Melanie Greene is an American writer, dancer, and choreographer. She is best known for being part of a dance ensemble, the skeleton architecture, which won a Bessies Award in 2017. [1] [2] [3]
Greene is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in journalism and mass communication. She went on to receive her Master of Fine arts in dance and choreography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. [4] Greene began writing in high school and continues to write performance reviews for The Dance Enthusiast, [5] articles for Dance Magazine , [6] long-form artist profiles of dancers and choreographers for Dancer's Turn, [7] and her personal blog On the Scene with Lanie Reene [8] .
Greene has been described as a "movement-based artist." [9]
Greene created a collection of dance works called Methods of Perception: Dance to Engage the Senses which seeks to heighten the dance performance experience by engaging all of the senses . Greene states that her work "smells like delicious pomegranates and body sweat wrapped in fuzzy naked flesh and lacy garter belts". [1] Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Upstart Festival, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. [5]
Greene was a 2016 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks artist, [10] a 2015 Gibney boo-koo Space Grant recipient, [5] and a 2016 Actors Fund Summer Push Grant artist. [11]
As part of the ensemble of the skeleton architecture, Greene won the Outstanding Performer award at the Bessies 2017 alongside Nia Love, Maria Bauman, Paloma McGregor, and others. [2] [3]
Damian Woetzel is an American choreographer.
The New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessie Awards, are awarded annually for exceptional achievement by independent dance artists presenting their work in New York City. The broad categories of the awards are: choreography, performance, music composition and visual design. The Bessie Awards were established in 1983.
AXIS Dance Company is a professional physically integrated contemporary dance company and dance education organization founded in 1987 and based in Oakland, California. It is one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with and without physical disabilities. Their work has received nine Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and nine additional nominations for both their artistry and production values.
Ann Carlson is an American dancer, choreographer and performance artist whose work explores contemporary social issues. She has performed throughout the United States and internationally and has won a number of awards.
Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was considered to have been developed as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet, and also a way to express social concerns like socioeconomic and cultural factors.
Camille A. Brown is a dancer, choreographer, director and dance educator. She is the Founder & Artistic Director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers, and has congruently choreographed commissioned pieces for dance companies, Broadway shows, and universities. Brown started her career as a dancer in Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, and was a guest artist with Rennie Harris Puremovement, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Brown has choreographed major Broadway shows such as Choir Boy, Once on This Island and Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert! that aired on NBC. Brown also teaches dance and gives lectures to audiences at various universities such as Long Island University, Barnard College and ACDFA, among others.
Dancenoise is an American performance art duo created by Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton. Dancenoise entered the New York and Washington, D.C., art and club scene in 1983, performing at venues such as WOW Café, the Pyramid, 8BC, Performance Space 122, Franklin Furnace, The Kitchen, La Mama, Danspace Project, and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. Their work has also been presented around Europe as well as at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Dancenoise has also collaborated with other artists including Charles Atlas, Mike Taylor, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Yvonne Meier. In addition to their work under the title Dancenoise, Iobst and Sexton, along with Jo Andres and Mimi Goese, were frequent collaborators with Tom Murrin, an East Village performance artist known for his monthly celebrations in honor of the full moon. Dancenoise is a recipient of National Endowment of the Arts Choreographic Fellowships and a Bessie Award for New York Dance and Theatre.
Gibney Dance, founded in 1991 by choreographer Gina Gibney, is a multi-faceted dance organization occupying two locations in New York City: one at 890 Broadway in the Flatiron District and the other at 280 Broadway in Tribeca. The organization’s activities are divided into the following three interrelated fields: Center, Company, and Community. The first, Center, refers to the facility and its programming, which provide rehearsal space to nonprofit and commercial renters in addition to classes, programs, and services to the New York dance community. Company refers to Gibney Dance Company, a professional contemporary dance company operating out of the Center. Finally, Community refers to Community Action, an outreach program uniting dancers with survivors of domestic violence in shelters around New York City. In 2008, Gibney Dance was inducted into Vanity Fair’s Hall of Fame for “making art and taking action”.
