Jawole zollar biography templates
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Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Early Influences
Jawole Zollar grew up in Kansas City, Missouri in a household where music was at the center of her family’s life. She and one of her sisters studied ballet for a brief period, after which she began studying with a different teacher, Joseph Stevenson, who was a former dancer in Katherine Dunham’s company. The Dunham technique laid a foundation for her continuing exploration of African-diaspora dance, and Stevenson also exposed his young students to different performance experiences that included appearing at nightclubs and in burlesque shows. In her later work, Zollar would often draw on these early experiences and embrace many different forms of dance expression as valuable material for her choreographic palette.
She continued her dance training at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where she received her undergraduate degree and at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she received her graduate degree. In , Zollar to
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Choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, founded Urban Bush Women (UBW) in because, as she put it, "I wanted a company [that had] shared values around making work. I really didn't have any definition of what kind of work, but I did know that I wanted to look at the folklore, the religious traditions, and the culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora." Often characterized as a dance company, Zollar's work for UBW is more complex than that, incorporating layers of visual imagery, props, and human-made sounds with dance steps. Zollar, also a tenured professor in dance at Florida State University, has garnered numerous awards, including several NEA choreography fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a USA Artists Wynn Fellowship. Urban Bush Women has also received grant support from the NEA, including a fiscal year grant to support a collaborative work by Zollar and fellow choreographer Nora Chipaumire. Here, in her own words, Zollar disc
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JAWOLE WILLA JO ZOLLAR: UNEARTHING JEWELS AND STORIES
The work of choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar intentionally and unapologetically centers on blackness in the absence of the white lens. She has choreographed Black culture – ritual, tradition, and joy of daglig life – with her year-old company Urban Bush Women, Black Womanhood. Her body of work fryst vatten a physical archive of complex experiences, while her choreographic practice is intricate and expertly crafted with the purpose of concomitantly reflecting, holding, and lifting the community.
ICONS: First, congratulations on receiving the MacArthur Award. Please share what it means for you, your work, and your mission.
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar: I think it's still early to understand what it means for me personally. I've gotten a lot of affirmation and a lot of accolades, and each one helped me believe in myself a little bit more. There were times when I had doubts… inom remember when I was first ta