Gathering The Folk: A Celebration of Zora Neale Hurston

Join us for a Women’s History Month community event and an interactive day of celebration! Honoring the legacy of Zora Neale Hurston, the groundbreaking writer of Their Eyes Were Watching God, cultural anthropologist, folklorist, playwright, and choreographer.

Led by Tanya Birl-Torres of ‘The Zora Project’ (Social Practice Artist-in-Residence at The Shed and Broadway Movement Director & Choreographer) and in collaboration with Anya Andrews (multi-disciplinary artist and educator), this family-friendly event brings Hurston’s legacy to life through storytelling, movement, and community connection.

What to Expect

We will gather, break bread and listen to some of Hurston’s collected folktales, learn how they work, and craft our own modern day stories. As Zora said, folktales are the “boiled down juice of human living”—everyday wisdom passed down through generations.

We will also experience the reimagined choreography of the Buzzard Lope and Crow Dance, powerful movement pieces adapted from Hurston’s lost choreographic works and ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. Together we will discover how Zora studied and participated in ritualized dance to preserve Black cultural traditions.

This event is free for the entire family! Come and gather with us! No experience necessary, just a curiosity and willingness to connect.

About the Facilitators

Tanya Birl-Torres 

Tanya Birl-Torres is a New York City–based creative director, choreographer, movement director, systems change facilitator, and mother. Her work spans major theaters including The Public Theater and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and she has performed on Broadway in The Lion King and Memphis. Through her company SoHumanity, she brings embodied, liberatory practices into social innovation and education, co-teaching at Columbia University’s Teachers College. A MAP Fund grantee and Artistic Director of the Washington Heights Womanist Arts Festival, Tanya is the 2026 Social Practice Artist-in-Residence at The Shed, where she is developing The Zora Project.

Anya Andrews

Anya Isabel Andrews is a migratory interdisciplinary educator, artist, emerging writer, and resurfacing dancer studying Afro-diasporic movement traditions with roots in the Caribbean. Raised in the African American theater tradition, her pedagogy and artistic practice center the transformative power of storytelling and meaning-making through movement, dialogue, and handcrafted adornments designed for performance. She continues to explore the application of her thesis, Lessons at the Kitchen Table, which investigates how spaces shape learning–how food, conversation, and everyday rituals become sites of knowledge. From teaching social justice–based mathematics to gathering folk at the kitchen table, Anya’s expansive storycraft practice is rooted in community, spiritual connection, and tending the gardens of our collective imagination.