Dance and Emerging Technologies

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as "One of the world's foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies," his choreography has been performed at venues including Jacob's Pillow, The Joyce Theater, and the 92nd Street Y, and he has lectured at the University of Cambridge, Yale, Mozilla, and Gray Area Festival. His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital "Wild Futures" Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces, and Host of the podcast "Dances with Robots," Skybetter serves as Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.

Pamela Tatge has served as the Executive and Artistic Director of Jacob’s Pillow since 2016, an international dance center that hosts the longest-running dance festival in the nation, alongside a school, archives, and community engagement programs. Prior to the Pillow, for 17 years, Tatge served as the Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, overseeing programming in dance, music, theater, and the visual arts. Tatge was named one of “The Most Influential People in Dance Today” by Dance Magazine in 2017 and is the recipient of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ 2010 William Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence and Sustained Achievement in Programming. She also received the 2022 José Limón Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and the NAACP Berkshires Dunham Freedom Fund Award in 2024, which recognized Tatge as “an Activist for Peace, Justice, Equity, and Equality in the Art of Dance.”

Schneider is mostly interested in how humans telling stories about ourselves to each other can make us better at being humans. He is an OBIE Award-winning, Drama Desk-nominated director, performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist creating original works for theater, dance, sound, video, installation and public art since 2003. Schneider uses new and old, high and low tech—from Wave Field Synthesis arrays and Volumetric Lighting displays to literal smoke and mirrors. He is interested in the edges of human perception, using science as a blueprint for staging, and above all, the question of: how does it make you feel? Original works include HERE (2025, Jacob’s Pillow), NOWISWHENWEARE (2022, Brooklyn Academy of Music and ongoing tour), »remains« (2020; Radialsystem, Berlin) commissioned by the Sasha Waltz & Guests dance company, NERVOUS/SYSTEM (2018, BAM Next Wave), AFTER (2018, Under the Radar, The Public Theater); YOUARENOWHERE (2015 OBIE Award, 2016 Drama Desk nomination), among others.

Brandon Powers is a director, choreographer, and technology translator who creates experiences across physical and virtual space. His projects incorporate AI, extended reality, and live performance including Echoes in Motion (Lincoln Center, 2025), Queerskins: ARK (Venice, Cannes XR 2020), Frankenstein AI (Sundance 2018), Duet (New York Live Arts 2021), and Kinetic Diffusion (FilmGate Interactive, New Images 2025). Powers is the Artistic Innovation Lead at MTF, an Onassis ONX member, NEW INC alum, Lincoln Center Collider Fellow (2025), and co-founder of Pulse & Pixel, creating Impulse, a choreography pre-visualization tool. He has spoken on the intersection of arts and technology across the world at TCG National Conference, Verizon’s 5G Lab, DanceXR Singapore, and more. brandon-powers.com

Brian Brooks is a Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography and current Master of Fine Arts candidate at NYU, accepted into their new graduate program for Interdisciplinary Research. Exploring the expansion of the body through interactive technologies, Brooks's self-directed research combines dance studies at Tisch School of the Arts with interactive digital media and computer coding at ITP and the Tandon School of Engineering. His research is informing the new choreographic and digital work in development for his New York City-based performance group, the Moving Company.

Brooks's work for his company has been presented at venues including The Joyce Theater, New York City Center, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and across the U.S. at the American Dance Festival (Durham, North Carolina), the Meany Center for the Performing Arts (Seattle, Washington), TITAS (Dallas, Texas), and the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California), among many others. The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival has presented Brooks's work on multiple occasions in the Ted Shawn Theatre, the Doris Duke Theatre, on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage, and remotely through his live-streaming Augmented Reality platform Viewpoint. Off-stage at the Pillow, he has been in residence at the Pillow Lab, taught in the Contemporary program of The School at Jacob's Pillow, co-facilitated the first ChoreoTech Lab at The School, and been a founding member of the Digital Futures Think Tank.