Miguel Gutierrez is an American choreographer, composer, performer, singer, writer, educator and advocate based in New York City. His multidisciplinary performances "layer quotidian business and seemingly off-the-cuff remarks with strikingly choreographed sequences and lyrical text" and have been presented in more than 60 cities around the world.
Annie-B Parson is an American choreographer, dancer, and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Parson is notable for her work in dance/theater, post-modern dance, and art pop music. Parson is the Artistic Director of Brooklyn's Big Dance Theater, which she founded with Molly Hickok and her husband, Paul Lazar. She is also well known for her collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Ivo van Hove, Sarah Ruhl, Lucas Hnath, Wendy Whelan, David Lang, Esperanza Spalding, Mark Dion, Salt ‘n Pepa, Nico Muhly, and the Martha Graham Dance Co.
Greensboro Ballet is a professional ballet company in North Carolina. It is the only ballet company in the Piedmont Triad. It is one of the few non-profit ballet companies in North Carolina. Greensboro Ballet has presented works by George Balanchine. The company also has performed a number of works made especially for the Greensboro Ballet by Rick McCullough, Jill Eathorne Bahr, Leslie Jane Pessemier, Elissa Minet Fuchs, and Emery LeCrone. Maryhelen Mayfield, who served as artistic and executive director of Greensboro Ballet from 1980 to 2019, choreographed over twenty-five works for the company.
Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, also referred to as BAAD!, is a New York performing and visual art workshop space and performance venue located in The Bronx. The Academy is home to the Arthur Aviles Typical Theatre and The Bronx Dance Coalition.
Nia Love is a dancer and choreographer based in New York City. She is a radical thinker, artist, performer and professor that focuses on Modern dance, Post-Modern dance, and West African dance. She is known for her spiritual relationships to movement and performance, as well as her personal work that is critical of structural racism and examines the role of women in dance through her poetry, movement and art.
Alice Sheppard is a disabled choreographer and dancer from Britain. Sheppard started her career first as a professor, teaching English and Comparative Literature. After attending a conference on disability studies, she saw Homer Avila performed and was inspired. She became a member of the AXIS Dance Company and toured with them. She also founded her own dance company, Kinetic Light, which is an artistic coalition created in collaboration with other disabled dancers Laurel Lawson, Jerron Herman and Michael Maag, who also does lighting and is a video artist. A lot of Alice's work revolves intersectionality.
Joya Powell, also known as Joya Powell-Goldstein, is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, educator, and activist. As the founding artistic director of Movement of the People Dance Company, she is known for creating politically scorching dance-theatre that confronts issues of race and justice.
Faye Driscoll is an American dancer, choreographer, and director. Her works have been presented throughout the United States and around the world. On Broadway, Driscoll choreographed Young Jean Lee's play Straight White Men. Driscoll also choreographed Josephine Decker's film Madeline's Madeline.
Justin Tornow is an American dancer, choreographer, dance scholar, and dance teacher. She is the founder and artistic director of COMPANY, a co-founder and co-organizer of Durham Independent Dance Artists, former Board President of the North Carolina Dance Alliance, and producer of the PROMPTS art series in Durham, North Carolina. Tornow is trained in Cunningham technique and is a New York Public Library Research Fellow in Cunningham dance pedagogy. She serves on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Elon University, and the American Dance Festival.
Hope Boykin is an American dancer, choreographer, educator, director, writer, and speaker who is a former member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Her mission is to create and share "within an environment of acceptance, brings new levels of awareness. Exploring, developing, and teaching a sound and healthy approach to movement and expression, promotes growth. Lifting and leading young and aspiring artists to a secure foundation and a concrete understanding evolves a confidence and an assurance which will be unmatched. There are no limits." She has inspired many with her journey to sharing her continued explorations with others on her path to search for hope. She continues to exhibit that her voice is indeed relevant and continues to remain significant within the dance community and world today.
Mariana Valencia is an American contemporary multidisciplinary artist. She was honoured as the "Outstanding Breakout Choreographer" at the 2018 Bessie Awards.
Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented communities and the cancer community. Maravilla's studio is located in Brooklyn, New York.