The New York Dance and Performance Awards, the Bessies, have announced the 2024 and 2025 award recipients at the 41st Bessie Awards Ceremony. Nicky Paraiso and Patricia Hoffbauer hosted this year’s celebratory event, which was held at Dixon Place in NYC. A complete list of the 2024 and 2025 awards follows below.
Bessie Awards were presented to artists for outstanding choreographer/creator, performer, sound design or music composition, visual design, outstanding revival, and breakout choreographer — an award that honors an artist who has made an exceptional leap in their career in this last couple of years.
Music composer and performer, Jonathan Howard Katz, presented his own composition -Ipseities: No. 4 (2020) and Ipseities: No. 24 (2021).
The 2024 and 2025 Bessie Awards Ceremony was co-produced by Sangeeta Ghosh Yesley and Charles Vincent Burwell.
The 2024 New York Dance and Performance Award recipients and citations:
2024 Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award
Dyane Harvey-Salaam
For a lifetime of extraordinary rituals melding dance, theatre, and the profound embodiment of an artist’s way of being. Her presence is a lighthouse, guiding artists toward refuge, courage, and inspiration. As the devoted holder and répétiteur of Eleo Pomare’s work, she safeguards what came before while illuminating what is still possible. Through unwavering generosity and resolve, she teaches us the endless power of persistence and the art of never giving up.
Beyond the studio, her impact radiates through quiet, consistent leadership mentoring artists toward their own authority, sharpening their craft while protecting their spirit. She holds space for complexity and keeps the path lit when the road is uncertain, reminding us that endurance is not an accident but a practice. In honoring her, we honor a lifetime of disciplined care, the rare artist who preserves the past without freezing it, and who insists, again and again, that what is possible is still unfolding.
Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance Award
Ballet Tech
Ballet Tech is a cornerstone of American dance education, dedicated to training the next generation of dancers by instilling the skill, discipline, and artistic passion required to excel in this demanding art form. In doing so, it not only preserves the tradition of ballet but actively advances its relevance in today’s world. As the only public school in the United States devoted exclusively to Dance, Ballet Tech uniquely combines high-quality academic education with intensive dance training through a tuition-free collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and the Ballet Tech Foundation.
Serving students in grades 4 through 8 at its home at 890 Broadway, Ballet Tech has, since 1978, auditioned 900,000 public school children and enrolled 25,430 students, dramatically expanding access to excellence for young people from all backgrounds — many of whom would otherwise never have the opportunity to study dance. Its impact extends far beyond technique and performance. Ballet Tech creates a vibrant, deeply connected community where the shared experience of learning and performing builds lasting bonds among students, teachers, and families, offering connection and continuity in an increasingly fast-paced and disconnected world.
That sense of community reaches well beyond its classrooms, through collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and arts organizations that generate interdisciplinary work and enrich the broader cultural landscape. Ballet Tech’s alumni have gone on to perform with leading companies including Alvin Ailey, Dance Theatre of Harlem, New York City Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, The Jose Limon Dance Company, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and on Broadway, and to pursue higher education at institutions such as Juilliard, NYU, Brown, Columbia, and Yale.
Today, as we celebrate 47 years of achievement and honor Ballet Tech with the 2024 New York Dance and Performance Awards — The Bessies Award for Service to the Field, we recognize an institution whose commitment to excellence, inclusivity, access, and community has profoundly shaped the lives of its students and strengthened the future of dance. Under the leadership of Principal Veronica York and Artistic Director Dionne Figgins, Ballet Tech stands as a model of what public education and professional arts training can achieve together, and why its mission continues to deserve our collective support and recognition.
Outstanding Visual Design
Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung, Andrew Jordan
for JEUX + A CHILD’S TALE, Christopher Williams
Baryshnikov Arts Center
Their costumes captivate and narrate, honoring Ballets Russes innovation while powerfully advancing story, character, and atmosphere.
Outstanding Sound Design or Musical Composition
yuniya edi kwon, Haruko Crow Nishimura, Joshua Kohl of Degenerate Art Ensemble
for Boy mother/faceless bloom, Juni One Set
New York Live Arts
yuniya edi kwon is a visionary dancer, vocalist, and musician whose interdisciplinary work Boy mother/faceless bloom is both immersive and transformative. In collaboration with Senga Nengudi, the work weaves mythology, autobiography, ritual, and stunning duet performance into an expansive, otherworldly experience.
