Bill T Jones

Bill T. Jones is an American choreographer, dancer, theater director, writer and company founder whose collaborative, multimedia works join rigorous movement with questions of identity, illness, memory, race and civic life. Born William Tass Jones on February 15, 1952, in Bunnell, Florida, he grew up in rural Steuben County in upstate New York. At the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he entered as a theater student, he began formal training in ballet and modern dance and met photographer and performer Arnie Zane in 1971—a meeting that would shape his artistic life.

After a period in Amsterdam, Jones returned to Binghamton and in 1973 co-founded the American Dance Asylum with Lois Welk. With Zane, Jones developed a sustained duet practice in which differences of race, body type, scale, sexuality and temperament were made visible rather than neutralized. In 1982, Jones and Zane formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, extending their duet experiments into ensemble and evening-length work. The repertory mixed movement, text, projected imagery, live or recorded music and collaborations with artists including Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Julius Hemphill and Cassandra Wilson.

After Zane died in 1988, Jones continued the company and created works that confronted loss without reducing dance to autobiography. *D-Man in the Waters* (1989) and *Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land* (1990) became landmark works of this period. In 1994, Jones premiered *Still/Here*, developed through survival workshops with people living with life-threatening illness. Participants' gestures, words and images became part of the work's choreography and media environment, bringing the politics of representation, illness and spectatorship into public debate.

Jones also moved between concert dance and theater. His choreography for *Spring Awakening* won the 2007 Tony Award, and his choreography for *FELA!* won the 2010 Tony Award. His honors include a 1994 MacArthur Fellowship, 2010 Kennedy Center Honors and the 2013 National Medal of Arts. In 2011 the company merged with Dance Theater Workshop to form New York Live Arts, with Jones as artistic director. He continued making large-scale works, including *Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray* (2009) and *Deep Blue Sea* (2021), which explored the unstable relation between individual and collective experience through a cast of company dancers and community participants.