Welcome to the Center for Creative Research

The Center for Creative Research (CCR) is a multi-year pilot project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), designed to re-engineer institutional contexts for artists. With a focus on higher education and working with a core group of universities and colleges, the Center aims to:

1. create and implement innovative long-term strategies for artist-university interaction that complement existing models

2. highlight and facilitate the trans/interdisciplinary contributions artists can make as scholars/researchers to the intellectual life of the university

3. enable artists to access the resources of these institutions in ways which are mutually meaningful to their investigations and inquiry.

The Center is currently made up of 11 Founding Fellows (Ann Carlson, Pat Graney, David Gordon, Margaret Jenkins, Bebe Miller, Ralph Lemon, Liz Lerman, Eiko Otake, Dana Reitz, Elizabeth Streb and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar); Artist-in-Residence, Ain Gordon; Project Director, Dana Whitco; and Senior Advisor, Sam Miller, President of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC). The Center’s founding institutional partners include Dartmouth College, University of Maryland and Wesleyan University. Additional partnerships with University of Minnesota, Temple University, Arizona State University and others are currently in development.

In January 2007, CCR’s pilot funding was renewed for two years by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, enabling further development of campus-based residency projects initiated during the first phase of the pilot. These projects vary in design and content but share a similar focus on research with investigations led by mature movement-based artists working collaboratively with members – faculty, students and staff - of the university community. Some activities include the teaching and co-teaching of credit-bearing courses, intensives and workshops; working with students on individual research projects (including the preparation of theses and performance projects); working with faculty on individual research projects; developing new work for formal and informal presentation, etc.

Among CCR’s ambitious goals for the next two years are the expansion of the Center’s artistic body through the addition of more movement-based Fellows as well as Associates from other artistic disciplines; and, the dissemination of the Center’s work (through publication and performance) since its inception in early 2005. Additionally, CCR continues its search for an appropriate long-term “home” and is currently in talks with the leadership of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU) towards a possible transfer of the program to that university in 2008.

Founding Fellows, Artists and Staff

Ann Carlson
David Gordon
Pat Graney
Margaret Jenkins
Ralph Lemon
Liz Lerman
Bebe Miller
Eiko Otake
Dana Reitz
Elizabeth Streb
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Ain Gordon

ANN CARLSON (Founding Fellow) works as an individual artist, drawing from the disciplines of choreography, performance, theater, public and conceptual art. Her works range from theatrically based solos to large-scale site-specific works. Ann has received over thirty commissions to make new work, invited by dance companies, museums, corporations, universities and individuals.

Ms. Carlson’s work has been seen through-out the US, in Europe, Mexico, and Russia. Her awards include a 2004/05 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, a 2004 Artist-in-Residency Award at Rockefeller’s Bellagio Foundation, a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography, a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance, a Doris Duke Award in 2000, a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance in 1999. She was the first choreographer to receive the Cal Arts/Alpert Award and received the prestigious three year NEA fellowship in choreography. In 2003, Carlson and video artist, Mary Ellen Strom completed Geyser Land, a video/performance installation on a train in Montana.

Carlson recently exhibited a dance in photography entitled, Chicken at Harvard University. She and Mary Ellen are currently collaborating on a video/performance installation entitled CAke to be presented in empty retail stores in the U.S. Ann graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah with a BFA in modern dance and earned a graduate degree in science from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Ms. Carlson lives in New York City.

DAVID GORDON (Founding Fellow)
Commissions for directing and/or choreographing include:
Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Dance Theater of Harlem, White Oak Dance Project, American Ballet Theater, American Repertory Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Joyce Theater, Theater For a New Audience, New York Theater Workshop, Guthrie Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Serious Fun at Lincoln Center, Spoleto Festival USA, Actors Studio, PBS/WNET Great Performances, PBS/KTCA Alive TV, BBC and Channel 4, UK.
Awards include: two Obies, three Bessies, two Dramalogues, two Guggenheims,
two Pew Charitable Trust National Residency Grants (in both Theater and Dance)
Current member: Actors Studio
Previous panel/chair: NEA Dance Program.
Founding artist: Grand Union. Judson Church Performances.
Performer: Yvonne Rainer Co./James Waring Co.
David Gordon has constructed dance and theater events for the Pick Up Performance Co(S). for thirty-five years.

