The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Dance at Princeton University announces three artists as Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence for the 2023-2024 academic year: Amy Hall Garner, Shamel Pitts, and Donna Uchizono. All three artists are creating new works or teaching repertory works that will be performed at the Princeton Dance Festival in December.
Launched in 2017, the Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence Program fosters the Program in Dance’s connections with the dance field. It provides selected professional choreographers with resources and a rich environment to develop their work and offers opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to engage with diverse creative practices. The artists share their work and processes with the Princeton community through workshops, conversations, residencies, open rehearsals, and performances. The program is designed to be flexible enough to create meaningful interactions between artists and students, allowing artists to develop engagement activities to suit the interests of the students, and allowing students to create projects that involve the selected artists. Other examples of such engagement activities include guest-teaching a class, selecting students to apprentice as choreographic assistants, participating in dinners and conversations with students, and advising student projects.
Photo credit: Luis Alberto Rodriguez
Amy Hall Garner, a guest artist in the dance program, is an internationally known choreographer based in New York City creating works in the ballet, modern, and theatrical genres. Her work has been commissioned by numerous dance companies and organizations including New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Miami City Ballet, Paul Taylor Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, BalletX, Ailey II, ABT Studio Company, Collage Dance Collective, Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum, and The Juilliard School, of which she is a graduate. Garner created a new children’s ballet titled Rita Finds Home for The Joffrey Ballet and reimagined Baltimore School for the Arts’ new production of The Nutcracker. Currently, Garner is the resident choreographer at Carolina Ballet. She personally coached Grammy Award winner Beyoncé, providing additional choreography for The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour. Her theatrical choreography credits include The Color Purple (Milwaukee Repertory Theater), Choir Boy (Yale Repertory Theatre), and Dreamgirls (Paramount Theatre). Her numerous awards and fellowships include participating in Alvin Ailey’s New Directions Choreography Lab supported by the Ford Foundation, one of the first recipients of the Joffrey Ballet’s Choreography of Color Award (now titled Winning Works), and a Virginia B. Toulmin Fellow through the Center for Ballet and the Arts–National Sawdust Partnership. As a teaching artist, Garner is an adjunct professor at New York University’s New School on Broadway at Tisch School of the Arts.
Hall Garner is creating a new work with 16 Princeton dance students, assisted by Abdur Jackson, through a co-curricular teaching and rehearsal process.
Photography by Itai Zwecker
Shamel Pitts, appointed for the fall semester as a lecturer in dance, is a performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, and teacher. Pitts began his dance training at LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at The Ailey School and then earned his B.F.A. in Dance from The Juilliard School. He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance and BJM Danse Montreal. He 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 performance art works known as his “BLACK series” which has been performed and toured extensively to many festivals around the world. He is an adjunct faculty member at The Juilliard School and has been an artist in residence at Harvard University and New York University. Pitts is the choreographer of the play Help by acclaimed poet and playwright Claudia Rankine, directed by Taibi Magar, and commissioned at The Shed in New York. He is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowships, a 2018 Princess Grace Award in Choreography, a 2019 New York State Council on the Arts Artist Fellowship Award in Choreography, and a 2020 Jacob’s Pillow artist in residence. Pitts is the founding artistic director of TRIBE, a New York City-based multidisciplinary arts collective.
In the fall course, “Dance Performance Workshop: Repertory II,” Pitts is setting his work, bubbles, on a cast of six Princeton students, assisted by Tushrik Fredericks.
Photo credit: Peggy Jarrell Kaplan
Donna Uchizono, appointed as a visiting professor in dance, is artistic director of Donna Uchizono Dance Company, which has performed throughout the United States, Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia. She has received public and critical recognition for her innovative movement language and distinct wit, recognized by notable commissions for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Paula Vogel, David Hammons, and Oliver Sacks. In 2011, after decades of critically acclaimed dance works that toured nationally and internationally, Uchizono was identified by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Dance Heritage Coalition as a master choreographer whose works require preservation. In addition to being a Guggenheim Fellow, United States Artists Fellow, and New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award winner, she has been recognized by many awards, including an Alpert Award in Dance and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Arts International, Foundation for Contemporary Performance, National Performance Network, Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Greenwall Foundation, and New Music USA, among many others. Uchizono is one of three choreographers creating the tri-section piece The March to premiere in the opening season at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in December 2023.
In the fall course, “Dance Performance Workshop: Repertory IV,” Uchizono is setting an excerpt of her work, State of Mind (1999), on a cast of four Princeton students.
Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence are chosen yearly through a nomination process and include choreographers at various stages of their careers exploring a wide range of aesthetics, including those who may not otherwise fit easily into the Dance Program’s curriculum. The Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence program is supported through a gift from Margaret C. and William R. Hearst.
The 2023 Princeton Dance Festival will be performed on December 1 at 8:00 p.m., December 2 at 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and December 3 at 2:00 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre at McCarter Theatre Center. Other choreographers whose work will be performed include Brian Brooks, Bill T. Jones staged by Catherine Cabeen, and Ishita Mili. The range of works includes contemporary ballet, Indian/hip hop fusion, and contemporary dance works from a multidisciplinary perspective. The December 1 performance will be open-captioned, and December 3 will be a relaxed performance.
Visit the Lewis Center website for more information on the Program in Dance, the Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence program, the Princeton Dance Festival, and the more than 100 other performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures offered each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of them free.
