Princess Grace Statue Award Recipient (2018), Doris Duke Award Recipient (2016), and MacArthur Fellow (2013) KYLE ABRAHAM began his dance training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh, PA. After graduating from Schenley High School, Abraham continued his dance studies in New York, earning a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Abraham later received an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Washington Jefferson College. Abraham is currently the Claude and Alfred Mann Endowed Professor in Dance at The University of Southern California (USC) Glorya Kaufman School of Dance (2021-). Prior to USC, Abraham served as a visiting professor in residence at the University of California, Los Angeles’s (UCLA) World Arts Cultures in Dance program (2016-2021). Abraham serves on the advisory board for Dance Magazine and in 2020 was selected to be their first-ever Guest Editor. Abraham sits on the artist advisory board for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the inaugural Black Genius Brain Trust. In addition, Abraham was named a Kennedy Center Next 50 Leader (2021), a list of leaders who exemplify the Center’s mission to help shape culture and society through the arts.
Rebecca Bengal of Vogue wrote, “What Abraham brings … is an avant-garde aesthetic, an original and politically minded downtown sensibility that doesn’t distinguish between genres but freely draws on a vocabulary that is as much Merce [Cunningham] and Martha [Graham] as it is Eadweard Muybridge and Michael Jackson.”
In addition to performing and developing new works for his company A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Abraham has been commissioned by a wide variety of dance companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The National Ballet of Cuba, New York City Ballet, and the Royal Ballet.
Abraham’s third work for New York City Ballet, When We Fell (2021), was reviewed by The New York Times as “among the most beautiful dance films of the pandemic.” Other recent works include The Weathering (2022), commissioned by The Royal Ballet; Abraham’s collaboration with NYCB Principal Dancer Taylor Stanley on Ces noms que nous portons (2020), a Lincoln Center and NYCB commissioned solo; and Unto The End, We Meet (2020), commissioned by the National Ballet of Cuba. Abraham was the final choreographer commissioned by Paul Taylor before his passing, creating Only The Lonely (2019) for Paul Taylor American Modern Dance. The Runaway (2018) was recognized on the “Best Dance of 2018” list by The New York Times and Untitled America (2016), a 3-part commissioned work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was described by The New York Times as “potent and explosive and wonderfully of the moment.”
In addition to his work for A.I.M and other major dance companies, Abraham has choreographed for many of the leading dancers of our time. Most recently, to be seen (2020), a new solo for American Ballet Theatre Principal Dancer Calvin Royal III, premiered during the virtual Fall For Dance Festival. Of this solo, The New York Times observed “how skilled [Abraham] has become at mingling the ballet vernacular with other forms, from hip-hop to West African movement” and his unique talent for “finding the person within the dancer and the bodies within a body.” Abraham created Ash (2019), a solo work for American Ballet Theatre Principal Dancer Misty Copeland that also had its premiere at Fall for Dance. The Serpent and The Smoke (2016) toured as part of Restless Creature, a pas de deux for Abraham and acclaimed "Bessie" award-winning and former New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Wendy Whelan. Off the stage, Abraham choreographed the music video for Sufjan Stevens’ Sugar (2020) and for the feature-length film The Book of Henry (2016) for acclaimed director Colin Trevorrow.
In his early career, Abraham served as a choreographic contributor for Beyonce’s British Vogue cover shoot (2013) and was named a Joyce Creative Residency Artist (2017-18), a City Center Choreographer in Residence (2015), the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award recipient (2012), a USA Ford Fellow (2012), and the New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist (2012–2014). Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered Abraham’s Another Night (2012) at New York City Center. OUT Magazine labeled Abraham as the “best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama” (2011). Abraham is the recipient of a "Bessie" award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for The Radio Show (2010) and a Princess Grace Award for Choreography (2010) and was selected as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch” (2009).
Abraham’s choreography has been presented throughout the United States and abroad. Notable venues and festivals include Brooklyn Academy of Music, Danspace Project, Fall for Dance Festival at New York City Center, Harlem Stage, The Joyce Theater, and Lincoln Center in New York; Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Los Angeles Music Center in California; Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago in Illinois; ICA Boston and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts; Bates Dance Festival in Maine; American Dance Festival in North Carolina; The Andy Warhol Museum, The Byham, and The Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pennsylvania; Performing Arts Houston and TITAS in Texas; On The Boards and Seattle Theatre Group in Washington; and The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Internationally Abraham’s works have toured to Théâtre Paul Eluard, Maison de la Danse, Théâtre de la Ville, and L’Onde in France; Tanz Im August and Kampnagel Festival in Germany; Project Arts Centre in Ireland; The Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum in Japan; and the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells in the United Kingdom, among others.
Photo by Carrie Schneider.