will collaborate with four dance artists to develop an evening-length multimedia dance theater production, tentatively titled Rail-Tracks, which recounts stories of migration and immigration through an immersive journey of a train ride across time and space, from modern China to 19th-century US and wartime Germany. The residency will be the first time the entire cast rehearses in person altogether, as not all dancers reside locally. We look forward to having dedicated time and space to delve deeply into crafting this work and building a community within us to reflect together on the relevance of these stories in today’s cultural and political landscape. In addition, we plan to conduct a community workshop and present an informal showing to connect with local residents and artists during the residency. The completed work is planned be to premiered in January 2027 at the von der Heyden Theater at Duke University through Duke Arts.

ERIC MULLIS
Website: ericmullis8.com
Instagram: ericmullisprojects

Eric Mullis is a dance artist and scholar who researches the possibilities of interdisciplinary performance. His choreography has been presented at the North Carolina Dance Festival, Contemporary Dance Choreography Festival (FL), Midwest Alternative Dance Festival (MI), Breaking Ground Festival (AZ), Dance City Festival (NY, IL, MI), and the ArtsInTank Festival (Seoul). In 2020, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study dance and emerging technology at Taipei National University of the Arts. Eric has authored several essays on dance technology as well as two books, "Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance: Interdisciplinary Research in the American South" (Palgrave MacMillan 2019) and "Instruments of Embodiment: Costuming in Contemporary Dance" (Routledge 2022). He recently co-edited a forthcoming volume on robot theater (Routledge 2026). Eric is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queens University of Charlotte.

FELLOWSHIP PLANS
Invisible Cartographies will use two drones to document a dance solo developed in the landscape surrounding Trillium Arts. In this respect, it will be similar to dance film projects which leverage drone technology to capture stunning images of site-specific dance. It is distinctive in that it will reveal the technology within the dance, and consider ways it shapes performance. The dance and drone movements will be choreographed by Davis and Mullis, two experimental choreographers with dramaturgical minds keen on investigating physical responsiveness in natural landscapes and the ways emerging technologies shape how dance is made and viewed. The research residency at Trillium Arts will culminate in a short dance film and fuel the development of a future performance—in Charlotte, NC in the fall of 2027—in which a trio of two drones and a dancer will choreographically interact before a live audience.