CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Tere O’Connor, a professor of dance at the University of Illinois, has been selected as a United States Artists Fellow. The annual fellowships are awarded in the form of $50,000 unrestricted grants to 50 artists who have made significant contributions to their fields and demonstrated artistic excellence and unique artistic vision.
The fellowships are awarded to artists in eight categories of creative disciplines, including architecture and design, crafts and traditional arts, and the visual arts. The finalists for this year’s awards were chosen from 348 applicants. The applicants were nominated by 150 artists, critics, scholars and leaders in the arts throughout the U.S. Panels of leading artists and art experts in the various disciplines selected the finalists.
Since the grants are unrestricted, the recipients may use them to fund their work, for philanthropy or even for personal use.
“I am very happy to receive this fellowship as a validation of my work,” O’Connor said. “I have committed to an investigational focus in my choreography attempting to give shape to the more ineffable elements of dance. It is truly meaningful to be recognized in this way.”
Committed to dance as a sub-linguistic area of expression, O’Connor through his work embraces the complex spectrum of human consciousness. His newest production, an evening-length work titled “Wrought Iron Fog,” premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City in November 2009.
Founded in 1985, Tere O’Connor Dance Co. has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and South America. A sought-after choreographer, O’Connor has created commissioned works for Mikhail Baryshnikov and for dance companies around the world, including the Lyon Opera Ballet, Norway’s Carte Blanche and the White Oak Dance Project.
Before joining the faculty at Illinois, O’Connor taught modern dance and ballet technique and composition at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Movement Research in New York and Ohio State University.
O’Connor’s work has garnered numerous honors and awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Award and three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards (in 1998, 1999 and 2005). He has been the recipient of several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation/MAP Fund and from many other foundations and agencies.
USA is a grant-making, artist-advocacy organization dedicated to supporting America’s finest artists in diverse disciplines. A nonprofit organization, USA was founded in 2005 with $22 million from the Ford Foundation, the Prudential Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rasmuson Foundation as a mechanism for corporate donors, private philanthropists and other contributors to support individual artists.
