John Heginbotham

John Heginbotham is a choreographer recognized for rigorous musical structure, theatrical wit, and cross-disciplinary work spanning concert dance, opera, Broadway, community practice, and dance education. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, he studied in Bessie Schönberg's Choreography Workshop at Jacob's Pillow in 1990 and earned a BFA in Dance from Juilliard in 1993, receiving the Martha Hill Prize for Sustained Achievement in Dance.

Heginbotham's performing career established the disciplined musicality at the center of his later work. He danced with Susan Marshall & Company from 1995 to 1998, then joined Mark Morris Dance Group, where he remained for fourteen years and performed leading roles in works including *L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato*, *The Hard Nut*, *Four Saints in Three Acts*, and *Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare*. While still performing, he began receiving support for independent choreography, including Jerome Robbins Foundation New Essential Works fellowships in 2010 and 2012.

Heginbotham founded Dance Heginbotham in 2011. The company made a prominent New York debut at Baryshnikov Arts Center in 2012 and appeared at Jacob's Pillow that summer. Works such as *Twin* and *Closing Bell* established a vocabulary that could be formally exact, rhythmically alert, humorous, and strange. In 2014, Jacob's Pillow presented him with its Dance Award, the same season in which Dance Heginbotham premiered *Chalk and Soot*. A Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography followed in 2018.

Education and access have remained continuous strands in his practice. Heginbotham became director of the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble in 2012 and served on Princeton University's faculty from 2012 to 2015. He is a founding teacher of Dance for PD, the Mark Morris Dance Group program developed with the Brooklyn Parkinson Group, connecting choreography, training, and community participation. His collaborations have reached opera and musical theatre, including *The Magic Flute*, *Girls of the Golden West*, *La Traviata*, and other productions, as well as work with artists including Isaac Mizrahi, Nico Muhly, Maira Kalman, and Brooklyn Rider.

During the 2020 pandemic shutdown, Dance Heginbotham developed *24 Caprices*, a sequence of short dance films created with violinist Colin Jacobsen and editor Maile Okamura. In 2024, Baryshnikov Arts commissioned and presented *Woolgathering*, demonstrating the continuing evolution of Heginbotham's dance-theatre practice.