Karen Louise Erdrich is an 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, 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 form 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. Frequently, critics have commented on his innovative blend of Asian and Western sensibilities, as well as his syncretic approach to performance art.
Jesse J. Cornplanter was an actor, artist, author, craftsman, Seneca Faithkeeper and decorated veteran of World War I. The last male descendant of Cornplanter, an important 18th-century Haudenosaunee leader and war chief, his Seneca name was Hayonhwonhish. He illustrated several books about Seneca and Iroquois life. Jesse Cornplanter wrote and illustrated Legends of the Longhouse (1938), which records many Iroquois traditional stories. Cornplanter was also the first Native American to play a lead in a feature film titled Hiawatha, which was released in 1913 and a year before the notable Western The Squaw Man.
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.
Peter van Riper was an American sound and light environment artist, musician and pioneer of laser art and holography.
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.
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).
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.
Pam Tanowitz is an American dancer, choreographer, professor, and founder of the company, Pam Tanowitz Dance. She is a current staff member at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts where she teaches dance and choreography. Her work has been performed at notable performance venues such as the Joyce Theater, the Joyce SoHo, and New York Live Arts, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Susan Rethorst is an American choreographer, writer, and teacher.
The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports Native American artists, culture bearers, and Native-led arts organizations, providing them with support through fellowships and project funding. This philanthropic organization exclusively supports American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian arts and cultures in the United States.
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.
Madeline Hollander is an American artist, choreographer, and dancer, living and working in New York City. Her work explores the evolution of human body movement and the intersection between choreography and visual art.
Jerron Herman is an American choreographer, dancer, performance artist, writer and a teacher for the Dream Project at National Dance Institute for children with disabilities. He grew up in California as part of a religious and art loving family. He has the movement disorder Cerebral palsy, the symptoms of which he has absorbed into his dance movements.