PAT GRANEY (Founding Fellow) received Choreography Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for 11 consecutive years, as well as from Artist Trust, the Washington State Arts Commission, the NEA International Program, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Seattle-based Pat Graney Company, incorporated in 1990, has toured to most major American cities as well as internationally to Japan, England, Scotland, Germany, Singapore, Chile and Brazil. In 2000, Ms. Graney was selected to receive a 'Golden Umbrella' award for recognition of lifetime achievement in her art form.

The Pat Graney Company has appeared four times as part of On the Boards New Performance Series. Ms. Graney has been commissioned by Pacific Northwest Ballet, has created several large-scale gymnastic performance works, including 'Seven/Uneven' with visual artist Beliz Brother and 'Pier 62/63,' which featured 150 gymnasts aged 8-50 and was presented as part of the Goodwill Games in 1990. Ms. Graney has been choreographing in the Seattle area since 1979, creating over 40 works while living in the Pacific Northwest.

The Pat Graney Company began the 'Keeping the Faith' project in 1992, which they offer to incarcerated women and girls nationwide. The program consists of performances, lecture-demonstrations and workshops for incarcerated women and girls. In 1995, the Company completed a six-month pilot project at Washington State Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, culminating in inmate performances that attracted national press. 2002 marks the seventh consecutive residency of Keeping the Faith in Washington State. In 2000, the Company developed a National Model of Keeping the Faith, where the KTF team will work with local artists and social workers in 4 US cities to set up locally-based programs based on Keeping the Faith.

Ms. Graney presented the Movement Meditation Project, which featured 150 female martial artists in an environmentally designed work at Seattle's Magnuson Park in July, 1996. Austin based composer, Ellen Fullman, collaborated with Ms. Graney on the work. The work was accompanied by both Seattle Kokon Taiko and Ms. Fullman, who played her 'long-stringed instrument,' which stretched to a length of 180 feet.

Ms. Graney’s work, Tattoo, toured to 11 US cities in the 2000/2001 season, as well as going to Valparaiso and Santiago, Chile. Ms. Graney’s most recent work ‘the Vivian girls’ based on the artwork of Henry Darger, toured to 7 US cities in 2004/2005.

Ms. Graney is now working on a book about her twelve-year experience working in the US prison system, and is creating a large-scale performance installation work entitled ‘house of min(d)’.

MARGARET JENKINS (Founding Fellow) is a choreographer, teacher, and mentor to many young artists as well as a designer of unique community-based dance projects. Jenkins began her early training in San Francisco. In the sixties, she moved to New York to study at Juilliard, continued her training at UCLA and returned to New York to dance in the companies of Jack Moore, Viola Farber, Judy Dunn, James Cunningham, Gus Solomons and Twyla Tharp’s original company with Sara Rudner. In addition, Jenkins was a member of the faculty of the Merce Cunningham Studio and often restaged his works for companies in Europe and the United States. In 1970 Jenkins returned to San Francisco and formed her own company. She also opened one of the West Coast's first studio-performing spaces at 2005 Bryant Street, a school for the training of professional modern dancers where Viola Farber and Merce Cunningham were frequent guests.

In addition to the over seventy-five works she has made for her Company, Jenkins' choreographic work has been commissioned by the New Dance Ensemble in Minneapolis, the Repertory Dance Theatre in Salt Lake City, the Oakland Ballet, the Cullberg Ballet of Sweden and Ginko, a modern dance company in Tokyo, Japan. She has received commissions from the National Dance Project, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, and Columbia College in Chicago, as well as being a recipient of a National Dance Residency Project grant. She has set work on various college and university dance departments: CSU Hayward Dance Company through the National College Choreography Initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, UC Santa Cruz, Mills College, and three times for UC Berkeley. In spring of 2003 Jenkins celebrated the 30th anniversary of her Company with a unique season of performances and exhibitions at Fort Mason’s Herbst Pavilion, a 30,000-square-foot warehouse in San Francisco, never before used for dance for which she was presented with a special Isadora Duncan Dance Award. She has also served on the steering committee for the 2002 International Women’s Day Conference in San Francisco and as a founding member of the Bay Area Dance Coalition and Dance/USA.

