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DANCE NEWS: The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Announces 2024-2025 Fellows
Roster Includes NYU Professors & Others Focusing on Choreography, Dance Education, Theater, Black Diasporic Studies & Art History
The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University (CBA), an international research institute for scholars and artists of ballet and its related arts and sciences, announces nine fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year. The distinguished roster represents a range of disciplines, including art history, choreography, dance education, and Black diasporic studies.
The announcement includes individuals in four programs:
- MeowMeow is awarded the Director's Fellowship, recognizing a distinguished artist or scholar and supporting them in developing a project focused on dance and its related arts and sciences.
- Alexander Bevilacqua, Honey Crawford, Deborah Damast, Catherine Quan Damman, and Shamel Pitts are Resident Fellows, the CBA’s core program offering scholars and artists across all disciplines support to develop projects that expand the way we think about the history, practice, and performance of dance.
- Haley Winegarden Murphree is awarded the CBA-Juilliard Fellowship, providing a stimulating environment, intellectual resources, and individualized support for emerging artists.
- Michele Byrd-McPhee and Mio Ishikawa are winners of the CBA-Chelsea Factory Fellowship, which fosters the development of scholarly and artistic work in ballet, dance, and related fields.
- The Center also hosts three visiting scholars: Phil Chan, co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface and president of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation; Virginia Johnson, former artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem; and Constantina Theofanopoulou, research assistant professor at Rockefeller University.
“We are thrilled to welcome this extraordinary group of fellows to CBA and NYU this academic year. Their diverse disciplines—including theater, choreography, art history, Black diasporic studies, street and club dance, and dance education—bring a wealth of perspectives,” says Jennifer Homans, CBA founder and director.
Since its founding in 2014, the CBA has hosted 194 fellows from 19 countries, including 123 artists and 71 scholars. It offers essential time, space, and support for creating new projects and a community that allows artists and scholars to learn from and collaborate with individuals they might not otherwise meet.
Director’s Fellow:
MeowMeow specializes in Weimar and French chanson repertoire as well as jump-cut explorations of Schubert and Schumann. Her unique brand of subversive entertainment has hypnotized, inspired, and thrilled audiences worldwide, including at London’s West End, New York’s Lincoln Center, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Sydney Opera House. Her original musical theater works have been commissioned by David Bowie, Pina Bausch, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others. Her album, Hotel Amour with Pink Martini’s Thomas Lauderdale, was ranked in the Times UK Top 100 albums of 2019. MeowMeow has performed what she describes as “orchestrated chaos” in Meow’s Pandemonium with The London Philharmonic, and the Seattle, Sydney, Bergen, Vancouver and San Francisco symphony orchestras. Her theater credits include Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London, Jenny in Die Dreigroschenoper with the London Philharmonic in Paris and London, Anna in Die Sieben Todsünden at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Meow created "fantastical history" song cycles for crumbling theaters and bespoke civic events, including a piece for the Liverpool Presents Sgt. Pepper at 50 that involved the city's brass bands, a "riot" and a requiem in a graveyard. She performed A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2019 and made her Carnegie Hall debut last spring with Sequins and Satire, Divas and Disruptors: The Wild Women of Weimar.
Resident Fellows:
Alexander Bevilacqua is associate professor of history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European
Enlightenment, which was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement books of the year and awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor with Frederic Clark of Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, the Library of Congress, the Warburg Institute, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. His current book project, The Face of Battle: Chivalry and the Racial Imagination, examines the performance of human difference at European princely courts.
Project: “Dance and Difference from the Moresca to the Ballet de Cour.” Scholars of early European ballet are divided between emphasizing its transcendent aspiration to make the ideal world tangible and its ties to mock warfare and chivalric antagonism. At stake in this debate is the significance of the many impersonations that the ballet inherited from late-medieval mummery. Wild men, African queens, satyrs, and Indigenous Americans appeared again and again on the stages of the ballet-besotted princely courts of seventeenth-century Europe. Bevilacqua will research the relationship of these early ballets—performed by noble amateurs as well as trained professionals—to the transgressive dances of the Renaissance, such as the rhythmic, twisting moresca. His aim is to show that the court ballet can deepen our understanding of the European race-making imagination at the beginning of the modern era.
