Gwen Welliver is a choreographer and dancer who works across performance, teaching, opera, and drawing. Since the 1990s she has been tracing various manifestations of line in performance and visual art asking us to think about form in terms of transition.
As a Bogliasco Foundation Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Choreography, a New York Dance and Performance ‘Bessie’ awardee for Sustained Achievement in Dancing with Doug Varone and Dancers, and former Rehearsal Director for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Welliver’s work has been presented in renowned venues worldwide: American Dance Festival, Center for Performance Research, Festival Aix-en-Provence, Gibney, Guggenheim Museum, Kennedy Center, La MaMa, La Monnaie/De Munt, Lincoln Center Festival, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Museum of Arts and Design, Nasher Museum, New York Live Arts, Sadler’s Wells Theater, Spoleto Festival USA, and Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Theater, among many others.
Recent commissions for new work include: Couple Riding (Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung’s Guggenheim Works > Process);The Welliver Variation, a Lamentation Variation co-commission by the Martha Graham Dance Company and Opening Nights; On its Face (Gibney); What a Horse! (La MaMa); Beasts and Plots (New York Live Arts). In 2015 Welliver was invited to choreograph Paradise Interrupted, a new installation opera conceived, designed, and directed by Jennifer Wen Ma with music by Huang Ruo. Paradise Interrupted premiered at Spoleto Festival USA, with subsequent performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Singapore Festival of Arts, National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, the National Concert Hall (Taipei), and MGM Coati Theatre, Macau.
Support for Welliver’s works and process has come from numerous sources: Baryshnikov Arts Center, Bogliasco Foundation, Van Cleef > Arpels, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, New Music USA’s Live Music for Dance Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts Artist’s Fellowships, New York Live Arts with support from the Jerome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, La MaMa, MIT Press’s PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Gibney and the Howard Gilman Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts funded Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program, Center for Performance Research’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Artist in Residence program, Littlemeat Productions, Florida State University’s Office of Research, Movement Research Fall Festival, Bennington College, Museum of Arts and Design, Barnard College, Dance Theater Workshop’s Studio Series Commissioning and Creative Residency Program, 92 Y Harkness Dance Festival, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and the Suitcase Fund.
Welliver’s teaching experience spans decades. She has taught in universities, conservatories, and festivals across four continents and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Dance at Florida State University. Her choreographic work is based in New York City.