Beyond his company, Brooks has been commissioned to create new dances for companies including Miami City Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance, and BODYTRAFFIC, and was the first-ever Choreographer in Residence at Chicago's Harris Theater for Music and Dance (2016-2019). He has choreographed several off-Broadway productions, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013), directed by Julie Taymor; and Pericles (2016), directed by Trevor Nunn; as well as duet productions performing alongside NYC Ballet Associate Artistic Director and former principal dancer Wendy Whelan (2012-2019). His extensive teaching has found him creating dances for schools including Princeton University, Rutgers University, Boston Conservatory, and The Juilliard School.

As Founding Executive / Artistic Director for the National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron), Christy Bolingbroke is responsible for setting the curatorial vision and business model to foster research and development opportunities in dance. Previously, she served as the Deputy Director for Advancement at ODC in San Francisco, overseeing curation, performance programming, marketing, and development organization-wide. Prior to ODC, she was the Director of Marketing at the Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a Master of Arts in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University. Additional service to the field includes SouthArts Momentum, Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Arts Innovation Management Initiative, the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Advisory, the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation New Works panels.

d. Sabela grimes is a choreographer, transmedia storyteller, writer, composer, costume designer, and educator. Improvisation and collaboration are central to his creative practice, weaving sound, visuals, and kinesthetic expression into interconnected multisensory experiences. His work explores the poetics of assemblage, the magic of mutability, and the mastery of misuse—unfolding how form, formlessness, and frequency expand our sense of time, space, place, and communal becoming.

His current collaborative project, Parable of Portals, co-created with Meena Murugesan, is a modular multidisciplinary constellation of live performances, immersive installations, short films, and participatory community activations. Drawing from Octavia E. Butler’s personal writings, journals, and unfinished manuscripts, the project fuses these archival elements with his original music, animated video art, and embodied performance.

As a faculty member at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he teaches courses in dance composition, hip-hop and street dance histories, African and Afro-diasporic dance traditions, fashion and materiality, and his original movement system, Funkamental MediKinetics. His research engages embodied theory, speculative practice, and Black cultural epistemologies. As a visual artist, he translates improvisational dance into AI-informed visual environments using techniques such as digital collage, glitch, and movement-responsive animation. He approaches generative AI as a site for symbolic expansion, developing speculative prompts and visual frameworks that challenge dominant associations and broaden the cultural imaginaries available to both humans and machines. He mentors students working across choreography, sound design, and emerging technologies, and shares pedagogical strategies that position generative AI as a dialogic tool for reflexive writing and interdisciplinary synthesis.

He is a 2023 USC Associates Award for Artistic Expression recipient, 2021 Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Performer, 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow, and 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. He loves pancakes, speculative fiction, and his kinfolk.

Dr. Ilya Vidrin is a choreographer, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of dance, interactive media, and ethics. As Assistant Professor of Creative Practice Research at Northeastern University, Vidrin is the director of the Partnering Lab and an affiliate with research centers focused on robotics, artificial intelligence, and ethics. Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch”, he has recently been guest artist at the Harvard ArtLab, MIT Media Lab, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Center for Performance Research (New York City), National Choreographic Center, Temporal Communities Cluster (Berlin), and the New Museum (New York City).

Jessica Rajko is an artist and scholar at the intersection of dance and computing. She conducts research with complex digital systems to examine how they influence and are influenced by dance. Her most recent Decoding Digital Bodies project critically examines how human movement—especially dance—shapes the code, metadata, and digital archives of Boston Dynamic’s Spot robots and Choreography SDK. The project is co-led with Varsha Iyengar and currently in collaboration with roboticists in Brown University’s Humans to Robots Laboratory.

Rajko's haptic/sonic media design research examines how touch-based media can expand audience’s experience of live dance performance. She has designed haptic media for BAIRA MVMNT PHLOSPHY, Brother(hood) Dance!, and Dirty Glove Bvck. Her media designs have been presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Center for Performance Research (Brooklyn), OT301 (Amsterdam), Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe), Scotiabank Nuit Blanche festival (Toronto), and Phoenix Art Museum.