Honey Crawford is assistant professor of English and dramatic literature at New York University. She studies Afro-Brazilian cultural performance as both a scholar and a practitioner, and she positions women-driven spectacles of Black consciousness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries against prevalent discourse on the Black diaspora and performance studies. Her research privileges embodied knowledge and oral traditions while investigating attempts to capture or contain these forms in literature and text-centric works.
Her current book project, titled Negra Demais!: Overwhelming Performances of Afro Brazilian Femininity, pays close attention to theatrical traditions that press against the bounds of propriety and indulge in an aesthetic of abundance, identifying a preoccupation with the transgressive potential held in performances of Black feminine power. Crawford has combined her research interests with practical contributions to the field of theater and performance, most recently as a dramaturgical researcher with Front Row Productions for the forthcoming Broadway production of Black Orpheus. She previously completed dramaturgical research for Lynn Nottage in her adaptation of Vinicius de Moraes’ Orfeu da Conceição, also with Front Row Productions.
Project: “Tripping Tongues: Stumbling through Black Diaspora”
Deborah Damast is associate professor and director of dance education at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where she teaches, choreographs, and directs concerts, Kaleidoscope Dancers, and Uganda study abroad. She served on boards of NYSDEA (Past-President), NDEO, DEiP, Peridance, Misty Copeland’s BE BOLD, and Dance Teacher, and she has presented at numerous conferences. Her choreography has been shown at over 40 venues in New York City, including Ailey Citigroup and Radio City Music Hall, and internationally in Japan, Uganda, Korea, and Italy. She has taught at 92Y, Peridance, Oregon Ballet Theatre, The Yard, New York City Ballet, and West Virginia University, and she has written curriculum for Peridance, Paul Taylor, Carnegie Hall, and the New York City Department of Education. She received grants from NYU’s inaugural Mid-Career Leadership initiative, as well as Caring Culture, Innovation and Diversity, Faculty Challenge, and Internationalizing the Curriculum grants. She is the recipient of the NYU GSU Star Faculty Award, NDEO Outstanding Dance Educator Award, Steinhardt Teaching Excellence Award, Dance Teacher Magazine Award, NYSDEA Outstanding Leadership Award, and 2023 Martha Hill Mid-Career Award.
Project: “What Can Dance Teach Us About Leadership?” Damast aims to develop an embodied practice informed by the fields of dance education, leadership, and women's studies to identify movement skills and concepts that can be employed to enhance leadership.
Catherine Quan Damman is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where she teaches and advises graduate work on feminist and queer approaches to global modern and contemporary art. She is completing her first monograph, Performance: A Deceptive History, which received a 2022–2023 ACLS Fellowship. She is a contributing editor at BOMB and a former frequent contributor to Artforum.
Project: “Picturing Black Physicality” considers how a multigenerational cohort of Black artists mounted forceful rejoinders to modernism's visual invocations of dance, which historically lay flush with the very terms that plague racist constructions of bodies, physicality, and their presumed expressivity. Across the twentieth century such artists—among them Jacob Lawrence, Barkley Hendricks, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar—make images of both Blackness and dancing anew.
Shamel Pitts is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award winner. A performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, director, and teacher, Pitts was born in Brooklyn and began his dance training at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at the Ailey School. He won a first prize in the National Arts Competition from YoungArts, earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in dance from the Juilliard School, and was awarded the Martha Hill Award for excellence in dance. He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance and Ballet Jazz Montreál. Pitts danced with Batsheva Dance Company for seven years under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin and is a certified teacher of Gaga movement language. Pitts has created a triptych of award-winning multidisciplinary performances, with his arts collective TRIBE, known as his “BLACK series,” which has toured extensively to many festivals and performance spaces around the world since 2016. He is an adjunct professor at Juilliard, and was an artist-in-residence at Harvard University and Jacob’s Pillow. He received a Princess Grace Award in Choreography, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Project: Pitts plan to continue discovering his embodiment practice of movement, dance, choreography, and multidisciplinary performance art as well as prioritizing an intentional focused space towards deeper excavation within his roles as artistic director and teacher.
