RAJA FEATHER KELLY

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), a Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company he founded in 2009. Over the past decade, he has created 18 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim, most recently The Absolute Future (NYU Skirball). In 2025, TF3T will present the New York premiere of Bunny Bunny at The Invisible Dog, followed by DOOMER or The Untitled Brahms/Radiohead Project in 2026. Raja made his playwriting debut at SoHo Rep with The Fires in 2024, which he also directed. The Fires received a 2025 Obie Award for Creation and Direction.

This year, he will also serve as Production Dramaturg for Elle Barbara’s AUTOGYNEGAMY (National Arts Centre Montreal) and as the 2025 ImPulsTanz Dance Festival DanceWeb mentor, in Vienna, Austria. Other 2025 projects include The Listeners (Lyric Opera) by Missy Mazzoli, Scenes for an Ending in collaboration with musician Emily Wells for the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and Macbeth In Stride at BAM.

He choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon) and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA), both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He was hailed by The New York Times as the choreographer who “can make your play move” for his extensive work Off-Broadway. Credits include White Girl in Danger (Second Stage Kiser Theater), We're Gonna Die (Second Stage Theater–his directorial debut), SUFFS (The Public Theater), and Lempicka (Longacre, Broadway).

He has received dozens of awards, fellowships and honors including a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2023-2025), a Mellon Foundation grant (2021, 2024), an Obie Award and Outer Critics Circle Award honor for choreography for A Strange Loop (2020), an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2021), a Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts (2019–2020), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019–2021), a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award (2009), a Creative Capital Award (2019), three Princess Grace Awards (2017-2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), a Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter (2018), and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (2017), a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard (2017), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), an ImPulsTanz Festival DanceWEB Scholarship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship (2016). He was featured on the cover of the February 2020 issue of Dance Magazine.

Kelly has performed with Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, David Dorfman Dance, Kyle Abraham|Abraham.In.Motion, and zoe | juniper. He has also managed a number of dance companies: Race Dance, Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, zoe | juniper, and Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group.

Kelly has held teaching positions at universities nationwide, including Yale, Princeton, The Juilliard School, and New York University, among others. He is a Quinn Martin directing fellow at the University of California, San Diego.

He was born in Fort Hood, Texas, and holds a BA in Dance and English from Connecticut College. He is currently earning a Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute certificate as an Ecker Fellow in Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts.