CORNISH_Logo_TypeOnly

Choreographer in Residence

Amy O'Neal

she/her/hers

Amy O’Neal is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator merging contemporary and street dance since 2000 to challenge notions of race, gender, and the sampling nature of innovation. She creates for concert dance, experimental performance, dance film, music video, and virtual reality and has toured eight acclaimed evening length works nationally and internationally. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, a dance/music/video performance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she creates dance experiences merging practices and values of hip hop, house dance culture, and experimental performance. Her eighth evening length work, Opposing Forces, created with five Seattle based Bboys exploring fears of feminine qualities in our culture through the hyper masculine form of Breaking, toured from 2015-2017 and two documentary films about the show screened through 2020.  O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, among others. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/Impulstanz scholar, a Kennedy Center Social Impact Residency Artist, Visiting Dance Innovator at Harvard, and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, where she earned the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. While in Seattle for 20 years, Amy taught at Velocity Dance Center, Cornish and UW, STG Dance This Program, and started the weekly House classes at The Beacon: Massive Monkees studio with dani tirell. Her work has been presented at On the Boards, Velocity, The Moore, The Paramount, Northwest Film Forum, Experience Music Project, as well as many DIY spaces, galleries, and night clubs. In 2016, O’Neal moved her homebase to Los Angeles. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 as part time lecturer where she teaches hybrid hip hop/contemporary improvisation methods, house, and composition. In LA, she has taught at Ryan Heffington’s The Sweat Spot, Debbie Reynolds Studio, and Stomping Ground LA, and has presented her work at The Bootleg, Electric Lodge, REDCat NOW Festival, LAX Festival, and The Versa Style Annual Annual Hip Hop Festival. She is currently developing her next evening length work Again, There is No Other: The Remix and continuing to build The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures, a research/performance platform for street dance practitioners to experiment with form and format. She continues to work between Seattle and LA and is the Curating Artist in Residence for Velocity Dance Center in Seattle for 2023-2025.

Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki

Qualifications

BFA, Dance
Cornish College of the Arts