Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is a choreographer, dancer, artistic director, educator, and organizer whose work has fundamentally reshaped American concert dance. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, she trained early with Joseph Stevenson, a student of Katherine Dunham, an education that connected dance technique to cultural history and community life. She earned a B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1975 and an M.F.A. from Florida State University in 1979.

In 1980, Zollar moved to New York City to study with Dianne McIntyre at Sounds in Motion, a Black experimental-dance environment that joined music, improvisation, theatricality, and social awareness. Four years later she founded Urban Bush Women, initially as a performance ensemble and eventually as a broader institution for performance, artist development, education, and community engagement. The company challenged assumptions about who belonged on the concert-dance stage by centering Black women of varied body types and placing stories often excluded from dominant dance narratives at the center of theatrical work.

Zollar created more than thirty-four works for Urban Bush Women and choreographed for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Philadanco, and universities. She has also collaborated with Germaine Acogny's Compagnie Jant-Bi and Nora Chipaumire, and choreographed Taylor Mac's *A 24-Decade History of Popular Music* and Jake Heggie's opera *Intelligence* for Houston Grand Opera in 2023. Her work moves fluidly between ensemble dance theatre, civic engagement, experimental performance, and large institutional production.

Zollar extended Urban Bush Women's mission beyond repertory through the Summer Leadership Institute and, in 2013, the Choreographic Center Initiative. These programs treat artistic practice, leadership, and cultural organizing as mutually reinforcing. The MacArthur Foundation specifically recognized how her model of community engagement influenced artists and companies beyond Urban Bush Women itself.

At Florida State University, Zollar has held the Nancy Smith Fichter Professorship in Dance and the university's Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professorship. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Dance/USA Honor Award, a Bessie lifetime-achievement award, a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2022 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the 2024 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award.