CBA-Juilliard Fellow
Haley Winegarden Murphree is a freelance choreographer and dancer. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School and has performed works by Justin Peck, Ohad Naharin, James Whiteside, Sonya Tayeh, Donald McKayle, Amy Hall Garner, Troy Schumacher, Norbert De La Cruz III, Jawole Jo Willa Zollar, and Spenser Theberge and Jermaine Spivey.
Murphree has worked as a choreographer with Orlando Ballet II, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, Nevada Ballet Theatre, and the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She was awarded the 2022 Kaatsbaan Playing Field Choreography Award. She won the Héctor Zaraspe Prize, awarded to a graduating senior of the Juilliard Dance Division who has shown outstanding talent and development as a choreographer. In December 2023, she made her debut at the Joyce Theater in the Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes.
Project: “Rehearsal Episode” will explore the beginnings of creating a 60-minute contemporary ballet set to multiple musical works composed by 22-year old, self-taught classical composer, Joshua Kyan Aalampour. Murphree aims to discover ways to expand the traditional structure of an evening-length ballet while staying true to it, and to explore musical intricacies and push the athletic form of the ballet language.
CBA-Chelsea Factory Fellows
Michele Byrd-McPhee is a street dancer, arts activist, and tireless advocate for girls and women who works to decolonize Hip-Hop culture along gender, sex, and cultural and socio-historic racial lines. With a bachelor’s degree from Temple University and a master’s degree from Drexel University, Byrd-Mcphee has worked in different sectors of the entertainment industry, including as production coordinator at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and senior music coordinator at Late Night with Seth Meyers. Winner of the 2023 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field, she won the 2020 Integrated Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she created and taught the course “Hip-Hop, Women and the World.” Byrd-McPhee has also served as a grant panelist for the McKnight Foundation, DanceNYC, and as a voting member of the Bessie Award Committee. Presently, Byrd-McPhee continues her 20-year tenure as executive director for Ladies of Hip-Hop and artistic director of LDC (LOHH Dance Collective).
Project: “Black Dancing Bodies” (BDB) was launched by Byrd-McPhee in 2018 as an initiative to uplift and celebrate Black women in street and club dance culture. BDB is an ongoing street and club dance project addressing the erasure, miscoding, and often intentional exclusion of Black women’s work and voices. BDB has embarked on the journey to collect, preserve and tell the stories of these women through dance works, interviews and photo documentation.
Mio Ishikawa is a Japanese movement artist based in New York City, working collaboratively across multiple artistic media. Ishikawa trained at the Juilliard School (BFA 2019) and has performed with Sidra Bell Dance New York, Punchdrunk's Sleep No More NYC, and with choreographers Stefanie Batten Bland, Austin Goodwin, Kyle Abraham, Ivan Perez, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Michelle Dorrance, Maleek Washington, Celia Rowlson-Hall, and Amy J Gardner. Her works have been presented at High Line Nine Gallery in Chelsea, Walnut Hill School for the Arts, and the New World Symphony in Miami. Ishikawa choreographed and directed the movements for photographers Tatyana Nagayeva, Olga Rabetskaya and Pearlin Lii. Ishikawa is a co-founder and an associate director of a dance platform BODYSONNET. As a core member, she has been a part of residencies in the United States and Germany and has produced dance performances and films. She was a 2023-2024 CBA-Juilliard Fellow.
Project: “Ma” is a work examining the idea of selflessness as freedom that is inspired by the Sengoku Period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This research is dedicated to human resilience and the relationship of freedom and selflessness throughout one of Japan’s most arduous years of civil war and profound unrest.
