Kyle Abraham | Abraham in Motion

Kyle Abraham, New York Live Arts’ 2012-2014 Resident Commissioned Artist and 2013 MacArthur Fellow, began his dance training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a B.F.A. from SUNY Purchase and an M.F.A. from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Abraham was named the 2012 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award recipient and the 2012 USA Ford Fellow. In December 2013, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered Abraham’s work, Another Night at New York’s City Center to rave reviews. Rebecca Bengal of Vogue wrote, “What Abraham brings to Ailey is an avant-garde aesthetic, an original and politically minded downtown sensibility that doesn’t distinguish between genres but freely draws on a vocabulary that is as much Merce and Martha as it is Eadweard Muybridge and Michael Jackson.”

Abraham received a prestigious New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for his work in The Radio Show and a Princess Grace Award for Choreography in 2010. The previous year, he was selected as one of Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch for 2009, and received a Jerome Travel and Study Grant in 2008.

His choreography has been presented throughout the United States and abroad, most recently at On The Boards, South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center, REDCAT, Philly Live Arts, Portland’s Time Based Arts Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Bates Dance Festival, Harlem Stage, Fall for Dance Festival at New York’s City Center, in Montreal, Germany, Jordan, Ecuador, Dublin’s Project Arts Center, The Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum located in Okinawa Japan, The Andy Warhol Museum and The Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA.

In addition to performing and developing new works for his company, Abraham.In.Motion, Abraham recently premiered The Serpent and The Smoke, a new pas de deux for himself and acclaimed New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award winning dancer and New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Wendy Whelan as part of Restless Creature at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

In 2011, OUT Magazine labeled Abraham as the “best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama.”