Pam Tanowitz

Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator who has steadily delineated her own dance language through decades of research and creation. The 2024 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Awardee redefines tradition through careful examination, subtly questioning those who came before her yet never yielding to perceptions stuck in the past. Her combination of intentional unpredictability, whimsical complexity and natural drama evoke master dance makers from Cunningham to Balanchine through the clever weaving of movement, music and space. 

For The Royal Ballet, she has had the honor to create Everyone Keeps Me in 2019 as part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial Celebrations and, for the 2022/23 Season, Secret Things for the Linbury Theatre and Dispatch Duet for The Royal Ballet: A Diamond Celebration, her first for the Royal Opera House Main Stage.  

Tanowitz holds degrees from Ohio State University and Sarah Lawrence College, where she clarified her creative voice under former Cunningham dancer and choreographer Viola Farber.  In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance-making with a consistent community of dancers. She has since been commissioned by Fisher Center at Bard, The Joyce Theater, The Kennedy Center, and many other leading arts institutions, and has received numerous honors and fellowships from organizations ranging from the Bessie Awards, Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Herb Alpert Award, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation among others. Her dances have been called a ‘rare achievement’ (New York Times) and her 2018 work, Four Quartets, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece, was called ‘the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century’ (New York Times). Tanowitz is an assistant professor of professional practice at Mason Gross School of the Arts/Rutgers University and is the first-ever choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center at Bard.