TERE O'CONNOR

Tere O'Connor is the artistic director of Tere O'Connor Dance and a Center for Advanced Studies Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has created over 45 works for his company and toured them throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Canada. He has created numerous commissioned works for other dance companies, including the Lyon Opera Ballet and the White Oak Dance Project, and solo works for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jean Butler. In 2014, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. O'Connor received a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, is a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow, and is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow and has received numerous other grants and awards. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project, The MAP Fund, and many other organizations. He has received three New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Awards.
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NCCAkron hosted O'Connor as part of its inaugural residencies in July 2017. The work he created during that time, Long Run, premiered at Bard College in October 2017. Also during that time, O'Connor and NCCAkron Director Christy Bolingbroke co-designed NCCAkron's Low-Residency Dance Writing Lab. This year-long experiment connected a cohort of five dance writers from across the country to address questions around the purpose, distribution, audience, and artistry of dance writing.