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Alumnae Dianne McIntyre and Abby Zbikowski Receive USA Fellow Awards

January 30, 2020

Alumnae Dianne McIntyre and Abby Zbikowski Receive USA Fellow Awards

Dianne McIntyre and Abby Zbikowski

The United States Artists (USA) announced that Ohio State Dance Alumnae Dianne McIntyre (BFA 1969) and Abby Zbikowski (MFA 2012) are two of fifty recipients of their 2020 USA Fellow award.  Each of the fifty recipients will receive a $50,000 cash award of unrestricted funds.  President & CEO Deana Haggag of USA notes, “The 2020 class is the largest cohort of Fellows we have awarded since we relocated to Chicago, and each and every one of them stands out as a visionary influence in their respective field.”

Dianne McIntyre is a dancer, choreographer, researcher, mentor, director, producer, and dance-driven dramatist. McIntyre’s artistic intention is to “express dance as music moving.” She has sustained a career over many decades with choreography in concert dance, theatre, film, and opera.

In the 1970s, after moving from Ohio to New York City, she founded Sounds in Motion in Harlem, which grew from a dance/music company into a school into a mecca for artists, scholars, and activists through the 1980s.

Current work for her company and others is performed internationally and encompasses dance connections with live “jazz” music, cultural history, social movements, personal narrative, and legend. She has transformed words into dance, from the work of acclaimed writers Ntozake Shange, James Baldwin, and August Wilson to the aviator stories of her mother. Her work spans genres and collaborators including Olu Dara, Lester Bowie, Cecil Taylor, Amina Claudine Myers, Bartlett Sher, Regina Taylor, and Jonathan Demme. She has choreographed for Broadway plays, London’s West End, over forty regional theatre productions, and for film with Beloved. She received an Emmy nomination for HBO’s Miss Evers’ Boys.

Her mentors are Gus Solomons, jr., Louise Roberts of Clark Center, Vera Blaine, and Helen Alkire as dance faculty of The Ohio State University and Elaine Gibbs Redmond. McIntyre’s numerous accolades include a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Bessies, two Honorary Doctorate Degrees, two Audelco Awards, and a Helen Hayes Theatre Award.

Portrait photo by McKinley Wiley.

diannemcintyre.com

Abby Zbikowski created her company Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 with founding members Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley. Zbikowski received the 2017 Juried Bessie Award for her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures to create works of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger.” In 2018 Dance Umbrella UK awarded her a “Choreographer of the Future” commission. She is an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence at the Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University (2017-19), current artist in residence at New York Live Arts (2018-20), and has been in residence at Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, and the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics.

She is an assistant professor of Dance at the University of Illinois and on faculty at American Dance Festival. She has taught at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia; at Festival Un Pas Vers L’Avant in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and studied at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal. Zbikowski holds a BFA in dance from Temple University and an MFA from The Ohio State University.

Zbikowski has performed with Charles O. Anderson/Dance Theater X, Momar Ndiaye, and the Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project. Her company has been presented nationally, performing at venues such as Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA, and the Fuse Box Festival in Austin, TX, among others. Her company’s new work Radioactive Practice is set to premiere at New York Live Arts in New York City in March 2020.

Portrait photo by Effy Falck.

abbyznewutility.org

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