Kayla Hamilton

2017 Bessie recipients for “Outstanding Performance,” the Skeleton Architecture collective originated through Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s curated evening during Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost & Found.

The collective is a vessel of Black womyn and gender non-conforming artists rooted in the rigor and power of the collective in practice. They commit to engaging embodied research to support the African Diasporic experiences.

Founded by Maria Bauman in 2009, MBDance creates Black & queer speculative dance artwork centering our non-linear and linear stories, our physicality, our ancestors, and our ways of being in performance-ritual settings without tragedizing or tokenizing us.

MBDance makes honest and bold art from a sense of physical and emotional power, an insistence on equity, and a fascination with intimacy and relationship.

Gesel Mason Performance Projects is a project-based dance company that seeks to create meaningful, relevant, and compelling art events to encourage compassion and inquiry.

Founded by Gesel Mason, the company utilizes dance, theater, humor, and storytelling to bring visibility to voices unheard, situations neglected, or perspectives considered taboo

Sydnie L. Mosley Dances (SLMDances) works with communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance-theater performance.  

 Their works reflect real life experiences central to our identities, and pulls focus to the stories of women and Black folks. The movement vocabulary fluidly integrates modern dance techniques and movement of the African Diaspora, while dancers frequently use their voice with spoken text and audible breath.

The dancers, choreographers, directors, and companies on Dance Magazine’s annual “25 to Watch” list offer heartening, imaginative, exciting possible answers to the question, “Where is the dance field headed next?”

While you might not be familiar with the up-and-comers yet, editors and contributors from across the dance world predict that we’ll be hearing a lot more from these artists on the verge of a breakout in 2025 and beyond.

Awarded to the ensemble of the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa for Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found.

The New York Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work by independent dance artists in NYC for 40 years.

Launched in 2020 as a three-cycle program, Disability Futures was designed in response to the disproportionate lack of recognition, funding, and professional resources afforded to disabled creative practitioners despite their outsized cultural impact.

Fellows are selected through a process of peer nominations followed by the selection of finalists by a group of rotating panelists. Each cohort is ultimately confirmed by an advisory council of disabled creative practitioners who collectively guide the initiative.

Finding a language for life —the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Pina Bausch Foundation have been following up on Pina Bausch’s credo since 2016 with a co-developed grant program.

The Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreography is for artists in the field of dance and choreography seeking to enhance their own artistic endeavors together with a cooperating partner of their choice.

The Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship supports early career artists based in Minnesota and New York City who are working in and across multiple artistic fields.

Jerome Foundation seeks to serve artists who take creative risks in exploring, expanding, imagining, or re-imagining creative practices and experiences; reclaiming or reviving traditional forms in original ways; and/or questioning, challenging, or disrupting cultural norms.

The National Dance Project (NDP) supports the creation and U.S. touring of new dance projects and connects artists, cultural organizations, and audiences across the nation.

Now in its third decade, National Dance Project is widely recognized as one of the country’s major sources of funding and field building for dance.

Outstanding Educators of the Year go through a highly selective process starting with recommendations from school supervisors and culminating in a vote by EU’s Advisory Council, a prestigious group of school administrators, political leaders, business executives, university academics representing major disciplines, the press, and supporting philanthropists.

In 2006 the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation established the Wynn Newhouse Awards. This awards program provides grants to artists of excellence who happen to have disabilities.

Winners will be chosen by a committee composed of persons respected in the arts and disabilities communities.