Yoshiko Chuma, conceptual artist

Yoshiko, a conceptual artist/choreographer/Artistic Director of The School of Hard Knocks, has been a firebrand of New York’s downtown dance scene since arriving in 1978. She has created more than sixty-five full-length company works, commissions, and site-specific events for venues in thirty-five countries, constantly challenging the notion of performance for both audience and participant. Her work has been presented in such diverse venues as Joyce Theater, the Eiffel Tower, Newcastle Swing Bridge, City Center, Lincoln Center, the former National Theater of Sarajevo, the perimeter of the Hong Kong harbor, World Financial Center, and an ancient ruin in Macedonia, among many others. Yoshiko has received fellowships and awards for choreography and career work from the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for Artists, Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer Choreographer/Composer Commission, and Philip Morris New Works. She has led workshops and masterclasses and been commissioned to create new work in East and West Europe, Asia, Russia, and the U.S. She received her first BESSIE award for choreography in 1984, and earned four more for her productions in 1992 and 1998. In 2007 she received a BESSIE for Sustained Achievement. She was Artistic Director of the Daghdha Dance Company in Limerick, Ireland, from 2000 to 2003 and has been a guest teacher/choreographer in the M.A. program in dance of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance.