LIONEL POPKIN

Lionel Popkin is a choreographer and performer based in Los Angeles. From 2004-2013 Popkin’s work looked at the cross-cultural conversation between his post-modern training and the imagery and iconography of the Indian subcontinent that surrounded his youth. Recent work has focused on the more intimate familial world, questioning conceptions of home from the point of view of the itinerant, the domesticated, and the globalized citizen.

Popkin tours and performs his projects throughout the United States and abroad, including at Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, La Mama, ETC, The Getty Museum, REDCAT, Jacob's Pillow Inside/Out Series, ODC, The Place Theater in London, and the Guongdong Modern Dance Festival in Guongzhou, China.

As a dancer, Popkin has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe in the companies of Trisha Brown, Terry Creach, and Stephanie Skura. He has received grants from the National Performance Network's Creation Fund, the National Dance Project Touring Subsidy, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Puffin Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Durfee Foundation. Popkin is the Chair of the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique.
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Popkin was in residence at NCCAkron in October 2018, researching his work Awkwardly Related: The Oedipus/Antigone Project. The project used immigration forms, navigation systems, topography, and the intersections of story, truth, and myth to follow a fictional journey of Oedipus and Antigone, investigating where civic identity and memory meet. The work premiered in March 2019 in Los Angeles, CA at The Getty Villa.