Kyle Abraham Kyle Abraham

Choreography

Kyle Abraham

Princess Grace Award:
Dance-Choreography Fellowship, 2010

Princess Grace Statue Award:
2018

Additional Grants:
• 2015 Special Project Award
• 2016 Special Project Award
• 2019 Special Projects Award

2018 Princess Grace Statue Award Recipient, 2017-18 Joyce Creative Residency Artist, 2016 Doris Duke
Recipient and 2015 City Center Choreographer in Residence, KYLE ABRAHAM is a 2013 MacArthur
Fellow who began his dance training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing
Arts High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a
BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, an honorary Doctorate in Fine
Arts from Washington Jefferson College, and is currently serving as a visiting professor in residence at
UCLA.


In November 2012, Abraham was named the newly appointed New York Live Arts Resident
Commissioned Artist for 2012–2014. Just one month later, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
premiered Abraham’s Another Night at New York City Center.


Rebecca Bengal of Vogue wrote, “What Abraham brings to Ailey is an avant-garde aesthetic, an original
and politically minded downtown sensibility that doesn’t distinguish between genres but freely draws on a
vocabulary that is as much Merce and Martha as it is Eadweard Muybridge and Michael Jackson.” That
same year, Abraham was named the 2012 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award recipient and 2012 USA Ford
Fellow, before serving as a choreographic contributor for Beyonce’s 2013 British Vogue cover shoot.


Abraham received a prestigious Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for his work in The
Radio Show, and a Princess Grace Award for Choreography in 2010. The previous year, he was selected
as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch” for 2009, and received a Jerome Travel and Study Grant in
2008.


His choreography has been presented throughout the United States and abroad; at Fall for Dance
Festival at New York City Center, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Joyce Theater, The
Los Angeles Music Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Théâtre de la Ville, Sadler’s Wells, Maison de
la Danse, Tanz Im August, On The Boards, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Bates Dance
Festival, Harlem Stage, Montreal, Ottawa, Italy, Germany, Sweden, France, Jordan, Ecuador, Dublin’s
Project Arts Center, The Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum located in Okinawa Japan, The
Andy Warhol Museum, The Byham and The Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA.


In addition to performing and developing new works for his company, A.I.M, Abraham premiered in 2016
Untitled America, a 3-part commissioned work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; toured The
Serpent and The Smoke, a pas de deux for himself and acclaimed Bessie Award-winning and former
New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Wendy Whelan as part of Restless Creature; and choreographed
for the feature-length film, The Book of Henry, for acclaimed director Colin Trevorrow. Abraham recently
premiered The Runaway for New York City Ballet’s 2018 Fall Fashion Gala, which was recognized as
“Best of Dance for 2018” by The New York Times.


In 2011, OUT Magazine labeled Abraham as the “best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New
York City in the age of Obama”.

website: http://abrahaminmotion.org/


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