Shen Wei

Shen Wei is a Chinese-born choreographer, visual artist and company director who has created a distinctive multidisciplinary dance-theater practice by joining Chinese opera, ink painting and modern dance into unified kinetic and visual compositions. Born in 1968 in Hunan Province to Chinese-opera professionals, Shen trained from childhood in opera performance, calligraphy and painting. He performed with the Hunan State Xian Opera Company from 1984 through 1989, developing a vocabulary of gesture, design and pictorial thinking before modern dance became his primary performance field.

In 1989, Shen entered the American Dance Festival program at the Guangdong Dance Academy. Two years later he became a founding member of Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China's first professional modern-dance company, where he worked as performer and choreographer until 1994. An Asian Cultural Council fellowship brought him to New York in 1995 to study at the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab. That same year, the American Dance Festival invited him to create work on festival students, beginning a practice of expanding contact with American postmodern and modern-dance traditions while continuing to draw on painting, calligraphy, opera and acrobatics.

Shen Wei founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in July 2000. Early works including *Folding* (2000), *Near the Terrace* (2001), *Rite of Spring* (2003), *Connect Transfer* and *Map* established a repertory in which bodies, pigment, costume, architecture and music operate as integrated parts of a single composition. Recognition came swiftly: a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001, the Nijinsky Emerging Choreographer Award in 2004, and in 2007 both a MacArthur Fellowship and United States Artists fellowship.

In 2008, Shen served as lead choreographer for the Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies. Since then, he has created work for major ballet and opera institutions including Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, Dutch National Ballet, Teatro di San Carlo and the Rome Opera, while expanding his practice into installations, films and painting exhibitions. In 2022, the American Dance Festival presented him the Samuel H. Scripps Award for lifetime achievement in choreography. His company remains a vehicle for performance, touring and the teaching of his Natural Body Development technique.