Abby Z and the New Utility

Abby Zbikowski created her company, Abby Z and the New Utility, in 2012. Her work utilizes both the physical aspects and psyche-emotional experience of rigorously training in African and Afro-diasporic forms, as well as playing sports and performing other acts of manual labor. Her NY Live Arts commissioned work, Radioactive Practice was named in NY Times’ Best of Dance 2022 and ranked the Guardian’s #1 Best Dance Performance of 2024 for its performance at Sadler’s Wells in London. She is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow in choreography, received the 2017 Juried Bessie Award for her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures to create works of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger” and in 2018 was selected by Dance Umbrella UK for a Choreographer of the Future commission. She is an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence at the Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University(2017-19), a current artist in residence at New York Live Arts(2018-20) and has been in residence at Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, and the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics. Zbikowski is a Professor of dance at The Ohio State University. She has taught at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia as part of Movement Research’s Global Practice Sharing and studied intensively at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal. Abby holds a BFA in dance from Temple University and an MFA in dance from Ohio State University. Her company has been presented by the Gibney Dance Center, the Abrons Arts Center, and the 92nd Street Y, the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, the FuseBox Festival in Austin, Texas, Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Walker Center for the Arts, and Jacob’s Pillow among others.