Ephrat "Bounce" Asherie is a NYC-based choreographer, performer and b-girl. A Bessie Award winner from Innovative Achievement in Dance, Asherie creates work for the dynamic group of dancers in her company, Ephrat Asherie Dance (EAD). Dedicated to honoring the ethos of NYC's underground club community, EAD explores the inherently complex and dynamic qualities of carious Black and Latine vernacular forms, including breaking, hip hop, house, and waacking. Asherie's singular way of creating "compact bursts of choreography with rapid-fire changes in rhythm and gestural articulation" (The New York Times)brings forth work that is aesthetically innovative, physically rigorous and unceasingly curious. Asherie has received numerous awards to support her work including Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award, a Jerome Artist Fellowship and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Asherie's work has been presented on stages nationally and internationally with additional commissions from Vail Dance Festival, Fall for Dance, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences, PHILADANCO!, Parsons Dance and Malpaso. Asherie is honored to have been mentored by Richard "Break Easy" Santiago and to have collaborated with Michelle Dorrance, Doug Elkins, Rennie Harris, Bill Irwin, Gus Solomons Jr. and Buddha Stretch, among others. Asherie earned her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in Italian and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee where she researched the vernacular jazz dance roots of street and club dance. She is a co-founding member of the all-female house dance collective, MAWU, and is forever grateful to NYC's underground dance community for inspiring her to pursue a life as an artist.