Jennifer Wood (Artistic Director, Suchu Dance, 1998 to present) has been active as a choreographer in Houston since 1994, when she became co-founder of The Duplex, a salon-style performance venue for contemporary dance where she and many other performing artists honed their skills at creating detailed, intimate chamber performances. Prior to that she had been a performing member of Farrell Dyde Dance Theatre and Runaround Sue Dance Company, followed by one year spent as a MFA graduate student in dance, which she decided to give up so she could practice the craft of choreography more and talk about it less. Now she is the chief creative force behind the Houston-based troupe Suchu Dance, the person ultimately responsible for all its new artistic pursuits and performances. In late 2001 Jennifer was named a semi-finalist in the 2002 Rencontres Choreographiques international choreography competition, and she is also the recipient of a 2002 and 2005 Individual Artist Fellowship in choreography from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County.

Louie Saletan (Managing Director, Suchu, Inc., 1999 to present) specializes in handling all things financial, administrative, and publicity-related for the award-wining postmodern dance performing group Suchu Dance and for the Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex, Suchu Dance’s new 7200 sq. ft. home and community arts facility in downtown Houston, which provides dozens of local dance and performing arts groups each year with studio and theater space for their rehearsals, classes, performances, and special events.  Louie is a former Treasurer of the Houston Dance Coalition (1997-2001), a co-founder of the annual Big Range Dance Festival, and is currently serving his second year on the DiverseWorks Artist Board.  An established dance artist in his own right, Louie graduated as Outstanding Senior Dance Major from Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. During his undergraduate studies at Grinnell College, where he majored in Russian language, Louie also studied modern dance and Javanese Dance, spent summers studying and performing modern dance in New York City, and expanded his interests to include environmental studies and renewable energy technologies, fulfilling an internship at the Florida Solar Energy Center.  Upon graduating from Grinnell in 1991, Louie capitalized on a prestigious full-year Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study and document the evolution of modern dance performing groups in the Soviet Union.  Since then Louie has taught Russian language to NASA astronauts and engineers at Johnson Space Center, and worked as Communications and Outreach Specialist at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, an energy- and resource-efficiency think tank.  In addition to juggling his current arts management responsibilities, Louie is also a freelance technical translator from Russian into English.