Onye Ozuzu
Teaching: Touch Improv, African
Homeland: American
Location: Chicago, IL
Onye Ozuzu is a dance administrator, performing
artist, choreographer, educator and researcher.
She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English
Literature with a minor in Economics as well as a
Masters of Fine Arts degree in Dance Performance
and Choreography at Florida State University.
She has most recently been serving as Associate Chair, Director of Dance in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While there, her work has been notable for its balance of visionary and practical progress in the arenas of curricular, artistic, and community development of diversity, collaboration and interdisciplinary performance arts.
She teaches African-based contemporary dance technique, Composition, World Dance and Culture, Improvisation, Creative Dance for Children, and a graduate Seminar, The African in American, Perspectives and Implications: A Dancer’s View.
Onye has been actively making and performing work since 1997. Her work has been seen nationally and internationally at The Joyce Soho (Manhattan, NY), Kaay Fecc Festival De Toutes les Danses (Dakar, Senegal), La Festival del Caribe (Santiago, Cuba), Lisner Auditorium (Washington DC), McKenna Museum of African American Art (New Orleans, LA), as well as many anonymous site-specific locations around the world.
She was a 2010 recipient of the Innovative Seed Grant, University of Colorado’s most prestigious research grant, for her ethnographic research project ADADIA African Drum and Dance in America: the Oral History Archive.
This summer she is returning to EarthDance Workshop and Retreat Center and teaching at Bates Dance Festival where she continues to expand work as an AfroModern contemporary technique teacher and on Technology of the Circle, a group improvisation and interdisciplinary performance process.
Her most recent choreographic endeavor, And They Lynched him on a Tree, is a multidisciplinary collaborative effort that premiered in February at the ATLAS Black Box Theatre, in Boulder, CO a center for the intersection of art, science and technology.