She is committed to an art of inquiry and to advance the health and future of the field of dance through a variety of projects. She conceived The National Dance Labs (NDL) a “product-driven,” as opposed to “market-driven,” model for creativity in the performing arts. Dance Lab starts with content and process and uses the device of a transparent laboratory to identify potential audiences and methods to reach those audiences. NDL was inaugurated in 2000 by the MJDC, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the University of California, Berkeley, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

In 2004 Jenkins and her Company opened the Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab and launched Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME), which fosters creative exchange and long-term relationships between emerging and established choreographers, and to create an arena for continuing education for choreography outside of the academic environment. Jenkins has also helped to structure and implement Choreographers in Action (CIA) a unique gathering of local choreographers. In addition, Ms. Jenkins is one of the founding members of the Center for Creative Research.

Jenkins’ choreographic activities have included a residency in Kolkata, India (2003) to create a new dance at the Ananda Shankar Center for Performing Arts, the premiere of a new site-specific work, Danger Orange (2004) San Francisco, a three-week teaching residency in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Beijing, China (2004), and the premiere of running with the land (2005) at the opening of the new de Young Museum in the Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden, commissioned by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation. In November of 2005, Jenkins and five members of her Company were invited to Kochi, India to participate in a four-week rehearsal and performance residency. The extended time in India allowed Jenkins to work with Indian dancers in collaboration with her Company to develop source material for the evening-length piece, A Slipping Glimpse which premiered May 17, 2006.
Jenkins has received numerous commissions and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Irvine Fellowship in Dance, the San Francisco Arts Commission Award of Honor, three Isadora Duncan Awards (Izzies), and the Bernard Osher Cultural Award for her outstanding contributions to the arts community in San Francisco and the Bay Area. April 24, 2003 was declared “Margaret Jenkins Day” by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. On that day she also received a Governor’s Commendation from Governor Gray Davis.

RALPH LEMON (Founding Fellow) received a B.A. in English Literature and Theater Arts from the University of Minnesota in 1975. A founding member of The Mixed Blood Theater Company of Minneapolis, he was also a member of the Wigman-inspired environment of the Nancy Hauser Dance Company. He moved to New York City in 1979 and performed with Meredith Monk/The House from 1979-81. He formed Cross Performance/ Ralph Lemon Company in 1985, which for 10 years performed worldwide as a touring dance ensemble, receiving numerous residencies, commissions and grants as well as critical and popular acclaim.

During this period, Lemon's choreographic commissions included works for Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble, Batsheva Dance Company (Israel), Ballet Hispanico, Boston Ballet, Geneva Opera Ballet, Graz Opera Ballet (Austria), The Limon Dance Company, Lyon Opera Ballet (France) and Sydney Dance Company (Australia). He has won numerous awards including eight Choreographer Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; four New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships; a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts fellowship; an American Choreographers Award; the Gold Medal in the 1988 Boston International Choreography Competition; and a 1987 BESSIE Award.

In 1995, Lemon dissolved his touring company and re-conceived Cross Performance, Inc. as an organization dedicated to the creation of new forms of performance and presentation. Cross Performance, Inc. produces performances, films, videos, exhibitions, publications and workshops presented throughout the United States and internationally.

Among the projects currently available are Persephone, Geography: art/race/exile and Tree: belief/ culture/balance (all three books published by Wesleyan University Press); Konbit (1996), a video collage about the Haitian community in Miami, which Lemon directed in collaboration with Lionel Saint Pierre, Zao and DanEl Diaz; Three (1999), a short film merging dance, text and image created with choreographer Bebe Miller and filmmaker Isaac Julien; Mirrors & Smoke, a DVD collaboration with Philip Mallory Jones; and Before and After Geography, a web documentary directed by Wayne Ashley and based on Lemon’s journals, stage notes, rehearsal videos and photographs surrounding the creation and performance of Part 2 of The Geography Trilogy. The web-based chronicle of the development and presentation of Charley Patton, entitled, How can you stay in the house all day and not go anywhere? is a collaboration with media artist John Klima, co-commissioned by Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University and the Walker Art Center. Lemon’s work has been exhibited at Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC; Art Awareness, Lexington, NY and Wesleyan University Center for the Arts, CT. From March – June 2006 Lemon’s mixed-media installation, Walter, will be exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

In 2005, Lemon concluded The Geography Trilogy, an international project created over a nine-year span (1995-2004) that investigated an apparent collision of art, cultures and a search for personal and artistic placement within a broader world arena. Each part of the Trilogy involved research and a creative process that converged to produce multiple works of art. The process included travel and research documentation; contributions from multi-national, multi-disciplinary collaborators and performers; intensive process workshops and rehearsal residencies; and public interactions with the artists. The resulting art works included evening-length dance/theater performances, as well as related visual arts exhibits, video art and documentary, catalogs, books and web-based art works. Part I: Geography, produced by Yale Repertory Theatre, premiered in 1997; Part II: Tree, co-produced by Yale Repertory Theatre, Cross Performance, Inc. and MultiArts Projects & Productions/MAPP, premiered in April 2000; and Part III: Come home Charley Patton (2004) was a co-production of Cross Performance, Inc., the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and MultiArts Projects & Productions. Lemon was awarded a 2005 BESSIE NY Dance and Performance Award for the entire Trilogy.