She has been invited to present at UToronto’s BMO Lab for Creative Research, UMich’s Performing Arts Technology Seminar Series, Harvard’s Digital Futures Consortium, UPenn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities, Davidson College’s Gender and Technology Seminar Series, and University of New Mexico’s ART Lab. She has been published in the Dance Research Journal, Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Dance Education in Practice, and British Computer Society, along with several chapter contributions in dance, human-computer interaction, and digital humanities.

Rajko currently serves as the Interim Associate Dean of College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts at Wayne State University.

Jordana Leigh is the Senior Vice President of Artistic Programming at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A strategic and visionary cultural leader, she has curated and produced more than 1,000 performances featuring artists from over 100 countries, launched 11 performance series spanning salsa, poetry, dance, and youth-focused work, and commissioned more than 60 artists. She led the opening of the David Rubenstein Atrium and the reimagined David Geffen Hall as vibrant, community-centered cultural spaces. Leigh is currently leading Lincoln Center’s expansion into immersive and extended reality (XR) arts, which earned a 2026 Webby Award for Immersive Programming.

Katherine Helen Fisher is a director and choreographer working at the intersection of dance, expanded cinema, and artificial intelligence. Across stage, screen, and installation, she creates participatory works that use the body as an interface, bringing lens-based technologies into conversation with real-time generative systems to examine agency, embodiment, and desire. A former member of the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Fisher has also performed with the Merce Cunningham Trust, in Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, and with MOMIX, ODC, and the Merce Cunningham Trust. Her work has been presented by Judson Church, REDCAT, Barnard Movement Lab, Brown Arts Institute, Jacob’s Pillow, and PBS. She co-founded Safety Third and Hyperreal Labs, curated Dancing the Algorithm at Jacob’s Pillow, and received the 2024 Google Artists + Machine Intelligence Faculty Research Award. She served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU Tisch from 2023–26 and is currently an ONX Onassis Fellow.

Lisa Jamhoury is a Lebanese-American artist working across live performance, installation, and physical media. She creates and directs cinematically rich, embodied experiences that recenter human agency in the digital age.

Drawing from her backgrounds in contemporary circus, somatics, and experience design, Jamhoury brings embodied intelligence to her work as a software programmer. She moves fluidly across platforms, code bases, and tools, treating technology itself as choreographic material. A specialist in motion capture from high-end studio systems to low-cost experimental tools, she translates the nuance of human movement into responsive digital environments where bodies and machines converse.

Jamhoury is currently an Interdisciplinary Fellow with the Royal Shakespeare Company and artist in residence with EY Intelligent Realities Lab and APOSSIBLE. She is a member of Onassis ONX and NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, design and technology. Her performance Maquette was a 2025 Lumen Prize Performance and Music finalist, and her spatial audio installation loss·y will premiere at SXSW 2026.

Jamhoury’s work has been recognized by Ars Electronica, IDFA DocLab, The Lumen Prize, Meta Open Arts, Google xStory, Conference on Movement and Computing, STREB Lab, and more. Jamhoury speaks regularly on human agency, the ethics of human-machine interaction, and the future of embodied creativity in live performance and digital art. She teaches at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she completed her Master's, and previously worked as a senior experience designer at Adobe integrating AI/ML into creative tools.

Jamhoury lives and works between New York City and Burlington, Vermont.

Matthew Niederhauser is an artist and the Managing Director of Onassis ONX in New York. Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for art and advanced technologies. As a catalyst for digital cultures, it empowers creatives who build transformative works while also engaging a network of institutions and industries ready to respond to new forms of creative expression. His personal practice otherwise pushes the limits of emerging technologies across a wide range of mediums, especially focusing on the creative and interactive potentials of AI. His award-winning projects have exhibited internationally at BAM, Centre PHI, and MEET and premiered at Venice Immersive, Sundance New Frontier, Tribeca Storyscapes, Ars Electronica, and SXSW.

Marlon Barrios Solano (Venezuela/USA) is an interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, and researcher working at the intersection of generative AI, performance, creative coding, and critical cognition.

