Dance Past Faculty

John Heginbotham

John Heginbotham headshot

Photo by Bud Lammers

About

Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, John Heginbotham is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. John graduated from The Juilliard School in 1993 with a BFA in Dance and was awarded the Martha Hill Prize for Sustained Achievement in Dance. He subsequently performed in the work of Pam Tanowitz, John Jasperse, Rebecca Stenn, Vanessa Walters, and Pilobolus Dance Theater, among others. From 1995 – 1998, he was a member of Susan Marshall & Company, originating roles in her evening-length works The Most Dangerous Room in the House and the award-winning dance opera composed by Philip Glass, Les Enfants Terribles.

John was a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) from 1998 – 2012, performing lead roles in L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato; The Hard Nut; Four Saints in Three Acts; and Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare. During his time with MMDG, he toured across the United States and abroad with artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, The Bad Plus, Zakir Hussain, and he performed with opera companies including The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, and English National Opera.

In 2011, he founded Dance Heginbotham (DH), a Brooklyn-based performance group devoted to the presentation of his dance and theatrical work. The company has performed at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Carolina Performing Arts, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Right Now Music Festival (Seoul, South Korea), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Vail International Dance Festival, among others. The US State Department and BAM recently announced that DH was one of only three companies chosen to represent the USA as participants in the DanceMotion USASM program. With this cultural exchange initiative, DH will travel to Indonesia, Laos, and the Philippines in the 2015-16 season.

In addition to his work with DH, John has provided choreography for a variety of independent projects including several operas (Maria de Buenos Aires at the Cork Opera House, Alceste with the American Classical Orchestra, The Magic Flute at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis) and Isaac Mizrahi’s Peter and the Wolf for the Guggenheim Works and Process Series, among others. In July 2014, The Atlanta Ballet premiered his first ballet, Angel’s Share, and in June 2015, John choreographed Daniel Fish’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, presented by Bard SummerScape.

A frequent collaborator with contemporary composers and live musicians, John has worked with artists and ensembles including Alarm Will Sound, American Classical Orchestra, Brooklyn Rider, Fischerspooner, Raymond Scott Orchestrette, Tyondai Braxton, Colin Jacobsen, Gabriel Kahane, Ethan Iverson, Yegor Shevtsov, and Shara Worden, among others.

John is the recipient of the 2014 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and two Jerome Robbins Foundation New Essential Works (NEW) Fellowships (2010 and 2012). He is on faculty at Princeton University, is the Director of the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble at Dartmouth College, and is a founding teacher of Dance for PD®, an ongoing collaboration between the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinson Group.

Campus Address

Lewis Center for the Arts
185 Nassau Street

Email Address

jh32@princeton.edu