Bessie Awards
American awards for choreographers, performers etc. of contempory dance in NYC in several categories (1983–)
The New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessie Awards, are awarded annually for exceptional achievement by independent dance artists presenting their work in New York City. The broad categories of the awards are: choreography, performance, music composition and visual design. The Bessie Awards were established in 1983.
History and description
The Bessie Awards were established in 1983 by Dance Theater Workshop and named in honor of Bessie Schonberg, an influential mid-20th-century teacher of modern dance and former head of the dance department at Sarah Lawrence College. The awards honor exceptional choreography, performance, music composition and visual design in dance and allied art forms. Nominees and award winners are chosen by the Bessie Selection Committee, which consists of dancers, dance presenters, producers, choreographers, journalists, critics and academics.
Since 2010, the awards have been overseen by an independent steering committee in partnership with Dance/NYC and administered by Lucy Sexton. In their current iteration, the awards encompass a broader range of dance genres and supporting art forms than in the past, and offer an annual commission to an emerging artist.
Recipients
Over 400 Bessie Awards have been presented since their founding. Notable recipients include:
Choreographers
Composers
Designers
An archive of past recipients is available at the Bessies web site.
The public source identifies “Bessie Awards” as american awards for choreographers, performers etc. of contempory dance in NYC in several categories (1983–). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bessie, Awards and American.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bessie Awards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.