Shamel Pitts Awarded the 2024 Knight Choreography Prize
The National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron) has announced Shamel Pitts (Brooklyn, NY) as the second recipient of the $50,000 Knight Choreography Prize. Made possible by Knight Foundation, this award is designed to support the artistic experimentation and career longevity of choreographers in the United States. Each year the award will honor a living choreographer whose body of work is distinguished not only for their artistry but also for their originality of thought and impact. The award celebrates choreographers who provide significant contributions to the dance field, expand audiences for dance, and ensure the artform has a prominent place in U.S. culture. Pitts will receive an unrestricted cash award of $30,000, plus $20,000 in programmatic support over two years, to be co-designed with NCCAkron.
NCCAkron Executive/Artistic Director Christy Bolingbroke shares, “Less than a dozen national awards for performing artists acknowledge excellence with unrestricted funds, even fewer are dedicated to dance and choreography at the national level. With the creation of the Knight Choreography Prize, NCCAkron can continue to advocate for dance as a central part of U.S. culture, raise the profile of preeminent choreographers, and invest in the future of the artform.”
Bolingbroke continues, “After a multi-month nomination process and curatorial selection committee review, we are so pleased to award the 2024 Knight Choreography Prize to Shamel Pitts, an artist citizen using his choreographic voice to not only create but also connect through our complex humanity. We know he will continue to have a deeply felt influence across our field.”
Shamel Pitts is a performance artist, dancer, conceptual artist, choreographer, spoken word artist, and teacher whose work explores and embodies multiplicity, vulnerability, Afrofuturism, rigor, and connection. After graduating from The Juilliard School, Pitts danced all over the world with Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance, Ballets Jazz Montréal, and Batsheva Dance Company. Shamel Pitts is the artistic director/founder of TRIBE, a New York-based multidisciplinary arts collective. He has created a triptych of award-winning multidisciplinary performance art works known as his “BLACK series” which has been performed and toured extensively around the world since 2016.
Shamel Pitts shares, “It is incredibly propelling to win a prize that is designed to recognize and uplift a choreographer’s art by contributing to their life by way of unrestricted funds! I am grateful to NCCAkron for being an organization that offers such life enhancing support. I look forward to drawing closer to the NCCAkron team and using these funds to continue to invest in my arts collective TRIBE, as well as imagine what my life may now look like as I am being poured into.”
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. In just eight years, NCCAkron has worked with over 400 dance artists across 65 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 National Center for Choreography-Akron supports the research and development of new work in dance by exploring the full potential of the creative process. In addition to offering studio and technical residencies to make new work, activities focus on catalyzing dialogue and experimentation; creating proximity among artists and dance thinkers; and aggregating resources around dance making. For more information, visit nccakron.org.
Shamel Pitts, photo credit Itai Zwecker and Alex Apt