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Wendy Whelan is widely considered one of the world’s leading dancers. She spent 30 years at New York City Ballet, performing virtually all the major Balanchine roles, working closely with Jerome Robbins on many of his ballets, and appearing internationally as a guest artist with The Royal Ballet and the Kirov Ballet among others.
Whelan has been nominated for an Olivier Award and a Critics Circle Award, and has received the Jerome Robbins Award, a Bessie for Sustained Achievement in Performance, the Dance Magazine Award, and a Doctorate of Arts, honoris causa, from Bellarmine University. She has performed on four continents and has worked with countless other dance legends including Christopher Wheeldon, William Forsythe, Twyla Tharp, Alexei Ratmansky, Jorma Elo, Shen Wei, and Wayne MacGregor.
Since retiring as a dancer from the New York City Ballet, Whelan has been teaching young female dancers and developing her own projects, including “Hagoromo”, “Some Of a Thousand Words” and “The Day”. For the latter, Whelan has joined forces with cellist Maya Beiser and the seminal modern dance choreographer Lucinda Childs to create an evening-length work featuring music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang. She is also working on a new collaboration with spoken word artist and activist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. A documentary, Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan, recently won the Chita Rivera Award for Best Dance Documentary, and speaks to her commitment to nullifying the stigma of aging and to focus instead on empowering women. The film is available on Netflix. In February 2019, Whelan was appointed as New York City Ballet’s Associate Artistic Director.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In the Spring of 2022, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was most recently welcomed into the 2023-24 Emerson Collective Dial Fellowship. An internationally renowned cultural strategist, Bamuthi is the co-creator of the paradigm-shifting allyship training HEALING FORWARD™. He has lectured in 25 different countries and his TED talk “You Have The Rite” has been viewed more than five million times.
Bamuthi has most recently completed commissions for Yale University, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, The Minnesota Orchestra, The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the Washington National Opera. His new opera “Watch Night” with music by Tamar-kali and direction by Bill T. Jones premiered at PAC NYC in 2023, and his collaboration with NYC Ballet Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan “Carnival of the Animals” will premiere and tour in 2024 and 2025.
An emergent onscreen talent, he is among the featured performers in HBO’s screen adaptation of “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehesi Coates. He currently serves as the Vice President of Social Impact and Artistic Director of Cultural Strategy at The Kennedy Center. A proud alumnus of Morehouse College, Bamuthi received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts in the Spring of 2022 and was the recipient of a second Honorary Doctorate from Middlebury College in the Spring of 2023.
Photo by Leslie Lyons