Professor of Dance
Artistic Director of UCI Dance
Director UCI Etude Ensemble
Modern Dance, Choreography
Donald McKayle, recipient of honors and awards in every aspect of his
illustrious career, has been named by the Dance Heritage Coalition "one
of America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: the first 100." His
choreographic masterworks, considered modern dance classics, Games,
Rainbow Round My Shoulder, District Syoryville, and Songs of
the Disinherited are performed around the world. He has
choreographed over seventy works for dance companies in the United
States, Canada, Israel, Europe, and South America. The Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater, the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Ballet
San Jose Silicon Valley, the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and the
Lula Washington Dance Theatre serve as repositories for his works. He is
Artistic Mentor for the Limón Dance Company. Ten retrospectives
have honored his choreography. In April 2005, Donald McKayle was honored
at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and presented with a
medal as a Master of African American Choreography.
In 2001, he choreographed the monumental ten-hour production of
Tantalus, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in
collaboration with the Denver Center Theatre Company. Five Tony
Nominations have honored his choreography for Broadway musical theater:
Sophisticated Ladies, Doctor Jazz, A Time for Singing, and for
Raisin, which garnered the Tony Award as Best Musical, and for
which he received Tony nominations for both direction and choreography.
For Sophisticated Ladies he was also honored with an Outer
Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award. His most recent
choreography for Broadway was showcased in It Ain’t
Nothing’ But the Blues that earned a Tony nomination for Best
Musical. He received an Emmy nomination for the TV Special, Free To
Be You and Me. His work for film includes Disney’s
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Great White Hope, and
The Jazz Singer. His other media awards include a Los Angeles
Drama Logue Award for Evolution of the Blues and a Golden
Eagle Award for On the Sound.
In dance he has received the Capezio Award, the Samuel H.
Scripps/American Dance Festival Award, the American Dance Guild
Award, a Living Legend Award from the National Black Arts Festival, the
Heritage Award from the California Dance Educators Association, two
Choreographer’s Fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Dance/USA Honors, an Irvine Fellowship in Dance, the Martha
Hill Lifetime Achievement Award, the Annual Award from the Dance Masters
of America, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dance Under the
Stars Choreography Festival, the Black College Dance Exchange Honors,
the Dance Magazine Award, and the American Dance Legacy
Institute’s Distinguished and Innovative Leadership Award,
among others.
For his work in education, he has earned the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann
Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching, UCI’s
Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research, and he is a
recipient of the UCI Medal, the highest honor given by the University of
California, Irvine. At the University of California, Irvine he has
also been awarded the title of Claire Trevor Professor in Dance, an
endowed chair, and is a Bren Fellow. Mr. McKayle has served on the
faculties of numerous international forums and many prestigious national
institutions including the Juilliard School, Bennington College, Bard
College, Sarah Lawrence College, the American Dance Festival,
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, and was Dean of the School of Dance
at the California Institute of the Arts.
His autobiography, Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life,
published by Routledge was honored with the Society of Dance History
Scholar’s De La Torre Bueno Prize. A television documentary on his
life and work, Heartbeats of a Dance Maker, was aired
on PBS stations throughout the United States.
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