SCHOLARLY BIOGRAPHY

Cynthia Oliver creates performance collages that move from dance to word to sound and back again toward an eclectic and provocative dance theatre.

A Bronx born, Virgin Island reared performer, she incorporates the textures of Caribbean performance with African and American aesthetic sensibilities. She has been awarded and/or commissioned by The New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) award, Franklin Furnace, The Puffin Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund for Minority Artists, New York State Council on the Arts, 92Y Harkness Dance Center, Performance Space 122, Dance Theater Workshop/New York Live Arts, The National Performance Network, Creative Capital, The Rockefeller/Doris Duke MAP Fund, New England Foundation for the Arts (NDP), The Pew Charitable Trust, The University of Illinois Research Board and the Illinois Arts Council. Her dance theatre work has been performed across the country in festivals and spaces like The Public Theater, The Kitchen, Performance Space 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Aaron Davis Hall and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City, NOCCA in New Orleans, Links Hall, the Hot House, The Dance Center at Columbia College, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Chicago and Urbana, IL, The Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas in Seattle, the Dance Place in Washington D.C., The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philadelphia PA, and Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston Maine, among many others. Her choreography for theatre has been performed at Minnesota’s Penumbra and Pillsbury House Theaters, New York’s La MaMa Etc., Syncronicity Space and Aaron Davis Hall. She has danced with Theatre Dance Inc. where she was mentored by Atti van den Berg (originally of Kurt Jooss’ dance theatre) and later the Caribbean Dance Company of St. Croix, Virgin Islands. She has toured the globe as a featured dancer with contemporary companies David Gordon Pick Up Co., Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, Bebe Miller Company, and Tere O’Connor Dance and as an actor in works by Laurie Carlos, Greg Tate, Ione, Ntozake Shange, and Deke Weaver. She earned a PhD in performance studies, and her scholarly work focuses on performance in the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly in the US Virgin Islands. She has published works in anthologies, exhibition booklets, the Movement Research Journal, and Women and Performance. Her single-authored book, Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2009. She teaches dancing techniques, composition, performance, post-colonial and feminist theory, and courses emphasizing the African-American and African-Caribbean influences in American performance. She has taught at New York University’s Department of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, The Newcomb Summer Dance Intensive at Tulane University, Florida State University, University of Maryland College Park, and the Dance Department at University of Utah. She is a full professor in the dance department at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, an affiliate in African American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and has served a five-year term as the institution’s Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in the Humanities, Arts and Related Fields. In 2011 she was named a University Scholar and in 2020 a Center for Advanced Studies Professor, both awards are among the most selective for faculty at the University of Illinois. And she was recently named a 2021 United States Artist Fellow and 2021 Doris Duke Artist and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.