With a hybrid background in dance, software engineering, and cognitive science, Solano explores AI as a poetic and cognitive collaborator. His work engages machine learning, algorithmic aesthetics, somatic practices, contemplative traditions, and queer diasporic experience to create lecture-performances, installations, speculative documents, raves, and participatory environments. He describes these frameworks as knowledge dramaturgies: systems in which identity, memory, perception, and computation are remixed through embodied and collective processes.

Since August 2024, Solano has served as Maker-in-Residence at the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) at the University of Florida, where he also teaches in the AI & Art Certificate Program. He has been a co-facilitator of Choreographic Coding Lab developed by Motion Bank.

Solano's work has been presented internationally and supported by institutions including ICK Amsterdam, the Gilles Jobin Company, UDK/HZT Berlin and Lake Studios Berlin. In 2025, he was awarded the Beyond Gravity / Decolonizing the Digital Residency at Theater Im Depot in Dortmund, Germany.

As a dancer and improviser in New York City (1994–2001), Solano collaborated with choreographers such as Lynn Shapiro, Merián Soto, Dean Moss, Bill Young, and Susan Marshall (dancing at Jacob’s Pillow several times), and performed with musicians including Philip Glass, John Zorn, and Erik Friedlander.

Solano holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance and Technology from The Ohio State University, completed the Software Engineering Immersion Program at General Assembly in New York City, and is a certified Mindfulness teacher through Spirit Rock Meditation Center and an Embodyoga® teacher.

Meena Murugesan is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised on the unceded lands of the Kanienʼkehá ka nation (Montreal), living on Tongva-Kizh land (Los Angeles). These spaces/places, along with their ancestral homelands of rural Tamil Nadu, continue to shape their art practice, gathering fragments of family stories, archives, folk dances, naturally dyed and woven fibers from kitchen scraps, and native plants into layered video installations.

Murugesan creates multimedia art at the crossroads of experimental film/video, textile art, live performance, and installation. They engage with the practices of assemblage, documentary, and embodiment to reveal complex layers of personal story, history, power, and liberatory movements. They conjure art experiences with charged relationships and states of being through aesthetics such as layering, framing and reframing, montage, and shadow play.

Murugesan researches interlocking systems of hierarchy, asking how we might reimagine ethical ecosystems across caste, race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and species. This inquiry informs one of their current projects, Dravidian Futures, a speculative multimedia installation series examining Dravidian-African connections, trance rituals, and the submerged civilization of Kumari Kandam / Lemuria. Their solo work has been supported through grants and artist residencies including The Mellon Foundation, CHIME, Pieter, UCLA, Canada Council for the Arts, CALQ, and SODEC.

Working in collectives is a central axis to Murugesan’s practice. They are a current member of four collectives: SADA (South Asian Dance Artists, Mellon awardee 2021-2026), SiriusShapeShifters (with d. Sabela grimes), JOY Collective (with D’Lo and Sundeep Morrison), and called by water (mentored by Omi Jones and Sharon Bridgeforth).

Michael Byrne is the Creative Lead for Tech, Arts, and Culture at Cornell University’s graduate campus in New York City, Cornell Tech, where he explores the intersections of dance history, design, and digital technology. He is an Associate Director of the Digital Life Initiative and the Milstein Summer Program in Technology and Humanity, both of which engage critically and creatively with emergent socio-technical systems. Byrne was awarded the 2025-26 Howard D. Rothschild Fellowship in Dance from Harvard University to examine how AI and XR can transmute ephemera from the Houghton Library into site-specific activations at Jacob's Pillow. Having trained in design and art direction at the Vega School in South Africa, Byrne pursued performance studies at the Royal Academy of Music, King’s College London, RADA, and the University of Cambridge, with a focus on aging and dance. For over a decade, he appeared within the narrative repertoire of the Royal Ballet in London.

