Shamel Pitts

Shamel Pitts is a Brooklyn-born American choreographer, dancer, director, and spoken-word artist who builds multidisciplinary performance worlds investigating Black embodiment, identity, intimacy, and transformation. His work combines choreography with light, projection, sound, and language to create what he frames as Afrofuturist practice—sensory environments where bodies and relationships emerge as sites of collective power and reimagining.

Pitts began formal training at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts while studying simultaneously at The Ailey School. He won first prize in the National YoungArts Competition in 2003 and went on to earn a BFA in dance from The Juilliard School in 2007, receiving the school's Martha Hill Award for excellence in dance. Early professional work included engagements with Mikhail Baryshnikov's Hell's Kitchen Dance and BJM_Danse Montréal, but the defining chapter of his performing career came through seven years with Israel's Batsheva Dance Company under artistic director Ohad Naharin. At Batsheva, Pitts worked within the sensory and improvisational research of Gaga, the movement language developed by Naharin; he became a certified Gaga instructor in 2010 and has remained a dedicated teacher of the practice.

Beginning in 2016, Pitts developed the works known as the BLACK Series, a body of multidisciplinary work that has toured internationally. The sequence culminated in *BLACK HOLE: Trilogy and Triathlon*, created in 2018 and presented in subsequent versions including 2022. The work brings three Black performers together in an uninterrupted environment rich with projection, original sound, samples, and spoken word. Rather than treating the black hole as an image of disappearance, the collaborators use it as a metaphor for generative transformation and collective power. The RED Series shifts focus from external perceptions of Blackness toward differences and relationships within Black identity itself. *Touch of RED* (2022), a duet for two men staged within a contemporary ring, studies masculinity, intimacy, vulnerability, power, and softness.

In December 2019, Pitts founded TRIBE, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit multidisciplinary collective that combines movement, video art, photography, documentary, installations, workshops, and performance. The organization's mission foregrounds artists of color and Afrofuturist possibility. TRIBE's works emerge from the combined vision of artists working across choreography, lighting, projection, electronic composition, cinematography, and video—a deliberately collaborative model that distributes authorship rather than centering a single creator. Pitts has also choreographed Claudia Rankine's play *HELP*, directed by Taibi Magar and commissioned by The Shed.

Pitts' honors reflect recognition at the highest levels of American arts support. He received a Princess Grace Award in 2018, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in 2019, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, and a Bessie Award in 2021. In 2024, he was named a MacArthur Fellow and received a Doris Duke Artist Award, the Knight Choreography Prize, and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator. His current recognitions include a 2026 United States Artists Fellowship and the 2026 Jacob's Pillow Men Dancers Award.