Guest Artists, Collaborating Artists and Organizations

George Peters, Airworks, Cory Gilstrap
Jeff Rusnak, Modular Creations, Dinu Bodiciu, and
Charles Lefkowitz, Augustana Arts,
Perspective Design Fabrication,
Jesse Mano.

Collaborating Artist Biographies

Christopher Ruud has been a part of the performing arts since birth. Growing up back stage at San Francisco Ballet he was immersed in the art of professional dance, performance and stagecraft. Receiving the majority of his dance training at San Francisco Ballet School he began his performing career on the War Memorial Opera House stage at the age of 9. Mr. Ruud was hired into Ballet West in 1998. Quickly moving through the ranks he was named Principal Dancer in 2004. He spent 21 years as an artist for Ballet West performing a huge range of classical and contemporary repertoire. Mr. Ruud is grateful to have seen sold out houses at home, all over the United States and internationally most notably in China, Cuba, New York and at the Kennedy Center receiving glowing reviews. In his time with the company he has danced major roles in the great works of Balanchine, Kylián, Forsythe, Ashton, Tudor and Cranko to name a few. He has worked personally with some of the great names in the ballet world such as Sir Anthony Dowell, Cynthia Gregory, Hans Van Mannen and Bruce Marks. Mr. Ruud has seen success as a choreographer having his ballets performed in the Ballet West Innovations program and at the annual gala performance garnering such awards as a New York Choreographic Institute Fellowship as well as several NEA grants. He spent two years as the Director of Ballet West 2 teaching, coaching and choreographing for a group of 10-12 young dancers, most of whom were hired into the main company. For several years, Mr. Ruud directed his own small company, RUUDDANCES, performing in the Annual Utah Arts Festival and touring to Jacobs Pillow. Having retired from being a professional dancer in 2019, he is thrilled to have joined the artistic team at Kansas City Ballet that same year. Since taking the position of KCB Second Company Manager and Rehearsal Director for the company, he has created many new works, ballet mastered many new and existing works, and spent time in the community educating children about ballet and performance with the Lecture Demonstration program “Studio to Stage”.

Tomm Ruud joined San Francisco Ballet in 1975, following ten years as a principal dancer with William Christensen’s Ballet West. Born in Pasadena, California and raised in Afton, Wyoming, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees from the University of Utah. During his tenure with Ballet West he performed a wide range of roles in the Christensen repertoire, contemporary works, and the entire classical repertoire. He won particular acclaim as Albrecht in Giselle, and Franz in Christensen’s Coppélia. His leading roles with San Francisco Ballet included Colas in Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, the Cavalier in Christensen’s Nutcracker, Romeo in Smuin’s Romeo and Juliet, Ferdinand in The Tempest (Smuin), and step-sister in Cinderella (Christensen-Smuin). He also performed featured roles in Jerome Robbins’ Moves and In the Night, George Balanchine’s Western Symphony, Symphony in C and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, John Butler’s Three, Jiri Kylian’s Forgotten Land, Maurice Bejart’s Firebird, and Arthur Mitchell’s Manifestations. Mr. Ruud made guest appearances with several national and international ballet companies and dance festivals, including the National Ballet of Canada, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Ninth International Ballet Festival in Havana, Cuba, the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the 88th Conference of the International Olympics Committee at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the San Antonio Ballet and Oakland Ballet. Ruud was named a Principal Character Dancer of San Francisco Ballet at the end of the 1986-87 season, having shown complete versatility as a dancer. He won praise for his dramatic performances of Drosselmeyer in Nutcracker (Christensen/Tomasson), the Rich Boy in Lew Christensen’s Filling Station, Widow Simone in Sir Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, Lord Capulet in Michael Smuin’s Romeo and Juliet, the Tutor in Helgi Tomasson’s Swan Lake, and the Master of Ceremonies in Tomasson’s The Sleeping Beauty. San Francisco Ballet lists several ballets choreographed by Ruud in its repertoire, including MOBILE, Metamorphoses, Trilogy, Introduction and Allegro, Richmond Diary, and Step for Two. In 1986 he choreographed the Student Sampler, a fifty-minute program to educate young audiences about ballet and to introduce them to the San Francisco Ballet. The performance included an original ballet set to Dvorak’s Carnival Overture; this program was repeated for three years. He also created ballets for several other companies, including American Ballet Theater, National Ballet of Canada, Kansas City Ballet, Ballet West, Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, the Harbinger Dance Company, National Ballet of Cuba, the Columbia National Ballet of Bogata, Oakland Ballet, Ballet Met, Alaska Dance Theater, and Pennsylvania- Milwaukee Ballet Company. A short-subject film, “Balances,” released in 1981, is based on his best-known ballet, MOBILE. MOBILE was a highlight of San Francisco Ballet’s 1994 Opening Night Gala and the 50th Anniversary Gala in January 1983. As a member of Tomasson’s artistic staff, he was the Rehearsal Assistant for Nutcracker (Christensen/Tomasson), Sunset (Paul Taylor), Giuliani: Variations on a Theme (Tomasson), Forgotten Land (Kylian), Swan Lake (Tomasson), The Sleeping Beauty (Tomasson), and Company B (Taylor). Ruud also taught ballet extensively, not only at the San Francisco Ballet School but also master classes wherever he had been invited to choreograph. He taught at the Marin Ballet Center for Dance, and in July of 1987 was invited to teach at the Second International Dance Congress in Rio de Janeiro. Ruud died February 28, 1994 from AIDS related illnesses.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is an internationally recognized Belgian dancer, choreographer and director. He has made over 50 choreographic pieces and received twoLaurence Olivier Awards for Best New Dance Production, three Ballet Tanzawards for best choreographer, the KAIROS Prize and the Europe Prize Theatrical Realities. Born to a Flemish mother and a Moroccan father, he won his first prize for his solo performance at a national dance competition at the age of 19. Later on he started studies at P.A.R.T.S., the dance school run by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Here he got to know techniques of such choreographers as William Forsythe, Pina Bausch and Trisha Brown. Cherkaoui debuted as a choreographer in 1999 and since has worked with Akram Khan and collaborated with and abundance of theatres, opera houses and ballet companies, such as Geneva Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet and Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in New York. He then founded his own company in January 2010 called Eastman in Antwerp. In 2015, Cherkaoui became the artistic director at the Royal Ballet of Flanders, and was also an associate artist at Sadler's Wells, London. He later left the Royal Ballet of Flanders to become the artistic director of Le Grand Théâtre de Genève in Switzerland in 2022.

