CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Dance professor Cynthia Oliver has received a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship.
Oliver is one of 60 USA Fellows for 2021, the largest class in the foundation’s history, and one of five fellows in the field of dance. The competitive fellowships are awarded to artists in 10 creative disciplines in recognition of their accomplishments and to support their ongoing artistic and professional development. Each fellow receives an unrestricted $50,000 cash award.
Fellowship winners are selected through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. This is the fourth time Oliver has been nominated for the fellowship. Two other Illinois dance professors previously received USA Fellowships – Abby Zbikowski in 2020 and Tere O’Connor in 2009.
Oliver is a choreographer and performer who danced with several professional companies before joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dance department in 2000, and she has continued to perform on select projects since. She also is an associate vice chancellor for research and innovation in humanities, arts and related fields. She is a Center for Advanced Study professor and a 2011 University Scholar. In the dance world, she has been awarded a New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award for choreography and a 2016 Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Mellon fellowship.
Oliver was raised in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, and her work incorporates Caribbean, African and American influences. Her most recent evening-length performance, Virago-Man Dem, considered the concept of masculinity in Caribbean and African American cultures. It premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2017 Next Wave festival and toured the country, including a performance at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. She also is the author of “Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean” (2009).
Oliver said she plans to write a second book about the involvement of Black artists in avant-garde and post-modern dance and experimental work. She’ll use her own history from her arrival in New York City in the early 1980s and the history of her work beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s to examine the larger impact of Black dancers and choreographers.
“There’s always this presumption that there weren’t many Black artists interested in experimental dance, that Black dance had a particular tenor and tone and qualities. We were more expansive in our thinking than often credited and we created work from that experimental ethos,” Oliver said.
Other planned projects, she said, include expanding on her 2019 dance piece “Tether” and creating a site-specific dance where one of her ancestors worked on a St. Croix slave plantation.
Oliver said the USA Fellowship is significant because it is one of only a few awards made to individual artists and because the monetary awards go directly to the artists, rather than through financial conduits.
United States Artists is a Chicago-based national arts funding organization that provides direct support to artists across the country. It is a founding partner of Artist Relief, which provided more than $20 million in the form of $5,000 in emergency relief grants to artists across the country in the past year.