Lemon was honored with a 1999 CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts and was invited to be a participant in the National Theatre Artist Residency Program, administered by Theatre Communications Group and funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. From 1996-2000 he was an Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre and in 2002 was a Fellow of the Humanities Council and the program in Theater and Dance, Princeton University. He won the 2004 NYFA prize and a 2004 Fellow at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. In 2004 he was a George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center. Lemon is currently an artist-in-residence at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

LIZ LERMAN (Founding Fellow) is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator, and speaker. Described by the Washington Post as "the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art," her dance/theater works have been seen throughout the United States and abroad. Her aesthetic approach spans the range from abstract to personal to political, while her working process emphasizes research, translation between artistic media, and intensive collaboration with dancers and communities. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and has cultivated the company's unique multi-generational ensemble, with dancers whose ages span five decades, into a leading force in contemporary dance.

Liz has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the American Choreographer Award, the American Jewish Congress "Golda" Award, and Washingtonian Magazine's 1988 Washingtonian of the Year. In 2002 her work was recognized with a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, and she was recently honored at the Jewish Cultural Achievement Awards and inducted into the University of Maryland's Hall of Fame. Liz's work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, BalletMet, and the Kennedy Center, among many others. From 1994 to 1996, in collaboration with the Music Hall of Portsmouth, N.H., Liz directed the Shipyard Project, which has been widely noted as an example of the power of art to enhance such values as social capital and civic dialogue. From 1999 to 2002 she led Hallelujah, which engaged people in 15 cities throughout the United States in the creation of a series of dances "in praise of" topics vital to their communities.

In addition to Ferocious Beauty: Genome, her current projects include Chairman Dances and Small Dances About Big Ideas, the latter commissioned by the Harvard Law School to help observe the human rights legacy of the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials. As a frequent keynote speaker and panelist, Liz addresses arts, community, and business organizations both nationally and internationally. She consults regularly with the Mellon Orchestra Forum and Synagogue 3000, and recently participated in Harvard University's Saguaro Seminar, which gathered thinkers to promote the growth of civic connectedness in the United States. She is the author of Teaching Dance to Senior Adults (1983) and the co-author of Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process (2003), and has written articles and essays for such publications as Reconstructionism Today, Faith and Form, Movement Research, the Washington Post Book World, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Community, Culture, and Globalization.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Milwaukee, Liz attended Bennington College and Brandeis University, received her B.A. in dance from the University of Maryland, and an M.A. in dance from George Washington University. She received an honorary doctorate from Williams College in 2006. Liz is married to storyteller Jon Spelman. Their daughter, Anna, is heading to college in the fall.

BEBE MILLER (Founding Fellow), a native New Yorker, has been making dances for over twenty-five years, and has been a Full Professor in Dance at The Ohio State University since 2000. Her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition is a connecting thread throughout her work, and, in order to further a process of group inquiry, she formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985. The company’s most recent work, Landing/Place, involving digital media, live music and dance, premiered in September 2005 and will tour through Fall 2006. In recent years, she has been investigating a mix of theatrical narrative, performance and movement to expand this language, notably in the award winning Verge (2001) and Going To The Wall (1998). In 1999, she, along with choreographer Ralph Lemon and filmmaker Isaac Julien, completed the award-winning, collaborative film, Three.

Collaboration being fundamental to her working process, she has worked with composers, visual artists, writers and filmmakers such as Robin Holcomb, Fred Frith, Don Byron, Caroline Beasley-Baker, Robert Kushner, Ain Gordon and Kit Fitzgerald. Miller has created original works for Boston Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Philadanco, among others. She has collaborated with OSU’s Department of Dance in producing several digital documentation works, including a DVD-ROM of Going To The Wall, a CD-ROM of Prey that accompanies the Labanotation score, and DanceCODES, a software template for choreographic documentation. Necessary Beauty, the Company’s next project, will address the ephemeral intersection of audience, art and beauty with a series of short mixed media works that carry complex emotional resonance in a contained space and time; it will premiere in 2008.