Charles Lefkowitz began doing fabrication work in 2007 for several restaurants and translated that experience into a full-time career in design and fabrication in 2009 while continuing to create and show his metal sculpture. The pursuit of both fine art and fabrication helps continue to fuel a very creative and synergistic relationship between his personal and professional goals. Charles’s commercial experience includes designing and fabricating beer gardens, large-scale public art, stage sets for events at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and original, economical railing systems and bike racks around Denver. charleslefkowitz.com.

George Peters has a thirty year history of working with aerial forms from gallery works to installation sculpture, kites, mobiles and banner works. During that time he has worked primarily as a studio artist and in the public art realm. His artistic experience includes film animation, graphic arts, theater set and costume design, photography, architectural modeling, painting and sculpture. He has completed over eighty large scale national and international commissioned works for private, corporate and public institutions.

Jeff Rusnak is the Assistant Technical Director at the University of Colorado’s Center for Innovation and Creativity. Jeff supervises and implements most aspects of technical production. He also serves as the scenic shop foreman and crew manager for opera and musical productions. With his own company, Modular Creations, Jeff has designed and created innumerable set pieces for arts organizations throughout the state. The “Portals” set design marks his fourth major collaboration with Zikr Dance Ensemble.

Cory Gilstrap is a Master Puppeteer and set designer with over 30 years of experience working in television and theater. He is “Denver’s premier puppet builder,” according to The Denver Post. His award-winning creations have been seen on countless stages nationwide and on broadcast commercial television. Notable television clients include MTV, FOX Television, and CBS Entertainment. Local clients include the Colorado Rockies, Denver Art Museum, RTD, and DCPA. Cory is presently interim Technical Director of the Schomp Theater, which is part of the Stage Craft and Design department at the Denver School of the Arts. Cory recently designed the incredible Anunnaki masks for David Taylor’s recent production of “Ripples In The Sand”.

Jesse Manno is Music Director of the University of Colorado, Boulder Dance Division. He is also a frequent accompanist/composer in residence with The Bates Dance Festival, ACDA, Florida Dance Festival, and others. He has composed around 200 dance, theatre, circus art and film scores for a variety of collaborators, including David Dorfman, David Taylor, Michael Foley, Robert Moses, Chris Aiken/Angie Hauser, Frequent Flyers, and Turning The Wheel, Inc. His work has been presented all over the U.S., and sporadically in Europe and Asia. His group SHEREFE performs Balkan and Middle Eastern music at festivals, weddings, and conferences throughout the Rocky Mountain Region. Please visit www.jessemanno.com and www.sherefe.org for more information.

Dinu Bodiciu is a Romanian-born designer and educator with over 15 years of teaching experience in higher education in various contexts (United Kingdom, Singapore, Romania and Norway). While in Singapore at Lasalle College of the Arts, Dinu led the BA in Fashion Design and Textiles Bachelors program. Dinu is currently a PhD candidate in the research program at University of the Arts in London. In his practice and research, Dinu is investigating the relationship between the human body and clothing as symbiotic. His work has been famously worn by Lady Gaga or featured in films like Hunger Games 3 & 4 or The Foundation series. Recently, Dinu has established Made With Time, a label that shifts the fashion paradigm through an all-encompassing sustainable philosophy: up-cycling existing items in a zero-waste manner and following a slow pace of production. Dinu recently created the women’s headpieces for David Taylor’s Portals.