Ishmael Houston-Jones

Ishmael Houston-Jones is choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and worldwide. Drawn to collaboration as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. He and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd. Houston-Jones received a fourth “Bessie” in 2020 for Service to the Field of Dance.

As an author Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His work has also appeared in the magazines PAJ, Movement Research Performance Journal, Bomb, and Contact Quarterly. His first book, Fat and Other Stories was published in 2018 by Yonkers International Press.

Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now. Houston-Jones is a 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2021 recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship. In 2024 he was awarded the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching award from the American Dance Festival. His work has also been supported by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2013), The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (2015), The Herb Alpert Foundation (2016), The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2018) and The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation (2020).