Outstanding Revival
The Rite of Spring (1975)
Pina Bausch; Restaged by Josephine Ann Endicott, Jorge Puerta Armenta and Clémentine Deluy and a specially assembled company of 34 dancers from 14 African countries for The Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables & Sadler’s Wells
Park Avenue Armory
Thirty-Four dancers from across the African continent — many without prior contemporary dance training — brought living, soulful movement to Stravinsky’s score, filling the space with breath, presence, and ferocity. Guided with exceptional care by artists who worked intimately with Bausch, the performance honored the choreography’s rigor while igniting it anew. From the elemental staging and soil-covered floor to the power of Black bodies in motion, this revival was riveting, masterful, and unforgettable.
Outstanding Performer
Abdiel
at Fort Greene Park
Abdiel is a masterful, culturally aware performer who, in an unexpected Brooklyn cypher under rain and heat, danced Latin Hustle at Fort Green Park with full presence, creating a show simply by doing what they love.
Paul Hamilton
for CEREMONIA, Antonio Ramos at Abrons Arts Center
Bold and nuanced, his performance celebrates the body, movement, and expression, leaving a vibrant imprint lingering in one’s memory.
Edisa Weeks
for 3 Rites: Liberty, DELIRIOUS Dances
at Mark O’Donnell Theater
for 3 Rites: Liberty, Edisa Weeks, DELIRIOUS Dances at Mark O’Donnell Theater
For a work that combined rigorous intellectual, emotional, and corporeal demands with humor and deep engagement, featuring unforgettable imagery — such as the performer tethered to evocative objects by her hair — masterful facilitation, excellent visual design, and the communal roots embedded in the backdrop, creating an extraordinary and lasting impact.
The Rite of Spring – Ensemble
at Park Avenue Armory
For filling the space with breath, presence, and ferocity. Guided with exceptional care by Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo and restaged by Josephine Ann Endicott, Jorge Puerta Armenta and Clémentine Deluy, the performance honored Pina Bausch’s choreography with rigor while igniting it anew. From the elemental staging and soil-covered floor to the power of Black bodies in motion, this revival was riveting, masterful, and unforgettable.
Cast: Aoufice Junior Gouri, Amadou Lamine Sow, Amy Collé Seck, Aníque Ayiboe, Anthony Lomuljo, Astou Diop (Tousa), Aziz Zoundi, Babacar Mané, Bazoumana Kouyaté, Brian Otieno Oloo, Carmelita Siwa, Didja Kady Tiemanta, Estelle Foli, Florent Nikiema, Franne Christie Dossou, Gloria Ugwarelojo Biachi, Gueassa Eva Sibi, Harivola Rakotondrasoa, Inas Dasylva, Khadija Cisse, Luciény Kaabral, Oliva Randrianasolo (Nanie), Pacôme Landry Seka, Profit Lucky, Rodolphe Allui, Rokhaya Coulibaly, Sahadatou Ami Touré, Serge Arthur Dodo, Shelly Ohene-Nyako, Sonia Zandile Constable, Stéphanie Mwamba, Tom Jules Samie, Vasco Pedro Mirine, Zadi Landry Kipre.
Outstanding Breakout Choreographer
Baye & Asa
Childhood friends since first grade have become a powerful duo. They move with certainty, aware of who they are and how the world has seen them. Once they start dancing, powerful, playful, bold, and jarring; their genuine presence makes their movement deeply relatable. Their work is rooted in trust, nourished by a long history of connection. Bursting with ideas, their artistry is in full bloom, emerging as groundbreaking choreographers.
Outstanding Choreographer/Creator
Hyejin Jeong, Sung Hoon Kim, Jaeduk Kim
for One Dance at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center
For a visually mesmerizing, contemporary reinterpretation of ceremonial Korean traditional dance demonstrating a perfect balance between stillness and movement, and culminating in an explosive, athletic, contemporary dance. For a show that takes you on a journey, and leaves you feeling light-hearted and elated.
