Pat Graney is an American activist and choreographer, based in Seattle, Washington. [1] She founded the Pat Graney Dance Company in 1991, [2] and continues to serve as its artistic director and executive director. [3]
Born in Chicago, IL, she moved to St. Augustine, FL with her mother and three siblings to be closer to extended family after the passing of her father in an accident. In St. Augustine her mother ran a book shop and antique shop in the ground floor of their house, [4] exposing Graney to a world of literature that would greatly influence her creative work. [5] Graney moved with her mother and siblings as well to Mechanicsville, Virginia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania due to her mother getting remarried. She left home before completing high school, but was able to graduate through night classes back in St. Augustine, while living alone and supporting both herself and her younger brother. [6] She went on to attend various colleges around the country, including Tallahassee Community College (Tallahassee, Florida) and The Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington), before finishing at the University of Arizona. In Arizona, she studied extensively with John M. Wilson at the School of Dance, and received a BFA in 1979, at which time she moved to Seattle. [5]
A feminist activist as well as a choreographer, [5] Graney has worked with teens in the Seattle school system who have been identified as having been trafficked. [2]
In 1992, Graney began a non-religious arts-based educational residency program Keeping the Faith – The Prison Project, intended to enrich the lives of incarcerated women and girls. As of 2013, the program works mainly with the Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Belfair, Washington, but has made artistic interventions in places as diverse as Japan, Ireland, and Germany. The program introduces writing poetry, collaboratively creating dance pieces, [3] visual arts and sign language. It is one of the nation's longest-running prison arts programs. [5]
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation describes her work as "featur[ing] a diverse set of movement vocabularies that range from ballet to gymnastics to martial arts; explorations of female identity and power; and rich visuals." [2] Seattle's On the Boards writes that "she often explores female identity and power, taking movement inspiration from ballet to gymnastics to martial arts to slapstick." [7]
Graney's 2004 piece The Vivian Girls was based on the drawings and stories of Henry Darger; [2] her Faith Triptych, consisting of Faith (1991), Sleep (1995), and Tattoo (2001), was presented in 2010 at On the Boards. [2] [7] [8]
House of the Mind explored Alzheimer's through Graney's experience with her mother's loss of memory. [4]
Graney created Girl Gods in 2015 to explore the rage of women and girls in the face of social pressure and mistreatment. [4] It draws from work by Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta. [9]
Graney has received the Alpert Award in the Arts (2008), a USA Fellowship (2008) a Doris Duke Award (2013). [2] In 1995, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography. [10]
Agnes George de Mille was an American dancer and choreographer.
Doris Batcheller Humphrey was an American dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Along with her contemporaries Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today. As many of her works were annotated, Humphrey continues to be taught, studied and performed.
Judith Ann Jamison is an American dancer and choreographer. She is the artistic director emerita of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Leanne Pooley ONZM is a Canadian filmmaker based in Auckland, New Zealand. Pooley was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, she immigrated to New Zealand in the mid-1980s and began working in the New Zealand television and film industry before moving to England where she worked for many of the world's top broadcasters. She returned to New Zealand in 1997 and started the production company Spacific Films. Her career spans more than 25 years and she has won numerous international awards. Leanne Pooley was made a New Zealand Arts Laureate in 2011 and an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year's Honours List 2017. She is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Virginia Tanner was an American dance instructor and founder of the University of Utah Children's Dance Theatre. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, she began her formal dance training at the University of Utah. She studied with Doris Humphrey in New York City before returning to Salt Lake City in the early 1940s to establish her school for creative dance for children.
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Eleanor Campbell King (1906–1991) was an American modern dancer, choreographer, and educator. She was a member of the original Humphrey-Weidman company, where she was a principal dancer in the pioneering modern dance movement in New York City, then moving on to choreography and founding her own dance company in Seattle, Washington. She was a professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, where she taught from 1952 to 1971, before retiring to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to start a new course of study into classical Japanese and Korean dance. She choreographed over 120 dance works, and wrote extensively for a variety of dance publications. In 1948, she was named Woman of the Year in Seattle, and in 1986 was listed as a "Santa Fe Living Treasure", also receiving the New Mexico Governor's Artist Award. In 2000, her archive was recognized by the White House Millennium Council's "Save America's Treasures" program.
On the Boards (OtB) is a non-profit contemporary performing arts organization in Seattle, Washington, founded in 1978. Originally located at Washington Hall in the Central District, the organization moved in 1998 to their current location in Uptown. They present more than 40 distinct shows annually, amounting to over 100 performance nights each year in 2 theater spaces.
Rebecca Brown is an American novelist, essayist, playwright, artist, and professor. She was the first writer in residence at Richard Hugo House, co-founder of the Jack Straw Writers Program, and served as the creative director of literature at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington from 2005 to 2009. Brown's best-known work is her novel The Gifts of the Body, which won a Lambda Literary Award in 1994. Rebecca Brown is an Emeritus faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont and is also a multi-media artist whose work has been displayed in galleries such as the Frye Art Museum.
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The Doris Duke Artist Award is undertaken by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and designed to "empower, invest in and celebrate artists by offering multi-year, unrestricted funding as a response to financial and funding challenges both unique to the performing arts and to each grantee". Started in 2011, the program supports artists in jazz, theatre, and contemporary dance. The Doris Duke Artist Award now offers up to $575,000 of individual support. The prize was $275,000 until it was doubled 2023 in commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of the program and Doris Duke Foundation's continued commitment to supporting individual performing artists. Two classes of Doris Duke Impact Awards totaling $80,000 were made in 2014 and 2015, but the program was discontinued after that.
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