Bio
Virginia Johnson
Artistic Director, founding member and former principal dancer of Dance Theatre of Harlem. During her 28 years with the company Virgina Johnson performed most of the repertoire, with principal roles in
Giselle,
Swan Lake,
Agon,
Concerto Barocco,
Allegro Brillante,
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Voluntaries and
Fall River Legend, which was broadcast on television and won a cable ACE award from the Bravo Network. Later choreographic works include ballets created for Goucher College, Dancers Responding to AIDS, the Second Annual Harlem Festival of the Arts, Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center and Marymount Manhattan College, where she was also an adjunct professor. After retiring from performing, she founded
POINTE Magazine and was editor-in-chief from 2000-2009. Her honors include a Young Achiever Award from the National Council of Women, a Dance Magazine Award, a Pen and Brush Achievement Award, the Washington Performing Arts Society's 2008-2009 Pola Nirenska Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2009 Martha Hill Fund Mid-Career Award.
www.dancetheatreofharlem.com Constance Valis Hill
Jacob's Pillow Scholar-in-Residence, Constance Valis Hill is a jazz dancer, choreographer, and scholar of performance studies whose writings have appeared in Dance Magazine, Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, Studies in Dance History, and Discourses in Dance; and in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African-American Dance (2001), Taken By Surprise: Dance Improvisation Reader (2003), Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham
(2005), and Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (2008). Her book Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000), received the Deems Taylor ASCAP
Award; and the newly-published Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (Oxford University Press 2010) was supported by grants from the John D. Rockefeller and John Simon Guggenheim Foundations. She has a Ph.D. in
Performance Studies from New York University and is a Five College Professor of Dance at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- Harlem
District occupying part of northern Manhattan Island, New York City, U.S. It lies north of Central Park, with its business district centred on 125th Street. Founded by Peter Stuyvesant in 1658 as Nieuw Haarlem, it was named after Haarlem in the Netherlands. During the American Revolution it was the site of the Battle of Harlem Heights (Sept. 16, 1776). It was a farming area in the 18th century and a fashionable residential district in the 19th century. A black residential and commercial area by World War I, in the 1920s it was the centre of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
- Harlem on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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