Nia Love
for UNDERcurrents
at Harlem Stage
For a transporting experience, taking the audience through an immersive and sensory journey of live performance and projected visuals. Historical research and personal memories are woven together to pose questions to the audience – with urgency and compassion.
Shamel Pitts
for Touch of RED
at New York Live Arts
Shamel Pitts crafts a viscerally charged work where physical rigor meets emotional intimacy. Touch of RED at New York Live Arts explores vulnerability and connection through hypnotic, rhythm-driven movement that fuses boxing footwork, Lindy Hop, and club culture, transforming confrontation into a shared, communal experience.
Wanjiru Kamuyu
for A Disguised Welcome…aka An Immigrant’s Story
at The Chocolate Factory Theater
A perfect solo: a powerful singular presence transforms a deeply personal narrative into a universal experience. Through her bold physicality, storytelling, and the simple use of upside-down chairs, she invites intimacy and connection. The work explores displacement and belonging, which anyone could experience, with vulnerability, strength, and profound emotional resonance.
The 2025 New York Dance and Performance Award recipients and citations:
2025 Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award
Garth Fagan
The generator of a thrillingly distinctive choreographic style, Garth Fagan’s artistry manifests humanity. His technique threads jazz’s polyrhythms through the specificities of Afro-Caribbean, modern dance and ballet forms. Founding a world class dance company — Garth Fagan Dance in Rochester, NY — Fagan mined the native talent forming an ensemble of incomparably kinetic dancers. Able to suspend themselves in eternal balances and levitate without preparation, the elite dancers reveal the intricacy of Fagan’s mind, ultimately inspiring him for over 5-and-a-half decades. Fagan’s choreography astonishes audiences from the groundbreaking Griot NY created in collaboration with Wynton Marsalis, to Julie Taymor’s Lion King, ballets for Dance Theater of Harlem, New York City Ballet and countless concert halls all over the world. Garth Fagan is a man of uncompromising values and artistic integrity.
Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance Award
Gibney Dance
Gibney Dance is recognized for its long-standing commitment to providing essential infrastructure, resources, and leadership in support of artists and the broader dance field. Through its consistent dedication to access, equity, and artist well-being, Gibney has strengthened the conditions necessary for creative practice, dialogue, and exchange.
In the tradition of the BESSIE Awards, which acknowledge not only artistic excellence but lasting contribution to the field, Gibney Dance exemplifies service rooted in responsibility, care, and continuity. Its work has supported generations of artists and institutions, contributing to a more resilient and inclusive dance ecosystem.
Outstanding Visual Design
Clifton Taylor
for Many Angels for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
at New York City Center
An emissary of light and shadow, commanding color with rare authority. Luminous and precise, a world built for dancers to inhabit, and for audiences to remember. Your transcendent manipulation of photons lets us see things as they could be, inviting us to bask in a warm embrace in Lar Lubovitch’s Many Angels for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at City Center.
Outstanding Sound Design or Musical Composition
Angie Pittman, Cody Jensen
for Black Life Chord Changes at Out-Front! Festival
at BAM Fisher Hillman Studio
A rigorous, transporting aural world that holds the audience with care while carving a brave space for Black Life Chord Changes at the Pioneers Go East Collective’s Out Front! Festival at BAM.
Outstanding Revival
Grace (1999)
Ronald K. Brown
for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
at New York City Center
For a work that returns not as nostalgia but as necessity, Ronald K. Brown’s Grace revives the stage as a site of deliverance where modern dance and West African lineage braid into a communal ritual of radiance, mercy, and forward motion. Performed by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at New York City Center, this collective prayer is precise, ecstatic, and fiercely human, carrying dancers through joy, struggle, and release with undiminished power and heightened relevance.
Outstanding Performer
Jacquelin Harris
for Many Angels, Lar Lubovitch for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
at New York City Center
With quiet authority and crystal-clear intention, she honored the continuing legacy of Ailey’s leading women bringing celestial clarity to the terrestrial stage in Lar Lubovitch’s Many Angels for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at New York City Center.
