Lecturer in Dance Dyane Harvey-Salaam and Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence Abby Zbikowski are among the winners of 2017 BESSIE (New York Dance and Performance) Awards.
Along with two other dance artists/companies, Harvey-Salaam was honored in the Outstanding Production category for her work at DanceAfrica and BAM Howard Gilman Opera House and her work with Forces of Nature Dance Theater that use “West African, hip-hop, and modern dance forms to find new ways of storytelling and new ways to deliver healing truths.” Harvey-Salaam is an accomplished performing artist, founding member of Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, educator, and choreographer. Each semester, she teaches the popular, cross-listed dance and African American studies course, “The American Dance Experience and Africanist Dance Practices.”
The Juried BESSIE was awarded to Zbikowski for “her rigorous and utterly unique development of an authentic movement vocabulary, employed in complex and demanding structures to create dances of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger.” Zbikowski is the founder of Abby Z and the New Utility, Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and one of four inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence at Princeton.
