ABOUT
Dean Moss
Dean Moss is an interdisciplinary choreographer and video artist whose practice investigates the sense of becoming, and the fluidity of self. He directs a project based production company called Gametophyte Inc. Its work has been presented internationally, and commissioned by New York Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Anthology Film Archives; Danse Visions Festival International de Cin´e-Video-Danse, Nantes France; Ksirarnawa Art Center, Denpasar Indonesia; The New Visions Art Festival, Hong Kong, China; FNB Vita Dance Festival, Johannesburg, South Africa; The Seoul International Dance Festival, South Korea; and The Kitchen, NYC, among many others.
Moss arrived in New York in 1979 on a ballet scholarship with the Dance Theater of Harlem. He studied directly under Martha Graham, toured with the Louis Falco Dance Company, and performed in the Paris company of Broadway’s revival West Side Story, all in the early 1980’s. Subsequently he danced ten years (1983-93) with the post-modern choreographer David Gordon in The Pick-up Performance Company: the artist’s experiential introduction to contemporary art. Moss became the Curator of Dance and Performance at The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art and the Avant-Garde (1999-2004, Curatorial Advisor until 2009).
Recognized for performance curation as well as innovative performance works, he has lectured internationally in video, interdisciplinary choreography and arts management, at Tokyo University of the Arts, Kookmin University in Seoul, and Harvard University in the Visual Arts department, (for which he received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning). Moss lectured on Dance Dramaturgy and Audience Participation works at Yale University, was Resident Faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Dance Faculty at Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College; and co-lectured on multimedia performance composition for visual artists at Rhode Island School of Design.
Moss is an Asian Cultural Council Fellow; American Academy in Jerusalem Fellow; a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident; the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography; the Doris Duke Impact Award in Theatre; a Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artists Grant; plus Fellowships in both Choreography and Multidisciplinary Works from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His most recent experimental video untitled:embrace has been an Official Selection in several international film festivals, and he was awarded a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” for his work Spooky action at a distance.
Currently Dean Moss is Distinguished Visiting Faculty in the department of Kinetic Imaging (hybrid media, video, performance, sound and animation) at Virginia Commonwealth University; and a trustee of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, an artist run grant giving organization founded by Jasper Johns and John Cage.