Cast of CATS: The Jellicle Ball
at Perelman Performing Arts Center
For a felicitous requiem of movement and motivation serving the body politic with prrr prrr vibes and regimented performances juxtaposed with unmatched fabulosity in Cats: The Jellicle Ball at PAC NYC. Where disciplined bodies in radiant revolt, make community look inevitable.
Cast: André De Shields, Baby Byrne, Bebe Nicole Simpson, Bryce Farris, Capital Kaos, Dava Huesca, Dudney Joseph Jr., Emma Sofia, Garnet Williams, Ivy Mugler, Jenny Mollet, Jonathan Burke, Jovan E’Sean, Junior LaBeija, Kai B. White, Kendall Grayson Stroud, Nora Schell, Phumzile Sojola, Primo, Robert “Silk” Mason, Rodrick Covington, Sydney James Harcourt, Tara Lashan Clinkscales, Teddy Wilson Jr., “Tempress” Chasity Moore, Xavier Reyes, Zachary A. Myers.
Jake Roxander
for Onegin for American Ballet Theatre at Metropolitan Opera House
at Lincoln Center
Dancing measured, controlled, and alive with meaning pulling us into Lensky’s inner life with his performance of John Cranko’s Onegin, performed by American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House. With unmistakable urgency and musical intelligence, he met each moment with care and courage.
House of Juicy + House of Telfar, Performance as a House,
Draw inspiration from one of Alvin Ailey’s iconic dance pieces
at The Whitney Museum
A sermon of movement that honored ballroom culture, modern dance, and new futures in motion, carrying forward the stories of the marginalized, and those who live unapologetically at the Whitney Museum for the Ailey Ball.
House of Juicy Couture – Alexis Wan, Jayden Benbow, Tyreel Simpson, Baby Byrne, Mateo Roska, Nicholas Sterling, Shaquill Blanding, Veyonce Deleon, Tyrone Reese.
House of Telfar – Dava Huesca, Bryce Farris, Omarion Burke, Xavier Villafañe, Travon Williams, Myles Porter.
Outstanding Breakout Choreographer
Amy Hall Garner
With her deep Southern lineage, muscular musicality and verve, she spins bodies into bonfires of joy, perseverance, and familial warmth at the core. Through bold commissions across the dance community, she proves how invention and imagination cultivates form.
Outstanding Choreographer/Creator
Fredrick Earl Mosley
for Unleashed
at Ailey Citigroup Theater
For his enduring commitment to creating dance works and performances, and for fostering cross-generational mentorship and meaningful community through his Hearts of Men series — expanding visibility, possibility, and legacy within the field.
Lar Lubovitch
for Many Angels
at City Center December
For a choreography steeped in yūgen, the quiet, inexhaustible depth of what can only be suggested, this work turns an old paradox (“how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”) into a living mystery. With restraint as virtuosity, Lar Lubovitch’s Many Angels performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at New York City Center makes the smallest space feel infinite, letting absence, silence, and precision summon the unseen.
Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons
for CATS: The Jellicle Ball
at Perelman Performing Arts Center
For an unmatched synthesis of Ballroom Culture and Musical-Theater mayhem, storytelling included, Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles conjure a new way of being in CATS: The Jellicle Ball at PAC NYC. With feline personas as their runway mythology, they blend soft and dramatic vogue with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, whipping and dipping it into an unlikely, irresistible potion.
Yoko Murakami
for Blink
at Triskelion Arts
For an imaginative and exquisite use of movement and visuals that draws viewers into another dimension, exploring the body’s existence through light, shadow, and the manipulation of perception — inviting us into a dreamlike state where time and space blend.
About The Bessies
The New York Dance and Performance Awards have saluted outstanding and groundbreaking creative work in the dance field in New York City for 39 years. Known as “The Bessies” in honor of revered dance teacher Bessie Schönberg, the awards were established in 1984, by David R. White at Dance Theater Workshop. They recognize choreography, performance, music composition, visual design, legacy, and service to the field of dance by independent dance artists and organizations. Nominees are chosen by a selection committee composed of artists, presenters, producers, and writers. All those working in the dance field are invited to join the Bessies Membership and participate in annual discussions on the direction of the awards and nominate members to serve on the selection committee.
For more information about The Bessies, visit www.bessies.org.
Share this:
