KNIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY PRIZE
Image Description: Top Photo: A moment from Wired. A close up of Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson suspended in the air, arms outstretched and clasping each other’s hands. Alice is a multiracial Black woman with coffee-colored skin and short curly hair; she wears a shimmery deep red costume. Laurel is a white person with cropped hair; she wears a shimmery gold costume with thick black shoulder straps. The dancers are upside down and horizontal at the same time, their wheels shining and facing out. If they let go, they will swing like pendulums. Photo Robbie Sweeny. Photo to the right: A moment from DESCENT. Laurel Lawson, a white person with very short cropped hair, balances above Alice Sheppard with arms spread wide, wheelchair wheels spinning. Alice, a multiracial Black woman with coffee-colored skin and short curly hair, opens her arms wide to receive Laurel in an embrace. Photo by BRITT / Jay Newman.
Empowering Creativity Through Dance
NCCAkron is thrilled to announce choreographers Alice Sheppard (New York, NY/Los Altos, CA) and Laurel Lawson (Atlanta, GA) of disability arts company Kinetic Light as the latest recipients of the $50,000 Knight Choreography Prize.
Each year NCCAkron selects a living choreographer or artist collaborative whose body of work is distinguished not only for their artistry but also for their originality of thought and impact. Made possible by Knight Foundation, this award is designed to support the artistic experimentation and career longevity of choreographers in the United States.
Alice Sheppard
Founder & Artistic Director of Kinetic Light
Alice Sheppard (she/her) is the Founder and Artistic Director of renowned disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light. A UCLA Regents Lecturer; United States Artists, MacDowell, and Disability Futures Fellow; Creative Capital grantee; and Bessie Award winner, Alice creates movement that emerges from her understanding of disabled expression, seeking to find the maximum expression of disability in all her different embodiments. Engaging with disability arts, culture, and history, Alice's commissioned work attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race. In addition to performance and choreography, Alice Sheppard is an independent arts researcher whose dance and disability writing has appeared in The New York Times, peer-reviewed essay collections, and such academic journals as Catalyst, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, and Movement Research Performance Journal.
Image Description: Alice Sheppard headshot, against a black background. Alice is a Black multiracial woman with coffee-colored skin and short curly blonde hair. She wears a soft lilac gray velvet turtleneck. She regards the camera with a soft smile. Photo by Cherylynn Tsushima.
Laurel Lawson
Access & Technology Lead with Kinetic Light
Laurel Lawson (any pronouns) is a founding member and Access & Technology Lead for Kinetic Light. Choreographer, designer, and artist-engineer, they lead research and development with initiatives such as Audimance, the company's app which revolutionizes audio description, and novel artistic haptic experiences. Lawson brings decades of experience in product design and facilitative leadership to access and technology work. Their work with immersive embodied experience platforms lives at The Choreodaemonic Collective, where they co-lead a collective of artist-technologists. Lawson’s work has been recognized with a 2019 DFA Fellowship, made possible with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation, a 2023 Creative Capital Award, and a 2025 Jacob’s Pillow Lab residency. Lawson is also the CTO and co-founder of CyCore Systems, a systems engineering consultancy which specializes in solving novel, multi-realm problems of all sizes for a global clientele.
Image Description: A headshot of Laurel Lawson, a white freckled person with very short light brown cropped hair; they wear a light green top. They regard the camera with a slight smile. Photo by Cherylynn Tsushima.
PREVIOUS PRIZE RECIPIENTS
With an initial investment of $5 million from Knight Foundation, NCCAkron was established in 2015 to address research and development opportunities in dance. This nonprofit organization has become an intellectual matchmaker between national choreographers and the robust cultural ecology in and around Akron, OH, as well as operating as a hyperagent for dance across the national landscape. Over the past decade, NCCAkron has worked with more than 800 dance artists across 100 U.S. cities. In 2022, Knight Foundation invested an additional $1.5 million to establish this annual unrestricted cash and programmatic award for choreographers and sponsor it in perpetuity.
The Knight Choreography Prize is designed to support the artistic experimentation and career longevity of choreographers in the United States. NCCAkron intends for the award to provide essential time and space for the creative process, for research, and for rigorous play and positive failure. NCCAkron commits to co-create activities and residencies with artists as equal partners and promote equity in the arts by elevating underrepresented voices that are a valuable part of the 21st century dance ecosystem and the future of the artform.
NCCAkron invited dance artists, dance stakeholders, and NCCAkron alumni across the U.S. to nominate a choreographer for this award. An NCCAkron committee then selected five artists from that nomination list, based on established criteria, and those artists were invited to submit application materials. The final selection committee comprised NCCAkron alumni, board members, and Knight City artists. Miami-based choreographer Rosie Herrera was named the inaugural recipient of the Knight Choreography Prize in May 2024, and Shamel Pitts (Brooklyn, NY) received the second award in October 2024. Hereafter, the Knight Choreography Prize is announced once a year, in the Fall.