STEPHAN KOPLOWITZ

Since 1984, Stephan Koplowitz has found inspiration for his work in mapping the human experience through arts from sources rooted in his interest in music, photography, film, theater, and dance. As the son of an American spy, he had the opportunity to grow up in France and Brazil and travel to many other parts of the world. Those early life experiences influenced his international perspective on life and culture.

Koplowitz graduated from Wesleyan University, where he majored in music composition. Composer Alvin Lucier and dance artist Cheryl Cutler mentored him. He started his professional dance training with Hanya Holm during two summers in Colorado. He started his teaching career at Jacob’s Pillow after fellowships there guided by Liz Thompson. While earning his MFA in Choreography at the University of Utah, Koplowitz encountered the work of Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Bessie Schonberg, Ann Riordan, and other influential artists.

Koplowitz has lectured, taught, and conducted community projects throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His creative portfolio includes 93 works, 66 of which were produced by commission. His concert work has been produced and presented by several venues and festivals, most significantly eight seasons at NY’s Dance Theater Workshop (now NY Live Arts), thanks to the Executive Producer David White, who allowed his concert work to develop over several years. For seven summers, the Bates Dance Festival Director Laura Faure engaged Koplowitz as a creative artist and educator. Koplowitz has also worked with the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with Sam Miller, Dance Place, DC, the American Dance Festival, and other festivals and institutions.

His career as a site artist began with a commission from Elise Bernhardt, the founder and director of Dancing in the Streets, to create a series of large-scale works. Over 16,000 people witnessed the first work, Fenestrations, part of Grand Central Dances in 1987. It was considered a landmark work of site-specific performance and was remounted over four evenings in 1999 for an audience of over 65,000 people. Koplowitz returned to work with Dancing in the Streets in 2004 and 2008 (with Aviva Davidson) with two works: The Grand Step Project, seen by 8,000 in three boroughs of NYC, and Five Entrances into a War Machine at the historical airfield, Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn, NY.

His site work has also taken him to Europe, where Val Bourne, Artistic Director of the Dance Umbrella Festival, commissioned two seminal works, Genesis Canyon at the Natural History Museum and Babel Index at the British Library. Other Koplowitz works have been commissioned and performed in Germany, Italy, Vietnam, and across the United States, including Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Lewiston, Portland (ME), Los Angeles, Columbus, San Francisco, Milwaukee, St. Peter (MN), Chattanooga, Salt Lake City, and San Diego.

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Koplowitz was appointed dean and faculty of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts in 2006 and led that program for a decade, capping a thirty-three-year career in arts education. His 23 years as dance director at the Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn, NY (private K-12) gave him the experience of teaching every age and level of learning (pre-K through MFA). His interest in education inspired his contribution to the first book on site-specific choreography, Site Dance, published by Florida University Press in 2009 and 2011 (paperback edition). His interest in the potential of online creative work led to the creation of the first dance-related course on Coursera and the MOOC platform. His course, Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works, online from 2013-2016, was the first dance-related course on Coursera and the MOOC platform. Over 21,000 people from 154 countries have registered for this course. In 2022, Oxford University Press published his acclaimed book On Site: Methods for Creating Site-Specific Performance.

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(a list of awards and fellowships can be found below, and more specific bios- site, visual/media, and education in the dropdown menu above)