Amara Tabor-Smith (born

1965 Events January–February * January 14 – The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland meet for the first time in 43 years. * January 20 ** Lyndon B. Johnson is Second inauguration of Lyndo ...

) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based

choreographer Choreography is the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion or form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design itself. A choreographer is one who cr ...

and

performer The performing arts are The arts, arts such as music, dance, and drama which are performed for an audience. They are different from the visual arts, which are the use of paint, canvas or various materials to create physical or static art object ...

noted for significant contributions to dance that draw on, celebrate, and reconfigure African-American and women's history.

Career

Tabor-Smith spent a decade as a dancer, then Associate Artistic Director with the internationally acclaimed

Urban Bush Women Urban Bush Women (UBW), founded in 1984 by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, is a Brooklyn, New York-based non-profit dance company and the only professional African-American women's dance company. The ensemble performs choreography by Zollar and a number o ...

dance company of New York City, where she was a part of developing the company's early community engagement methodologies. As founder of Deep Waters Dance Theater, she creates choreographic work rooted in ritual and exploring issues facing people of color and the environment. Her 2011 work ''Our Daily Bread'' - which explored what and how we eat - included live cooking and eating and was described as "a theatrically cogent, emotionally rich piece of dance theater that made us laugh at ourselves and want to scream at the end." Tabor-Smith won a San Francisco Guardian 2013 ''Best of the Bay'' award for ''He Moved Swiftly But Gently Down the Not Too Crowded Street: Ed Mock and Other True Tales in a City That Once Was'', which consisted of 11 site-specific performances that journeyed through the life of Bay Area dance pioneer Ed Mock. "Everybody's saying the feisty, freaky soul of San Francisco is dying," the SF Guardian wrote. "Finally someone did something about it, in the form of resurrecting one of the city's most treasured cult arts figures. ...You could feel Mock smiling fearlessly, glorious in a giant pink tutu, back on the streets." Tabor-Smith has performed in the works of a number of noted choreographers, many of whom inform her own work. These include Ed Mock, Joanna Haigood of

Zaccho Dance Theatre Founded in 1980, Zaccho Dance Theatre is a San Francisco-based dance company. The company presents site-specific works as well as works inspired by environmental, cultural, and structural settings. Zaccho's co-founder and artistic director, Joan ...

, Pearl Ubungen,

Ronald K. Brown Dancer and choreographer Ronald K. Brown founded the dance company Evidence in New York in 1985. Brown's work incorporates modern dance, Senegalese Sabar and other West African movement vocabularies, Afro-Caribbean dance, and contemporary urban da ...

Liz Lerman Liz Lerman (born 1947 in Los Angeles, CA) is an American choreographer and founder of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange . Called by the Washington Post “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,” she and her dancers ...

Faustin Linyekula Faustin Linyekula (born February 27, 1974). is a Congolese dancer and choreographer of contemporary dance.Anna Deavere Smith Anna Deavere Smith is an American actress, playwright, and professor. She is known for her roles as National Security Advisor Dr. Nancy McNally in ''The West Wing'' (2000–06), hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus in the Showtime series ''Nur ...

Aya de Leon Aya de Leon (born 1967) is an American novelist and activist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley. She first came to national attention as a spoken-word artist in the underground poetry scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a ...

, Herbert Siquenza, The SF Mime Troupe, and

Marc Bamuthi Joseph Marc Bamuthi Joseph (born 1975) is a spoken-word poet, dancer, playwright, and actor who frequently directs stand-alone hip-hop theater plays. Early life Joseph was born to Haitian immigrant parents and grew up in Laurelton, Queens, New York ...

. Tabor-Smith choreographed and appeared as a dancer in Shakti Butler's documentary film ''Making Whiteness Visible''. Her work with DWDT and Headmistress has been performed at Espaço Xisto in Salvador, Bahia; Rue Danse Festival in Brazzaville, Congo;

Judson Memorial Church The Judson Memorial Church is located on Washington Square South between Thompson Street and Sullivan Street, near Gould Plaza, opposite Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It ...

and

Movement Research Movement Research is a non-profit organization that offers dance classes, workshops, residencies and performance opportunities for artists in New York City. Its focus is on improvisation, post-modern dance, and experimentation. It was founded in ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

as well as many venues throughout the San Francisco/Bay Area.UC Berkeley, Dept. of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies
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Awards and recognition

Tabor-Smith has received numerous grants and residencies, including Creative Work Fund's Performing Arts Grant, The Headlands Center for the Arts artist in residence, CHIME Mentorship Exchange grant, Green Choreographers Residency at Dance Exchange. She is currently Artist in Residence at

ODC/Dance ODC, formerly the Oberlin Dance Collective, is a contemporary dance and arts organization founded in 1971, in Oberlin, Ohio, by current artistic director Brenda Way. ODC relocated to San Francisco in 1976 and in 1979 became the first modern danc ...

in San Francisco. She received a

Creative Capital Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has commi ...

award in 2016 with artist Ellen Sebastian Chang. Tabor-Smith received th
Rainin Arts Fellowship
(formerly The Rainin Fellowship) in 2021.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tabor-Smith, Amara Living people American female dancers Dancers from California African-American female dancers African-American dancers African-American choreographers American choreographers Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area 1965 births 21st-century African-American people 21st-century African-American women 20th-century African-American people 20th-century African-American women