Jessica Kimlat Fogel

Professor of Dance
jkfogel@umich.edu
734-647-2289

Jessica Fogel's choreography has been produced in NYC, throughout the US, and internationally since 1974. She spent a decade in NYC as a performer, choreographer and teacher, and was artistic director of Jessica Fogel and Dancers there from 1978-1982. During that time, she danced with several companies, including Dances/Janet Soares; Phoebe Neville Dance Company; Hannah Kahn, Dalienne Majors and Dancers; and Andrew DeGroat and Dancers.

From digital multi-media dances merging movement, projections and text-- to dances based on the life and work of painters including Cassatt, Monet, Vermeer and Hopper-- to a dance about the science of chaos-- her choreography has treated a wide breadth of subjects and moods. In her works, wide-open lyrical dancing is often juxtaposed with theatrical tableaux and gesture. The dances are at turns painterly, athletic, multilayered, cinematic. A more recent interest of hers has been the creation of large-scale site-specific dances.

She taught at SUNY Brockport and the University of Rochester before joining the University of Michigan Dance Department faculty in 1985, where she is a Professor of Dance. Her works have been commissioned and produced by, among others, Dance Theater Workshop, the Riverside Dance Festival, the Lincoln Center Touring Program, The Yard, Harbinger Dance Company, Park Avenue Dance Company, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, and the Toledo Museum of Art. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, ArtServe Michigan, the Cultural Council Foundation of New York, and numerous sources within the University of Michigan.

Ms. Fogel is a founding member and co-director of Ann Arbor Dance Works, the resident professional dance company of the University of Michigan, and she also choreographs regularly for the University of Michigan Dance Company. She has been the recipient of numerous commissions and awards, including the Michigan Choreographer's Festival Award, an award for a Lifetime of Achievement in the Arts from the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit, and an Award of Excellence from the National Fine Arts Video Competition. She has performed, choreographed and taught in Costa Rica, Japan, England, Greece, Ireland, Canada, and Mexico.

Born and raised in Ithaca, NY, where she received her early dance training with the Ithaca Ballet Guild and the Cornell University Dance Group, she received a BA in Dance from Barnard College, and an MA in Dance Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

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