Congratulations to Anya and Mitsuko Clarke-Verdery of MICHIYAYA Dance on receiving the 2025 Performing Arts Sponsorship

MICHIYAYA will present: Road to Sky. Road to Sky is a multimedia dance work by MICHIYAYA Dance, created by Artistic Directors Anya and Mitsuko Clarke-Verdery. The project explores their personal experiences becoming queer parents, focusing on Anya as the birthing parent and Mitsuko as the supportive partner, reflecting the emotional complexities of their journey and broader challenges faced by LGBTQ+ parents in today’s political climate.

Road to Sky will be performed at Wood Street galleries in November 2025. 


About MICHIYAYA
Artistic Directors Anya and Mitsuko Clarke-Verdery founded MICHIYAYA Dance in 2015 as a way to combine their voices as artists—Anya, a Black queer choreographer/dance artist from Brooklyn, and Mitsuko, a white & Japanese queer visual/performance artist from Manhattan. Together the duo creates multidisciplinary works that often recount or reveal a contemporary engagement with queerness, resistant relationships to schemes of oppression and power, cultural constraints on the body and interpersonal relationships, and other revelatory themes.

MICHIYAYA is an evolving dance company based in New York City and Pittsburgh. Their performances have spread nationally at venues and institutions such as Yale University, Brooklyn Museum, Andy Warhol Museum, Gelsey Kirkland Theater, Gibney, La MaMa Galleria, among others. Our powerful group of femme voices has been featured in Art Forum, Vice i-D, Thinx, Mask Magazine, and more. Anya & Mitsuko’s vision has been supported by Microsoft, CVS Health, New York State Council on the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opportunity Fund, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and Dance/NYC.

MICHIYAYA’s educational and community engagement initiatives have reached the American Dance Festival, University California - Santa Barbara, Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program, Center for Anti-Violence Education, Dancing Grounds, GOOD MOVE, and more. Anya & Mitsuko have served as adjunct faculty for Purchase College Conservatory of Dance and Point Park University. They’ve been invited as artists in residence at the UC Santa Barbara, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art & Drama, PearlArts Studios, and more. The duo has been commissioned by Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, Earl Mosley's Diversity of Dance, UT Austin, among others.

Anya & Mitsuko’s latest venture is their multidisciplinary artist residency space in Pittsburgh, PA titled inter-. inter- is an extension of MICHIYAYA providing creative space for local and visiting artists.