Bebe Miller’s work has been performed internationally in Europe, Asia and the African continent, and nationally in venues ranging from New York City’s Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Walker Center for the Arts, the Wexner Center for the Arts to numerous colleges and universities around the country. She has been honored with three BESSIE (New York Dance and Performance) Awards, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, an American Choreographer’s Award and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. She currently serves on the boards of Dance USA, Dance Theater Workshop and Danspace Project, and is a past member of the International Artists Advisory Board of the Wexner Center for the Arts.

EIKO OTAKE (Founding Fellow), Japanese-born choreographer/dancer, has collaborated with her partner Koma in creating a unique and riveting theater of movement out of stillness, shape, light, and sound since 1972. They studied with Kazuo Ohno in Japan, Manja Chmiel in Germany, and Lucas Hoving in the Netherlands before moving to New York in 1976. Since then, Eiko & Koma have presented their work in theaters, universities, museums, galleries, and festivals worldwide, including five appearances at BAM's Next Wave Festival. For Breath, the "living" gallery installation commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Eiko & Koma performed for four weeks throughout all of the museum’s hours.

Eiko & Koma have created and presented site works as free-admission events at 70 sites for over 30,000 audience members. River takes place in a body of moving water. Performed in a specially modified trailer, Caravan Project is an installation, a “museum by delivery.” Offering, premiered in the Battery Park near the Ground Zero in 2002, is a ritual in communal mourning. Tree Song was presented in the St Mark’s church’s graveyard in 2003. Eiko & Koma’s noted stage collaborations include Be With (2001, with Anna Halprin and Joan Jeanrenaud), When Nights Were Dark (2000, with Joseph Jennings and a Praise Choir), the proscenium version of River (1997, with Kronos Quartet, who performed Somei Satoh’s commissioned score live), and Land (1991, with Robert Mirabal). Eiko & Koma’s recent Death Poem, designed to be performed in intimate spaces and is a meditation on dying. For their newest work Eiko and Koma collaborated with nine young Cambodian painters and Cambodian American composer, Sam-ang Sam. Cambodian Stories was performed in eleven cities around the United States in the spring of 2006.

As a Center for Creative Research (CCR) Resident Artist at Wesleyan University, Eiko has taught monthly Delicious Movement Workshop to both students and faculty and also co-taught the course, Atomic Bomb and Japan with history Professor William Johnston. Eiko will be teaching her own course Movement for Remembering, Forgetting and Mourning at the University of California Los Angeles and Wesleyan University during the 06-07 academic year.

Recipients of two “Bessies,” Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Eiko & Koma were honored with the 2004 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement in modern dance.

DANA REITZ (Founding Fellow) is a choreographer, dancer and visual artist who has developed and produced projects since 1973. Most of these works have been performed in silence to reveal the movement's own musicality. Since the early 1980’s, she has created scores that weave movement and light and has collaborated with lighting artists Beverly Emmons, James Turrell, David Finn, Richard Martin, and, extensively, Jennifer Tipton. Her projects include Unspoken Territory, a solo she created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Necessary Weather, a collaborative work with Tipton and dancer Sara Rudner, Shoreline, Private Collection, Lichttontanz, Suspect Terrain, Circumstantial Evidence, Severe Clear, and Field Papers. In 1996, she and Mikhail Baryshnikov toured together with a program of solos; in 1998, she created Cantata for Two, a duet for Baryshnikov and Tamasaburo Bando (Tokyo). Since then, her works include Gestures for Edwin, Again for Rudy Burckhardt, Cadences for Cunningham and Cage, Some Chamber Pieces, With Meredith in Mind, and Sea Walk.

Her work has been commissioned and produced by the Festival d'Automne in Paris, the Hebbeltheater in Berlin, the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, The Kitchen, and PepsiCo Summerfare, among many others. Reitz has toured extensively as a performer and teacher throughout North America, Europe, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan, and she is currently on the faculty of Bennington College. She is the recipient of two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards, she is the Artistic Director of Field Papers, Inc, and her work has been supported in part by many foundations and public agencies, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc., and The National Endowment for the Arts.

