Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
William Forsythe is an American dancer and choreographer formerly resident in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and now based in Vermont. He is known for his work with the Ballet Frankfurt (1984–2004) and The Forsythe Company (2005–2015). Recognized for the integration of ballet and visual arts, which displayed both abstraction and forceful theatricality, his vision of choreography as an organizational practice has inspired him to produce numerous installations, films, and web-based knowledge creation, incorporating the spoken word and experimental music.
Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance movement that came into popularity in the early 1960s. While the term postmodern took on a different meaning when used to describe dance, the dance form did take inspiration from the ideologies of the wider postmodern movement, which "sought to deflate what it saw as overly pretentious and ultimately self-serving modernist views of art and the artist" and was, more generally, a departure from modernist ideals. Lacking stylistic homogeny, postmodern dance was discerned mainly by its anti-modern dance sentiments rather than by its dance style. The dance form was a reaction to the compositional and presentational constraints of the preceding generation of modern dance, hailing the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocating for unconventional methods of dance composition.
Shen Wei is a Chinese-American choreographer, painter, and director who resides in New York City. Widely recognized for his defining vision of an intercultural and interdisciplinary mode of movement-based performance, Shen Wei creates original works that employ an assortment of media elements, including dance, painting, sound, sculpture, theater and video. Critics have commented on his innovative blend of Asian and Western sensibilities, as well as his syncretic approach to performance art.
Trisha Brown was an American choreographer and dancer, and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern dance movement. Brown’s dance/movement method, with which she and her dancers train their bodies, remains pervasively impactful within international postmodern dance.
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.
Rajkumar Singhajit Singh, is a leading exponent, choreographer and a guru of Indian classical dance form of Manipuri, including the Pung cholom and Raslila. He was awarded with the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1984 and the Padma Shri in 1986 for his contribution to the Manipuri dance. In the year 2011, Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's The National Academy for Music, Dance and Drama, awarded him with its highest award, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship for his contribution to Indian Dance. In 2014 he was also conferred with the Tagore Award.
David Dorfman is a dancer, choreographer, musician, activist and teacher. A native of Chicago, he received his bachelor of science in business administration degree in 1977 from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1981, he received his MFA in dance from Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, where he is regularly the chairperson of the department of dance, having joined the faculty in 2004. In 1985 he founded his company David Dorfman Dance, one of the nation's leading modern dance companies. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 to continue his research and choreography in the topics of power and powerlessness, including activism, dissidence and underground movements. He has also been awarded four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, an American Choreographer's Award, the first Paul Taylor Fellowship from The Yard, and a 1996 New York Dance & Performance Award ("Bessie").
Jonah Bokaer is an American choreographer and media artist. He works on live performances in the United States and elsewhere, including choreography, digital media, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and social enterprise.
Sophiline Cheam Shapiro is a Cambodian dancer, choreographer, and educator.
Deborah Jinza Thayer is an American choreographer, dancer, and artistic director, located in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Merián Soto is a choreographer and performance artist. Soto is best known for her interdisciplinary solo, group and collaborative works that explore and reflect upon the legacy of colonialism and Latino heritage, history and culture. Simply, Soto creates choreographic works that intertwine improvisational movements and post-modern structures she calls “energy modes”. By means of her choreography that accesses the personal history of Puerto Ricans, expresses the experiences of Puerto Ricans, and elicits the cultural memory of Puerto Ricans, Soto attempts to “blur the line between “real” life everyday/commonplace movement/dance/performance and staged/”artistic” dance and performance.”
Kyle Abraham is an American choreographer and dancer. He founded his own company A.I.M by Kyle Abraham in 2006 in New York City and has produced many original works for A.I.M such as The Radio Show (2010), Absent Matter (2015), Pavement (2012), Dearest Home (2017), Drive (2017), INDY (2018), Studies on Farewell (2019), and An Untitled Love (2021). Kyle has also been commissioned to create new works for international dance companies such as Untitled America (2016) for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Runaway (2018) for New York City Ballet, The Bystander (2019) for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Only The Lonely (2019) for Paul Taylor American Modern Dance and Ash (2019).
Stephan Koplowitz is a director and choreographer and media artist specializing in site-specific multimedia performances. Since the 1980s, Koplowitz, an international site artist and former Dean of Dance at CalArts, has dedicated himself to site-specific work. He has made work on and for the steps of the New York Public Library, in the halls of London’s Natural History Museum, in a German factory, and in the windows of Grand Central Station Koplowitz was one of 14 artists included in the book Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces edited by Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik, published by Florida University Press, 2011 In 2022, Koplowitz's book, On Site - Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation was published by Oxford University Press: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/on-site-9780197515242?cc=us&lang=en&
Big Dance Theater is a New York City-based dance theater company. It is led by Artistic Director Annie-B Parson, who founded Big Dance Theater in 1991 with Molly Hickok and Paul Lazar. Big Dance Theater has created over 20 dance/theater works and won 18 awards over the years. They have been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The National Theater of Paris, The Japan Society, and The Walker Art Center, and have performed in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, the Chocolate Factory, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena, On the Boards, New York Live Arts, UCLA Live, The Spoleto Festival USA, and at festivals in Europe and Brazil.
Emily Johnson is an American dancer, writer, and choreographer of Yup'ik descent. She grew up in Sterling, Alaska, and is based in New York City. She is artistic director of her performance company, Emily Johnson/Catalyst. Johnson is a organizer for the First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking. She has worked part-time at Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore owned by author Louise Erdrich.
Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, editor, and writer. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
Red Eye Theater is a multidisciplinary creative laboratory dedicated to the development and presentation of boundary-breaking performance work in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was founded in 1983 by writer/director Steve Busa, performer Miriam Must, and visual artist Barbara Abramson.
Sarah Michelson is a British choreographer and dancer who lives and works in New York City, New York. Her work is characterized by demanding physicality and repetition, rigorous formal structures, and inventive lighting and sound design. She was one of two choreographers whose work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, the first time dance was presented as part of the bi-annual exhibition. Her work has also been staged at The Walker Art Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Kitchen, and the White Oak Dance Project. She received New York Dance and Performance awards for Group Experience (2002), Shadowmann Parts One and Two (2003), and Dogs (2008). She has served as associate director of The Center for Movement Research and associate curator of dance at The Kitchen. Currently choreographer in residence at Bard's Fisher Center, she is the recipient of their four-year fellowship to develop a commissioned work with Bard students and professional dancers.
Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes from the Upper Midwest is a recipe/collage book written by Heid E. Erdrich, published by the MN Historical Society Press in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Heid E. Sherman is a member of the North Dakota Turtle Mountain Band of the Ojibwe people who is currently based in South Minneapolis. Her cookbook explores native american cuisine and indigenous ingredients, within a globally-aware framework that includes stories, recollections and anecdotes.
