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 using poetic sauciness, political savvy, 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 (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist who makes epic dances and melancholy music and writes ranty essays. Recent work includes Bad Girls, a commission for the Trisha Brown Dance Company that premieres in 2027, Super Nothing, which was created through the Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program at New York Live Arts, and Frankenstein, a dance created for visual artist Avram Finkelstein at Smack Mellon. His two records - SADONNA: The Album, where he performs sad covers of Madonna songs, and sueño, which features his original songs - are available on all streaming platforms. Miguel's work has been presented internationally for over twenty years, most recently at ODC/SF, On the Boards, CAP/UCLA, MCA Chicago, American Dance Festival and he was a selected artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and has received a Foundation for Contemporary Art award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Frankie Award, and four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. He has received project support through the National Performance Network, MAP, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project. His writing has appeared in BOMB online, Small Press Traffic’s The Back Room, InDance, SLUTS anthology from Dopamine Press, and in Entanglements, a monograph on collaborative work by Luke George and Daniel Kok. His podcast, Are You For Sale? examines the ethical entanglement between dance making and funding. He is an Associate Professor of Choreography in UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and splits his time between Los Angeles, Brooklyn, San Francisco, and the world. www.miguelgutierrez.org
Long Ass Bio:
Miguel Gutierrez is a multi-disciplinary dance artist and Feldenkrais Method practitioner living between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY and Tovaangar/Los Angeles. His work continues and expands the legacy of experimental QTPOC artists and creates empathetic, irreverent, and reflective spaces that prioritize attention as a means to unravel normative belief systems. Recent work includes Bad Girls, a commission for the Trisha Brown Dance Company in response to Brown’s 1979 work Glacial Decoy (premieres in 2027), and Super Nothing, a meditation on grief and the ways queer/poc communities navigate survival and joy, which was created through the 23-24 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program at New York Live Arts. Other recent work includes I as another, which looks at the virtual architecture of memory, and sueño, a bilingual music and dance 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. His led his absurdist workout form DEEP AEROBICS for ten years (2007-2017) and in 2013/14 was used as the warmup act for The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual world tour. In 2017, he created Cela nous concerne tous/This concerns all of us as a commissioned 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. His dance Aerobicon, was filmed and used as the music video for Le Tigre’s Deceptacon, which was one of the first videos to go viral and spawn multiple copycat videos on YouTube.
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, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist Award, and a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award. He has received project support from Cafe Royal Foundation, the Josephine Foundation, Dance NYC, Bossak Heilbron Charitable Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, 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), All the Possible Variations and Positions by Ryan Davis (Theater Magazine, 2015), and Becomings: Pregnancy, Phenomenology, and Postmodern Dance by Johanna Kirk (Routledge, 2024). 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. Other published writings include “Aging Awfully” for Small Press Traffic’s The Back Room, “The Grant You Wish You Could Write” for InDance Magazine, “Super Preferred Body Value Self Meditation Exercise” for Creative Time’s Invitations Towards Re-Worlding, “Camboy Poems” in Sluts from Dopamine Books, a contribution to On Creative Administration from University of Akron press, and “A Way In,” an essay that is included in Entanglements, a monograph on Luke George and Daniel Kok’s work. His podcast Are You For Sale? examines his long standing interest in 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 Spelman College, 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 created works for students at University of Colorado/Boulder, George Washington University, Goucher College, Hollins University, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, University of North Texas, University of New Mexico, and in Stockholm at DOCH. 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 ran 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.
He holds a BA with Honors in Theater and Performance Studies/Dance from Brown University and an MFA in studio art from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. www.miguelgutierrez.org