Doug Elkins is a two-time New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award-winning choreographer who began his career as a B-Boy, touring the world with break dance groups New York Dance Express and Magnificent Force, among others. In 1988, he officially founded the Doug Elkins Dance Company with Lisa Nicks, Jane Weiner, and Ben Munisteri, which performed nationally and internationally for fifteen years before disbanding in 2003. Doug is a recipient of significant choreographic commissions and awards from the NEA, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation, Choo-San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation, Dance Magazine Foundation, Metropolitan Life/American Dance Festival, Hartford Foundation, Arts International, The Greenwall Foundation, and The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. In 1994, he was honored with a Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal, sharing the stage with author Philip Roth and photographer Nan Goldin. In 2006, he was honored in New York City by the Martha Hill Award for Career Achievement; last month in Boston, he received an Elliot Norton Award for Best Choreography (for Fraulein Maria).
Doug has taught and choreographed extensively in the US and Europe and has created original work for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, Flying Karamazov Brothers, MaggioDanza, Pennsylvania Ballet, Union Dance and CanDoCo of London, as well as a number of university dance companies and the renowned Mini and Maxi of Holland. His theater work includes collaborations with Joanne Akalaitis and Philip Glass, Robert Woodruff, Pavel Dubrusky, Annie Hamburger, Molly Smith, Craig Lucas, David Henry Hwang, Michael Preston, and Barbara Karger, and Arin Arbus.
A graduate of SUNY/Purchase, Doug received his MFA in Dance from Hollins University/ADF in 2007. Until January 2011, he taught at The Beacon School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where his tenure was the subject of Where the Dance Is, a short film by Marta Renzi. Most recently he concluded a creative residency in Santa Barbara sponsored by DANCEworks for the creation of Mo(or)town/Redux, and now, with funding from The Joyce Theater Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation’s NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, he and theater director Anne Kauffman are in residence at Joyce Soho for the creation of another new work.
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