I identify first and foremost as a person who makes. I make dances, music, drawings, and I write. My desire to create things is an obsession that keeps me alive and engaged in this challenging world. I find comrades along the path and we build things together, in conversation with each other, and in support of each other, to assert imaginative possibilities through poetic insouciance, political savvy, and irreverence, rawness, and honesty as strategies and textures. I am honored to be part of a legacy of process-focused experimental artists, truth-telling queers and POC folx who take issue with propriety, because our lives exist beyond polite speech. I am a middle-aged queer who grew up as the child of Colombian immigrants. These intersections gave me insight into the absurdity of hierarchical structures, and I find ways to ignore, poke, stab, re-arrange, question, and laugh at them in my work. Each piece I make is about something and is a thing itself. My interests are vast: my father’s neurological illness and death, ghostliness, the limits of representation for racialized bodies, queer kinship and desire, what happens in the in-between, my roiling relationship to identity, grief, and how to make art for the end of the world.
Short Bio:
Miguel Gutierrez is a multi-disciplinary dance artist living between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY and Tovaangar/Los Angeles. He makes emotional work about epic and existential themes and is committed to creating space for qtbipoc folks to dream and express complexity. Recent work includes I as another, which looks at the virtual architecture of memory, and sueño, a bilingual music project of melancholy songs. His work has been presented internationally for over twenty years. He received a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award. He is currently making a new work through the Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program at Live Arts, with additional support from On the Boards/Seattle, CAP/UCLA, MCA Chicago, ADF, MANCC, and Jacob’s Pillow. He is an Associate Professor of Choreography and Vice Chair of the MFA program in UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Long Bio:
Miguel Gutierrez is a multi-disciplinary dance artist and Feldenkrais Method practitioner living between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY and Tovaangar/Los Angeles. His work creates empathetic, irreverent, and reflective spaces for himself and other QTPOC folx and centers attention as a means to unravel normative belief systems. Recent work includes I as another, which looks at the virtual architecture of memory, and sueño, a bilingual music project of melancholy songs.
His performances have been presented internationally in venues such as Festival d’Automne, Centre National du Danse and Centre Pompidou in Paris, Montpellier Danse Festival, Festival Universitario/Bogotá and Barranquilla, ImpulsTanz in Vienna, BiPod Festival in Beirut, and Festival Transameriques in Montreal, among many others. In the United States, he has been presented in venues such as Fringe Arts/Philadelphia, Walker Art Center/Minneapolis, Wexner Center for the Arts/Columbus, TBA Festival-PICA/Portland, MCA Chicago, Live Arts Bard, and in New York at The Kitchen, Live Arts, BAM, Danspace Project, Abrons Art Center, The Chocolate Factory, and American Realness. He was a selected artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2017, he was commissioned to create a work for Ballet de Lorraine, a contemporary dance company in France, and he created the choreography for Every Ocean Hughes’ 2021 film ONE BIG BAG, which has exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, four NY Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards, and a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award. He has received project support multiple times through the National Performance Network, MAP Fund, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project.
His work is discussed and featured in Performance Now: Live Art for the Twenty-First Century by Roselee Goldberg (Thames & Hudson, 2018), The Choreographic by Jenn Joy (MIT Press, 2014), I want to understand what is happening to me by Amanda Hamp (TDR, 2016), and All the Possible Variations and Positions by Ryan Davis (Theater Magazine, 2015). He has contributed essays to A Life in Dance (ed. Rebecca Stenn and Fran Kirmser, CreateSpace, 2017) and In Terms of Performance: A Keywords Anthology (ed. Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola, The Pew Center & UC Berkeley, 2016). His book of performance texts, When You Rise Up (2009), is available from 53rd State Press, and his essay “Does Abstraction Belong to White People” is one of the most viewed writings at BOMB magazine online. In 2024 his writing will appear in Sluts from Dopamine Books, and On Creative Administration from University of Akron press. His podcast Are You For Sale? examines the ethical entanglements between money and art making.
He has created music for several of his own works and for other choreographers such as Antonio Ramos and in collaboration with Colin Self for Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit. He has performed as a singer with Anohni, Holcombe Waller, Vincent Segal, Nick Hallett, and My Robot Friend. His music project, SADONNA, where he transforms upbeat Madonna songs into sad anthems, has toured internationally since 2017. He has released music under the moniker The Belleville and his debut sueño album is available on multiple streaming platforms.
Miguel has served as visiting lecturer and guest artist at Bennington College, CalArts, Hollins University, Yale University, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Hunter College, UCSD, New York University/Tisch School of the Arts and Carnegie Mellon University. He has also taught in many dance programs around the world, such as Movement Research, CAMPING at the Centre National du Danse, ici Montpellier, ImPulsTanz, and Bates Dance Festival. In 2016 he created LANDING, a non-academic educational initiative that run through 2019. Gutierrez was the 2020-2021 Caroline Hearst Choreographer in Residence at Princeton University.
He is an Associate Professor of Choreography at UCLA in the department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he also serves as the Vice-Chair of the MFA in Choreographic Inquiry. Miguel is the 2023-2024 New York Live Arts Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA). As the culmination of this residency, he will premiere a new work in 2024-25 season at Live Arts called Super Nothing, a quartet that works with the archive to identify new possibilities for coming together.
He holds a BA in Theater and Performance Studies/Dance from Brown University and an MFA in studio art from the School of Art Institute of Chicago.