STEPHAN KOPLOWITZ

Stephan Koplowitz is a multi-faceted artist who has created diverse works over a 35+ year career, including interactive media installations, site-specific and staged dance performances, and short films. Koplowitz’s site creations aim to alter people’s perspectives of place, site, and scale and offer communities a chance to rediscover shared spaces through an artistic experience. Since 1984, he has created 95 works and awarded 65 commissions. He received a 2017 Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship, a 2014 Hewlett-Gerbode Choreographic Fellowship, a 2004 Alpert Award in the Arts (Dance), a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography in addition to a 2000 New York Dance and Performance Award, “Bessie” for “Sustained Achievement” in Choreography. Koplowitz also received six National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships (1988-97). In 1996, his site-specific work Genesis Canyon, commissioned by the Dance Umbrella Festival for the Natural History Museum in London, won Time Out Magazine’s Award for “Best Dance Production of 1996”. He is the recipient of two Distinguished Alumni Awards, from Wesleyan University (1994), where he received his BA in Music Composition and from the University of Utah College of Fine Arts (2010), where he received his MFA in Choreography.

 

His choreography and company, Stephan Koplowitz & Company (Kop Art, Inc.), have been produced repeatedly by internationally recognized performing arts venues domestically and abroad. After living in New York City for 23 years, Koplowitz, in 2006, was appointed dean and faculty of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts, Los Angeles) and served in that capacity for ten years until 2016. He contributed to the first book published on site-specific choreography, Site Dance, published by Florida University Press. 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 April 2022, Oxford University Press published his critically acclaimed book On Site: Methods for Creating Site-Specific Performance.

 

Recent works include Untamed Grace: A Performance Journey of Improv and Site, commissioned by Center Mouvement on April 14, 2024, for St. John’s Grace (Episcopal Chuch), Buffalo, NY, with fifteen performers with live Gamelan Orchestra. Four Frames/Four Landscapes: A Site-Specific Performance for Madong, commissioned by the Seoul Institute of the Arts, as part of a creative residency, March 3, 2024, with fifteen performers, and four sites.

A 2023 reconstruction/reimagining of his 1979 work Abide (duet, music by Richard Winslow), first performed at Wesleyan University (1979) and Symphony Space, NYC (1980), initially in collaboration with renowned Balinese dance artist I. Made Bandem. In 2023, he worked on Abide with dance artist and choreographer Hari Krishnan. Passage Home (2021) was commissioned by the Wooden Floor in Santa Ana, CA (nine dance works, ten films, and a cast of 80 young performers (12-18 years old). The Northfield Experience (2018) was an immersive sited multi-arts event for the entire city of Northfield, MN;  Mill Town (2017), a site-specific performance/installation in historic mills in Lewiston, ME, commissioned by the Bates Dance Festival; Occupy (2017), a site-specific work for the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco commissioned by AXIS Dance Company. In 2015, he premiered Play(as) commissioned for the 2015 edition of Trolley Dances in San Diego. In 2014,  commissioned by The Ohio State University, he premiered Sullivant Travels featuring 11 different site-specific dance, interactive media, film, theater, and aerial dance for the re-opening of Sullivant Hall. Columbus Alive named it one of the 2014 “best” dance events. In 2013, he premiered two site works commissioned by the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Stephan Koplowitz: Water Sight, Milwaukee, at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the historic water tower.

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(A list of awards and fellowships can be found below, and more specific information on many of his works for site, stage, and media, including specific bios for site, visual/media, and education, can be found in the dropdown menu above)