WUPPERTAL.- For the seventh time, the Pina Bausch Foundation and the Kunststiftung NRW are awarding the Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreography. The newly assembled international jury, consisting of Keng Sen Ong, Lia Rodrigues and Marc Brew, selected four grant holders from 92 applications. The new jury has been appointed for two years. The fellowship supports dancers and choreographers in developing their own artistic expression by enabling them to work with an international cooperation partner of their choice between September 2022 and August 2023.

The Felllows 2022:

Lilian Maximillian Nabaggala
Lilian Maximillian Nabaggala is a female interdisciplinary artist based in Uganda working in the fields of dance, choreography, fashion, and education. Her identity as a choreographer is based on her strong skills in and passion for four distinct areas of dance: street, Ugandan traditional, contemporary, and Latin. During her fellowship, Lilian will cooperate with Kettly Noël, Haitian choreographer, and director of both Dense Bamako Danse festival (MLI) and Port-au-Prince Performance festival (HTI) as well as of the Donko Seko Choreographic Centre (MLI). Lilian’s interest is drawn to Noël’s political approach to dance, exploring and transgressing dated ideas of ethnic identity and womanhood.

Amit Noy
Amit Noy is a performer and dance maker living in Aotearoa New Zealand. "He grew up as a visitor on the unceded lands of Oahu, Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand to Latine and Israeli parents." Amit makes dances from the questions and inheritances of his life as a post­Holocaust homosexual Jew. For his fellowship Amit will cooperate with Miguel Gutierrez, a choreographer, music artist, writer, and advocate based in New York City. Gutierrez’s work creates empathetic and irreverent spaces outside of traditional discourse; it is philosophical inquiry disguised as performance.

Danielli Nascimento Mendes
Danielli Nascimento Mendes is a Brazilian dance artist based in São Paolo. Her artistic work is deeply informed by the practice of Chinese Anatomy and Chinese Body Practice and aims to create spaces beyond the Eurocentric contexts of
contemporary dance. For her fellowship, Danielli is going to cooperate with École des Sables in Senegal. For Danielli, being in Africa won’t be a return, but an act of repositioning herself to move forward. Living and working in Brazil, a territory where black people are strategically weakened and threatened, she as well needs to be strategic, especially as someone dealing with questions of body, movement, and space.

Robert Ssempijja
Robert Ssempijja is a Ugandan contemporary artist and dance researcher whose practice is marked by the era of postcolonialism and decolonization, Ssempijja‘s work is composed of research projects that reproduce into dance films, installations and performances. For his fellowship, Robert will cooperate with internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly. Coulibaly‘s contemporary dance is inspired by his African culture and starts from feeling but also carries reflection and hope. Robert is interested in understanding Coulibaly‘s creation process and aiming at deepening, expanding and transforming his artistic perspective and practice through the experience of this cooperation.