Visiting Scholars
Phil Chan is co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, an organization dedicated to eliminating outdated and offensive stereotypes of Asians onstage, and president of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation, which champions Asian voices in the arts. A graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School, Chan is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact. He has held fellowships with NYU, Harvard, the Manhattan School of Music, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Drexel, and the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris. As a writer, he served as the Executive Editor for FLATT Magazine and contributed to Dance Europe Magazine, Dance Magazine, Dance Business Weekly, and the Huffington Post. He served multiple years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel and the Jadin Wong Award panel presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. His latest choreography project, the "Ballet des Porcelaines,” premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2021 and toured throughout 2022.
Project: “Asian American Pipeline Study” Through the founding of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation, Chan will look at structures that actually build equity and opportunities for underrepresented groups in the field. From 10,000 Dreams Choreography festivals to the pipeline study with Drexel University and Brigham Young University, he will examine what building resources and opportunities looks like in practice in the ballet world.
Virginia Johnson is a founding member and former principal dancer and artistic director of Dance Theatre of gaining acclaim in a broad range of works by George Balanchine, Michel Fokine, Glen Tetley and others. Her performances in Giselle, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Fall River Legend were recorded for broadcast on network and cable television. After retiring as a dancer in 1997, she resumed work on an undergraduate degree in journalism, a step that led to the creation of POINTE Magazine. She is the founding editor of that publication and served as editor-in-chief from 2000-2009. At the request of DTH co-founder Arthur Mitchell, she returned to DTH as artistic director in 2010, a post she held until last year. She has received numerous honors and awards as well as honorary doctorates from Cornish College of the Arts, Harlem. Her 28-year performance career with DTH took her around the world, gaining acclaim in a broad range of works by George Balanchine, Michel Fokine, Glen Tetley and others. Her performances in Giselle, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Fall River Legend were recorded for broadcast on network and cable television. After retiring as a dancer in 1997, she resumed work on an undergraduate degree in journalism, a step that led to the creation of POINTE Magazine. She is the founding editor of that publication and served as editor-in-chief from 2000-2009. At the request of DTH co-founder Arthur Mitchell, she returned to DTH as artistic director in 2010, a post she held until last year. She has received numerous honors and awards as well as honorary doctorates from Cornish College of the Arts, Swarthmore and Juilliard. She serves on the advisory board of Dance NYC and is on the Board of Works & Process.
Project: Johnson’s time at CBA will be devoted to a non-fiction book that looks at the forces driving ballet’s evolution in the early decades of the twenty-first century. It will include interviews with key individuals who are part of this evolution.
Constantina Theofanopoulou is the Herbert and Nell Singer Research Assistant Professor at Rockefeller University and research associate at Emory University and the United States Department of Veteran Affairs. Her research aims to understand the neural circuits of complex sensory-motor behaviors that serve social communication, specifically speech and dance, and to identify potential therapies for speech and motor deficits, such as those encountered in Parkinson’s disease. Her scientific findings in the neurobiology of dance have garnered worldwide media attention and more than 20 scientific awards. She has been named a Next Generation Leader by the Allen Institute and included in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for 2021. She is actively involved in disseminating science to non-scientists and supporting underrepresented minorities and women in science, including as a STEM mentor in the New York Academy of Sciences and as a council member of the Rockefeller Inclusive Science Initiative. Theofanopoulou is a flamenco dancer who has performed in numerous solo and group shows worldwide and, in 2012, she was awarded with the first flamenco prize by the Spanish Dance Society.
Project: Theofanopoulou will explore three topics: the neurobiology of human speech and dance, including a comparison of the brain pathways involved in these fundamental modes of sensorimotor communication across motor and other domains; the potential therapeutic benefits of dance-based interventions for individuals with speech and other deficits; and human evolution, shedding light on the origins of speech and dance.
