luciana achugar
luciana achugar is a Brooklyn based Choreographer from Montevideo, Uruguay. After moving to New York upon graduation from CalArts in 1995, achugar danced with several choreographers, including Jeremy Nelson, Wil Swanson, Chameckilerner, Maria Hassabi and John Jasperse. From 1999 to 2003, she worked in a close collaborative relationship with choreographer Levi Gonzalez.
Since 2002, she has created eight independent works for which she has received two BESSIE Awards: the first in 2006 for her first evening-length piece Exhausting Love at Danspace Project and in 2010 for PURO DESEO – a piece that was also chosen as one of TimeOUT NY’s best of Dance for 2010. Her work has been presented in New York at The Kitchen; Movement Research’s MELT Festival; the Ensemble Studio Theatre; Dixon Place; The Latino American Dance: Not Festival Project; CANADA Gallery; Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery; Abrons Arts Center; La MaMa Theatre; Danspace Project and Dance Theatre Workshop; in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Green Street Studios; in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center; in Los Angeles at ShowBox LA and in Uruguay at the Festival Iberoamericano de Danza, Teatro Solís and the Centro Cultural de España en Montevideo. She has also made commissioned work for students at Barnard College, George Washington University, The New School and for the Zenon Dance Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
achugar is a 2013 Creative Capital Grantee and Guggenheim Fellow; she was 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee and one of Dance Magazine’s 2011 “25 to Watch”. In 2009 she received a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council President’s 2009 Liberty Award for Choreography and in 2008 she accepted a BAX10 “Passing it on Award” from Tere O’Connor, which honors individuals in the arts who have revealed and transformed our creative world, deepened the definition of their field and paved the way for others. She was a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Choreography; a 2009-2011 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist-in-Residence and a 2001-2003 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. Currently, she is an LMCC Extended Life Artist in Residence, a program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, as well as an Artist cohort of The Hatchery Project, a collaborative residency between The Chocolate Factory, Live Arts Brewery/Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, and Vermont Performance Lab.
Most recently, she was a 2014 Doris Duke Impact Award nominee and Alpert Award nominee. Her work has also received support from the Jerome Foundation; the Multi-Arts Production Fund; The Field Dance Fund; The Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund; The Puffin Foundation and the New England Foundation for the Arts.
