Foundation for Contemporary Arts

Miguel Gutierrez

Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Born 1971, Flushing, NY

Choreographer

I am a Brooklyn-based dance and performance maker. I create evening-length performances that engage enduring philosophical questions regarding who we are as individuals and why we are here. My pieces are rigorous and generous frameworks that exercise perception on physical, emotional and intellectual levels. My work is about desire, longing and the search for meaning. My first encounters with dance were as a young, repressed queer boy growing up in New Jersey, the son of Colombian immigrants who had aspirations for me that did not include "dancer." When I was little my sister and I, social outcasts that we were, would spend Friday nights staging celebratory solo improvisational dances for each other. One of us would put on a record and the other would instantly create a performance to it. Through this dancing I experienced myself as powerful, sensual, ecstatic, totally engaged with the present and free from societal expectations of propriety. In these performances I was able to identify and externalize the tapestry of my fiercely private interior life. This combination of pleasure, resistance, imagination and personal revelation still fuels my art-making today.

1992 - 1993 New York University

1989 - 1992 Brown University

SELECTED WORKS

2009 Last Meadow, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop, New York, NY; also performed in the US and internationally

2008 Nothing, No thing, premiered at LaMama Moves Festival, La MaMa E.T.C., New York, NY; also performed in the US and internationally

2007 Everyone, premiered at Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; also performed in the US and internationally

2006 myendlesslove, premiered at MiX: The Experimental Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival, New York, NY

2005 Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop, New York, NY; also performed in the US and internationally

2004 dAMNATION rOAD, premiered at The Kitchen, New York, NY; also performed in the US and internationally

2003 I succumb, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop, New York, NY; also performed in the US and internationally

2001 freedom of information, premiered at Aqui the Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY; also performed at Politics of Ecstasy Festival, Berlin, Germany

SELECTED HONORS AND AWARDS

2009 Creative Capital Grant

2004, 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography

2006 New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for the choreography of Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies

2006 - 2008 Tides Foundation's Lambent Fellowship in the Arts