Molissa Fenley, Dancer

Molissa is a New York-based choreographer and performer. She founded Molissa Fenley and Company in 1977 and has since created more than 85 dance works during her continuing career. With her company, and as a soloist working in collaboration with visual artists and composers, she has performed throughout the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Two of her works, Cenotaph and State of Darkness, were awarded Bessies for Choreography in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Molissa has also created many works on ballet and contemporary dance companies, most recently for the Oakland Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Robert Moses’ Kin and the Seattle Dance Project. She is a professor of dance at Mills College and serves on the faculty of the Experimental Theater Wing of New York University. Seagull Press/the University of Chicago recently published Rhythm Field: The Dance of Molissa Fenley.

Molissa on Art and Nature

While walking through the Reserve, Molissa thought about the importance of nature in her work and how, when she is in a place of natural processes of growth, fecundity, and change, she is inspired by the immensity of variation, of plant adaptation, and diversity, of the essential, of the sense of belonging.