ELIZABETH STREB (Founding Fellow) was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' award in 1997. She is currently the 'Dean's Special Scholar' at New York University at the Draper Program working towards an M.A. in Time and Space studying Physics, Philosophy and Architecture.

Streb's choreography, (she calls it POPACTION) intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, extreme-sports, and Hollywood stunt work into a bristling muscle and motion vocabulary that combines daring and strict precision in the pursuit of attempting to display publicly the aggressive and deep effect of 'pure movement.'

STREB the dancers and the show have been seen on the David Letterman show, in a special on CBS Sunday Morning, on CNN's Showbiz Today, Nickelodeon, NBC's Weekend Today, on MTV, on Larry King Live debating with Dick Armey about the National Endowment for the Arts and on ABC Nightly News with Peter Jennings.

Ms. Streb is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a three-year choreography fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the Endowment, yearly, for subsequent 15 years, two New York Dance and Performance Awards ('Bessie') in 1988 and 1999 for her 'sustained investigation of movement,' a National Dance Residency Program Award sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust, a National Dance Program award from the New England Foundation for the Arts, a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts awards, and a Brandeis Creative Arts Award in 1991.

JAWOLE WILLA JO ZOLLAR (Founding Fellow) was born and raised in Kansas City, MO. She trained with Joseph Stevenson, a student of the legendary Katherine Dunham, and received a B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and an M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University. In 1980, she moved to New York City to study with Dianne McIntyre at Sounds in Motion. She founded Urban Bush Women in 1984.

In addition to thirty works for UBW, Jawole has created works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ballet Arizona, Philadanco, University of Maryland, University of Florida, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and others. Her many positions as a teacher and speaker include Worlds of Thought Resident Scholar at Mankato State University (1993-94), Regents Lecturer in the Departments of Dance and World Arts and Culture at UCLA (1995-96), Visiting Artist at Ohio State University (1996), and the Abramowitz Memorial Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998). She was named Alumna of the Year by University of Missouri (1993) and Florida State University (1997), and awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Columbia College, Chicago (2002). She also received the Martin Luther King Distinguished Service Award from Florida State University, where she holds a tenured position as the Nancy Smith Fichter Professor in Dance. Zollar directs the Urban Bush Women Summer Institute, an intensive training program in dance and community engagement for artists with leadership potential interested in developing a community focus in their art-making.

AIN GORDON (Artist) is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, a two-time NYFA Fellow and the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting. His work has been commissioned/produced/presented by New York Theater Workshop, Soho Rep., The Public Theatre, 651 ARTS, Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space 122, and HERE (all NYC); the Mark Taper Forum (CA), the George Street Playhouse (NJ), the Krannert Center (IL), the Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), DiverseWorks (TX), Spirit Square (NC), VSA North Fourth Arts Center (NM), Jacob’s Pillow (MA), LexArts (KY), The Kitchen Theatre (NYS), and Dance Space (DC), etc. Collaborations with David Gordon were commissioned and produced by American Repertory Theatre (MA), American Conservatory Theater (CA) and American Music Theatre Festival (PA). Gordon twice collaborated with choreographer Bebe Miller on works presented at the Wexner Center (OH), Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents (MT), and the Bates Dance Festival (ME), etc. As a performer, Gordon appeared in the Off-Broadway run of Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell and continues to tour the production to venues including UCLA Live, Guild Hall (LI), TBA Festival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR), The ICA Boston (Elliot Norton Award nom), Vineyard Playhouse (MA), the Walker Art Center (MN), and Painted Bride Art Center (PA), etc. Gordon also wrote for NBC’s “Will & Grace.” Gordon has received support from the Multi-Arts Production Fund (MAP), the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Peg Santvoord Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Performance Network, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, AT&T OnStage, and the Arts Presenters Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Program funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Trust etc.

Gordon has been a guest speaker/facilitator/teacher for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (NY), the Surdna Foundation (NY), the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (MD), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (NY), the Kentucky Writer’s Conference, Dance USA (DC), the University of Minnesota, Wesleyan University (CT), the University of Limerick & the Dublin Dance Festival (Ireland), Chicago Dancemakers Forum and Columbia College (IL), Ohio State University, and Dartmouth College (NH), etc. Currently, Gordon is a Core Writer of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, CCR Artist-in-Residence, a member of the Board of Directors of Performance Space 122, and Chair of the Danspace Project Artist Advisory Board. He has been Co-Director of the Pick Up Performance Co(S) since 1992.