On May 7 in Chancellor Green Rotunda, senior visual arts and dance student Bree White received the Service to the LGBTQA Community Award at Princeton’s Lavender Graduation ceremony. Each year this ceremony, hosted by Princeton’s LGBT Center, celebrates the achievements of graduating undergraduate and graduate students and of faculty and staff who support the LGBT community.

White was nominated by Professor of Dance Judith Hamera, who noted that “[Bree] has engaged both student and professional choreographers on issues of gendering in dance, prompting them to rethink conventional male/female binaries beginning with the audition process. Because of Bree, dancers and choreographers on this campus, and in the New York dance world, think more subtly about gender rather than defaulting to binary presumptions.”

Earlier in April, White conceived, choreographed, and presented a new, interactive performance work entitled Petrichor that incorporated dance, sculpture, music and text/language to explore being “other.”

“This award is a huge honor and we are thrilled that a Lewis Center for the Arts student is its recipient this year,” said Stacy Wolf, Professor of Theater and Acting Chair of the Lewis Center. “Bree is a living example of the mutual dependence of the political and the artistic.”

To learn more about the LGBT Center at Princeton, visit lgbt.princeton.edu.