STEPHAN KOPLOWITZ

Stephan Koplowitz is an award-winning director/choreographer/media artist known for his work on stage, film, and site. His site work aims to alter people’s perspectives of place, site, and scale, all infused with a sense of the human condition, and is concerned with the intersection of natural, social, and cultural ecologies within urban and natural environments. Since 1984 he has created 92 works and has been awarded 65 commissions. He is the recipient of a 2017 Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship, 2014 Hewlett-Gerbode Choreographic Fellowship, 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 is also the recipient of six National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships from (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 (awarded 1994), where he received his BA in Music Composition and from the University of Utah College of Fine Arts (awarded 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). He served in that capacity for ten years until 2016. In 2022, Oxford University Press will publish his first book On Site: Methods for Creating Site-Specific Performance.

 

Recent projects include:

In July 2021, he premiered Passage Home, commissioned by the Wooden Floor in Santa Ana, Ca. consisting of nine dance works and ten films, and a cast of 80 young performers (12-18 years old) in a live site-specific event designed to operate within the current health protocols. In 2018, Koplowitz launched his largest and most ambitious project, The Northfield Experience, an immersive site event (consisting of eleven different works of dance, theater, media, and music) throughout the city of Northfield, MN. 2017, saw three premieres. The Bates Dance Festival commissioned Mill Town (2017), a media and performance work inspired by the historic mills in Lewiston, ME. Occupy was commissioned by the mixed-ability AXIS Dance Company at the Yerba Buena Gardens, SF (2017). 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.

​

(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)