Joyce Award Winners

Camille A. Brown with DANCECleveland

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Camille A. Brown received a Joyce Award to collaborate with DANCECleveland to create, Black Girl, a powerful dance and music composition that will depict the complexities of carving out a positive identity for African American females in urban American culture. Brown and her dancers will interview communities of African American women, both young and old, in Cleveland and other parts of the country. Their struggles and triumphs will be incorporated as spoken text during the performance. Combining history and musicology with the fantastical approach of imagery in “Alice in Wonderland,” this work will shed light on feminism, patriarchy, stereotypes and beauty. The piece will premiere in New York and tour the country in 2015.

Ms. Brown is the 2013 recipient of The International Association of Blacks in Dance Founders Award, winner of the prestigious Princess Grace Award (Choreography), the Mariam McGlone Emerging Choreographer Award (Wesleyan University), and the 2012 City College of New York Women & Culture Award.

Informed by her music background as a clarinetist, she creates choreography that utilizes musical composition as storytelling investigating the silent space within the measure, and filling it with mesmerizing movement.

Camille A. Brown’s choreography and dynamic performances have led her to receive a Bessie nomination for Best Performance in her work, The Evolution of a Secured Feminine, and a Best Choreography nomination from the Black Theater Arts Alliance for her debut work set on the Ailey company, The Groove To Nobody’s Business, and was among the first cohort of fellows for Ailey’s New Directions Choreography Lab.

Dance companies that have commissioned her work are: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Philadanco, Urban Bush Women, Complexions, Ailey II, Ballet Memphis, TU Dance, and Hubbard Street II, among others. Camille and her dancers have performed at major dance venues around the country including The Joyce Theater, Bates Dance Festival, Whitebird Dance, and Jacob’s Pillow. Her works have been performed at The Kennedy Center, The Apollo, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Madison Square Garden, and New York City Center. She was the Choreographer for Saverio Palatella’s line, Whole¬garment 3D, for New York Fashion Week in 2008. A graduate of the LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts, Ms. Brown earned a B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. From 2001-2007 she was a member of Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, and was a guest artist with Rennie Harris’ Puremovement, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (2008 and 2011).

A career highlight for Camille was being named choreographer for the Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire in 2012, along with the Off-Broadway musical production, Soul Doctor. She also choreographed a production of Pins & Needles in 2011 presented by The Foundry Theater. Ms. Brown recently choreographed William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, for The McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ, and is the Movement Consultant for an Untitled work in development with poet-playwright Marcus Gardley and The Foundry Theatre. A new musical, Fortress of Solitude, also featuring her choreography, is slated to debut at the Public Theater in 2014.

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