Neil Greenberg

Bio
Neil Greenberg, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, has been creating dances since 1979. He has created over twenty-five works for his company (Dance By Neil Greenberg), as well as commissions for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. He came to New York from Minnesota in 1976 and danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1979 to 1986. He formed Dance By Neil Greenberg in 1986, and his choreography has since been presented in nineteen New York City productions and on tour. He is known especially for his Not-About-AIDS-Dance, which employs his signature use of projected words as part of a layering strategy that complicates the performance moment while opening doors into potential meanings in the dance. His work reflects the influence of his study of innovative somatic approaches to movement—such as Body/Mind Centering, Laban Fundamentals, Klein Technique and Alexander Technique—and his appreciation of favorite theater artists such as the Wooster Group and John Jesurun.

Greenberg recently joined the faculty of The New School after three years in California on faculty at UC Riverside. He was on the dance faculty of Purchase College from 1987 to 2007, has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and served as artist-in-residence at many colleges and dance organizations. He has also served as the Dance Curator at The Kitchen from 1995 to 1999. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a National Dance Project Production Fund Grant and has received repeated support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance Program and the Harkness Foundation for Dance. He has received two Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund grants: with John Jesurun (video) for Partial View (2005), which received that year’s TimeOut New York Audience Award; and with Michael Stiller (lighting and visual design) for Really Queer Dance With Harps (2008). Both works included original scores by Zeena Parkins. His works have twice been cited as among the Ten High Points of the Year in The New York Times: his dance/video work Two in 2003 and Not-About-AIDS-Dance in 1994. Most recently, he was awarded a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Creative Exploration Award.