ABBY ZBIKOWSKI is a choreographer creating contemporary dance works that pay homage to the effort of living, tactics of survival, and the aesthetics produced as a result, utilizing the physical aspects and psyche-emotional experience of her rigorous training in African and Afro-diasporic forms, playing sports, and performing manual labor. She founded Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 and received the 2017 juried "Bessie" award for her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures to create works of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger.” In 2018 she received a Choreographer of the Future commission from Dance Umbrella UK and in 2020 a United States Artists Fellowship. She is an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, currently artist-in-residence at New York LiveArts, and formerly at Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, and the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics. She is currently an Associate Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University, formerly at the University of Illinois, and on faculty at the American Dance Festival. She has taught at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia, at Festival Un Pas Vers L’Avant in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and studied at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal. Abby has created commissioned work for the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and numerous universities.