Sage Ni’Ja Whitson (they/them) is an international award-winning queer and transgender artist noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer and the Park Avenue Amory as a “trailblazing XR artist to know.” They are a 2025-2026 DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Visual Arts Fellow, Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, and Creative Capital and two-time Bessie Award recipient who engages anti-disciplinarity through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual in science, technology, and art. Their multi-form works on dark matter and dark energy, via The Unarrival Experiments, have been commissioned across the world and media, including recently at SAVVY Contemporary Art Center, the Museum of Art of the African Diaspora, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Black Speculative Arts Movement – Denver, and a solo exhibition at the California African American Museum. Their single-authored book Transtraterrestrial: Dark Matter and Black Divinities (2025, Wesleyan University Press), received early praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, Autostraddle, and Chicago Book Review.

Sarah Nguyễn is an information and movement researcher, archivist, and educator originally from North Bay California. They investigate community participatory, co-design methodologies to activate memory and placemaking among diaspora through intergenerational trust, collective information seeking behaviors, and transnational information systems. To embody these explorations within critical science, technology, and society studies, she practices movement and dance towards future building. Nguyễn's works have been presented and published on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, NPR, VICE, Radical Networks NYC, Northwest Film Forum, and the Association for Computing Machinery, among others. Previously, Nguyễn supported library and archives projects for Luna Dance Institute, Mark Morris Dance Group, Dance/USA, and AXIS Dance Company. Currently, Nguyễn is the Director of Archives at Jacob’s Pillow and Archivist and Programs Director of Dance Is Life.

Sarah Silverblatt-Buser is a dancer, choreographer, and director raised in New Mexico and based in Paris since 2018. Her work builds bridges across fields and forms, drawing on the body’s intelligences as tools for deeper understanding.

In 2025, she created Collective Body (82nd Venice International Film Festival), a multi-user VR experience that invites the public to reconnect to themselves and each other through movement. Additional work in XR includes choreographing and performing in Motion Capture for Dance, Dance, Dance - Matisse VR (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris) and La Petite Danseuse AR (Musée d’Orsay). She also danced in Fugue VR by avant-garde cirque artist Yoann Bourgeois, with whom she has performed internationally since 2018.

Alongside Gordon, she co-directed, choreographed, and performed in Rave-L Party (Théâtre du Châtelet), incorporating dance, orchestra, DJ, real-time 3D projections, and Ravel’s Boléro. She performed in and co-directed Curtain! From Chaos to Silence (Théâtre du Châtelet), which danced between the wit and heart of Erik Satie and John Cage, and Indefinito (Musée du Louvre), exploring sensuous desire to accompany the exhibit Corps Vivants: Michelangelo and Rodin. For the Paris Cultural Olympiad, she choreographed parkour artists inside and on top of the Musée d’Orsay in Street Art by l’Ensemble les Apaches.

In 2023, she was Artist-in-Residence at the Barnard Movement Lab and created two university courses: Digital Performance and Dance Improvisation. She previously held administrative positions at BAM, Lincoln Center, Aspen Institute Arts Program, and the Vail Dance Festival, and served as assistant to Damian Woetzel. She has written extensively on dance.

She recently founded Body of Ways to pursue collaborative works that build embodied understanding and collective experience in today’s increasingly disembodied and isolated world.

Silas Riener makes dances as collisions of games, formal training, improvisation, athletics, and building and construction. He has worked with Rashaun Mitchell since 2010 and collaborates with sculptor Martha Friedman. He danced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, with Tere O’Connor, and many others. Riener is a 2026 Guggenheim fellow, and recently premiered “Open Machine,” an NDP and Creative Capital supported project in collaboration with Rashaun Mitchell, Jesse Stiles, Davison Scandrett, Charmaine Lee, Thomas Arsenault/Mas YSA, and nine extraordinary dancers. More at rashaunsilasdance.com

Silas Riener makes dances as collisions of games, formal training, improvisation, athletics, and building and construction. He has worked with Rashaun Mitchell since 2010 and collaborates with sculptor Martha Friedman. He danced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, with Tere O’Connor, and many others. Riener is a 2026 Guggenheim fellow, and recently premiered “Open Machine,” an NDP and Creative Capital supported project in collaboration with Rashaun Mitchell, Jesse Stiles, Davison Scandrett, Charmaine Lee, Thomas Arsenault/Mas YSA, and nine extraordinary dancers. More at rashaunsilasdance.com

