Ishmael Houston-Jones

Ishmael Houston-Jones

Fellow: Awarded 2022
Field of Study: Dance

Competition: US & Canada

Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, curator, teacher, arts advocate, and performer. His improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. He has received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now, both at Danspace Project in New York. He also curates Danspace’s DraftWork, a platform for works-in-progress.

As an author Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His work has also appeared in the magazines: PAJ, Movement Research Performance Journal, Bomb, and Contact Quarterly. His first book, Fat and Other Stories was published in 2018 by Yonkers International Press.

Houston-Jones’ work has been supported by The Herb Alpert Foundation, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Photo Credit: Mark Poucher

Scroll to Top