Onye Ozuzu

Onye Ozuzu is a dancer, choreographer, performing artist, educator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the intersections of ritual, club, concert, and experimental movement practices. She has been actively presenting work nationally and internationally since 1997 and most recently served as Dean of the University of Florida College of the Arts in Gainesville, Florida.

Ozuzu's practice emerges from decades of immersion in contemporary dance alongside study and lived experience in West African dance and drumming, martial arts, yoga, salsa, and house dance. Her work is grounded in improvisation and shaped by intentional collisions between forms—rooted in the body’s capacity to carry culture, channel spirit, and generate change.

Her collaboration with jazz composer Greg Ward, Touch My Beloved’s Thought, premiered at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (Chicago) in 2015. The work was commissioned by Links Hall and Constellation as a live dance and music engagement with Charles Mingus’ work. Her project Project Tool, which explored the relationship between mind, body, and tool, was a Joyce Award recipient (2018), garnered a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist grant (2016), and a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Links Hall in partnership with Dancing Grounds.

Ozuzu's current work, Space Carcasses, is an international collaboration with artists Simon Rouby, Joshua Akubo Gabriel, Ben LaMar Gay and Native Malaria. Supported by the National Performance Network and the New England Foundation for the Arts, the project engages bodies, architecture, and 3D audio-visual technologies to record, re-contextualize, and re-remember spaces shaped by African diaspora histories and migrations. Space Carcasses is co-commissioned by Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, Maine), Q Dance Center (Lagos, Nigeria), and Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project (San Francisco, California).