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California Institute of the Arts

Visiting Artists

The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance

A large group of dancers in bright costumes, draped inside and across the top of a car. A woman in a cowboy hat is in the foreground.

Photo by visiting artist Josh Rose.

CalArts is renowned for its vibrant and dynamic approach to dance education, and an environment where creativity, innovation, and artistic expression flourish. Central to this ethos are the world-class dancers, choreographers, and interdisciplinary artists who come to CalArts to engage with students through workshops, performances, and collaborative projects. Working with these leading figures in the dance world, students are inspired to push the boundaries of their practice and develop their unique artistic voices, preparing them for impactful careers in the ever-evolving field of dance.

  • Gerard & Kelly: Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly are American artists who work with performance, video, and installation.
  • Okwui Okpokwasili: 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts recipient Okwui Okpokwasili is a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, actor, writer, and luminous stage presence with the talent to hold and unsettle audiences.
  • Emmanuelle Huynh, Plateforme Múa: Emmanuelle Huynh is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, exploring the relationship between dance and literature, music, light, ikebana, and architecture.
  • Salia Sanou is a renowned choreographer and dancer from Burkina Faso. He is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Choreographic Development La Termitière in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
  • (La) Horde is a collective of three artists: Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Artur Harel. Directors of the CCN Ballet National de Marseille, they work on choreographic creation with dance at the heart to develop movies, video installations, and performance.
  • Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, composer, performer, singer, writer, educator, and advocate. He is fascinated by the time-based nature of performance and how it creates an ideal frame for phenomenological questions around presence and meaning-making.
  • LAJAMARTIN is a physical dance theater company founded by Laja Field and Martin Durov. From floor to air, a variety of dynamic movement defined by musicality and rhythm crafts the vocabulary that embodies the work’s intention.
  • Josh Rose is a photographer. His unique eye and story-driven approach have made him one of the most sought-out new photographers, leading him to shoots for brands like Nike, Ford, Major League Baseball, the Los Angeles Dance Project, and more.
  • Danielle Agami is an Israeli choreographer whose unique movement and ability to cultivate excellence in others have brought her to the forefront of her profession. After eight years dancing with Batsheva Dance Company, Agami founded her company Ate9 as a platform for innovative movement and artistic research.
  • Benjamin Millepied is a choreographer, filmmaker, and former principal dancer with New York City Ballet. Millepied moved to Los Angeles in 2012 to found his company LA Dance Project with Charles Fabius, which has since given hundreds of performances at prestigious venues around the world, as well as site-specific performances in nontraditional venues.
  • Faustin Linyekula is a Congolese dancer and choreographer of contemporary dance. His works are structured along the lines of the dance form Ndombolo and its associated music, and address the legacy of decades of war, terror, fear, and the collapse of the economy.
  • Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as an artist since 1991.
  • Rubberlegz, aka Rauf Yasit, is a Los Angeles-based choreographer and dancer with Kurdish roots who was born and raised in Celle, Germany.
  • Boris Charmatz is a dancer, choreographer, and director of Terrain who subjects dance to formal constraints that redraw the field of possibilities. The stage is a notepad to draft concentrated, organic concepts in order to observe the chemical reactions, intensities, and tensions engendered by their encounter.
  • Luciana Achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialog with the New York and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out.
  • Tino Sehgal is an artist of German and Indian descent based in Berlin, who describes his work as “constructed situations.” He is known as a choreographer who makes dance for the museum setting.
  • Noé Soulier’s work explores choreography and dance in different settings. In conceptual projects as the book Actions, Movements and Gestures or the performance Movement on Movement, he analyzes and describes different ways to conceive movements that aim to offer multiple ways to experience the body.
  • Ronald K. Brown is a dancer and choreographer who founded the dance company Evidence in New York in 1985. Brown’s work incorporates modern dance, Senegalese Sabar and other West African movement vocabularies, Afro-Caribbean dance, and contemporary urban dance from around the world.
  • Donald Byrd is a Tony-nominated (The Color Purple) and Bessie Award-winning (The Minstrel Show) choreographer and artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theater.
  • Joe Goode is a choreographer, writer, and director widely known as an innovator in the field of dance for his willingness to collide movement with spoken word, song, and visual imagery.
  • Anna Halprin helped pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to herself as a breaker of the rules of modern dance.
  • Jacques Heim is a French-born choreographer who founded Diavolo Dance Theater in 1992 after graduating from CalArts.
  • Lawrence (Larry) Keigwin is a native New Yorker and choreographer who has danced his way from the Metropolitan Opera to downtown clubs to Broadway and back. He founded KEIGWIN + COMPANY in 2003 and as artistic director has led the company as it has performed at theaters and dance festivals throughout New York City and around the world.
  • Barak Marshall, son of the acclaimed dancer, choreographer, and singer Margalit Oved, is the former house choreographer of the Batsheva Dance Company and one of Israel’s most celebrated dance artists.
  • Rennie Harris is a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, and professor of hip-hop dance. Harris formed the first and longest running hip-hop dance touring company, Rennie Harris Puremovement, in 1992. In 2007, he conceived another touring company, RHAW, or Rennie Harris Awe-Inspiring Works.
  • Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, conceptualist, director, writer, and installation artist who has pushed the boundaries of dance.
  • Marjani Forte-Saunders is an independent artist and half of the performance duo 7NMS| with Everett Saunders. Fort-Saunders is also co-founder with Nia Love of LOVE|FORTÉ A COLLECTIVE, and one of two directors of the Alkebu-lan Cultural Center in Pasadena, alongside sound designer/composer Everett Saunders.
  • Meg Stuart/Damaged Good is an American choreographer and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. Stuart strives to develop a new language for every piece in collaboration with artists from different creative disciplines and navigates the tension between dance and theater.
  • Fiona Lummis danced with Netherlands Dance Theater from 1981 to 2001. Fiona created roles in 15 of Jiří Kylián’s ballets, and in numerous works by Hans Van Manen, Nacho Duato, Ohad Naharin, and Mats Ek, among others.
  • Will Rawls is an American contemporary choreographer, performance artist, curator, and writer based in New York City and with continuing projects in Europe.

The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 awarded annually to risk-taking, mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater, and the visual arts. Each Herb Alpert Award recipient develops a residency at CalArts during the year of their award. Here are some of the past awardees in Dance.