Isabel Quinzaños Alonso

Christy Bolingbroke

Kristen Brogdon

Brian Brooks

Michael Byrne

Nancy Baker Cahill

Beata Calińska

Cinthia Chen

Molly Clark

Fernando Cortes

Maya Davis

Julia Diamond

Katherine Helen Fisher

Brian Fitzpatrick

Vallejo Gantner

Adrienne Godwin

Kristin Gregory

Kristin Gregory

Kalecia Grier

Susan Gunter

Alberto Ibarguen

Lisa Jamhoury

Yayoi Kambara

Megan Kiskaddon

Hari Krishnan

Jordana Leigh

Cathy Levy

Sarah Lutman

Christian Lyhus

Tod Machover

LaJuné McMillian

Ariane Michaud

Rachel Moore

Meena Murugesan

Sarah Nguyễn

Matthew Niederhauser

Brandon Powers

Jessica Rajko

Silas Riener

Liz Rosenthal

David C. Rowell

Andrew Schneider

Linda Shelton

Sarah Silverblatt-Buser

Sydney Skybetter

Marlon Barrios Solano

Jesse Stiles

Clemence Taillandier

Ilya Vidrin

Sage Ni'Ja Whitson

Estelle Woodward

Kyle Yandow

Mimi Yin

Jacob’s Pillow is a National Historic Landmark, recipient of the National Medal of Arts, and home to America's longest-running international dance festival, which celebrates its 94th season in Summer 2026. Jacob’s Pillow acknowledges that it rests on the ancestral homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok or Mohican people. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors and elders past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all. In addition, we acknowledge the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag and other tribal nations who also made their homes in what is now known as Massachusetts.

Founded by Ted Shawn in 1933, each Festival includes national and international dance companies and free and ticketed performances, talks, tours, classes, exhibits, events, and community programs. The School at Jacob’s Pillow, a prestigious professional dance training center, advances the careers of the upcoming generation of performers and choreographers; during the Festival, 100 international dancers evolve as artists in ballet, choreography, contemporary, musical theatre, tap, and other genres; and year round, artist faculty and accomplished alumni nurture younger dancers in a series of Jacob’s Pillow 360 Workshops and Intensives offered in partnership with leading dance institutions across the United States. The Pillow also provides professional advancement opportunities across the disciplines of arts administration through seasonal internships. Through its community engagement programs, the Pillow serves as a partner and active citizen in its local community. The Pillow’s extensive Archives, open year-round to the public and highlighted online at jacobspillow.org/explore-dance, chronicles more than one century of dance in photographs, programs, books, costumes, audio, and videos.

Notable artists who have created or premiered dances at the Pillow include choreographers Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Donald McKayle, Kevin McKenzie, Twyla Tharp, Ralph Lemon, Susan Marshall, Trisha Brown, Ronald K. Brown, Wally Cardona, Andrea Miller, and Trey McIntyre; performed by artists such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Carmen de Lavallade, Mark Morris, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Edward Villella, Rasta Thomas, Min Tanaka, Savion Glover, and countless others. On March 2, 2011, President Barack Obama honored Jacob’s Pillow with a National Medal of Arts, the highest arts award given by the United States Government, making the Pillow the first dance presenting organization to receive this prestigious award. The Pillow’s Executive and Artistic Director since 2016 is Pamela Tatge.

It is with gratitude and humility that Jacob’s Pillow acknowledges that it rests on the ancestral homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok or Mohican people, who are the Indigenous peoples of this land. Despite tremendous hardship in being forced from here, today they reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors and elders past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all.

In addition, we acknowledge the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag, and other tribal nations who also made their homes in what is now known as Massachusetts, and we recognize their continued existence and contributions to our region. We invite you to visit this page to learn more about how to become involved.