Tere O'Connor

Biography

Tere O’Connor has been making dances since 1982 and has created over 40 works for his company. He is recognized as one of our nation’s most influential contemporary choreographers and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. The company has performed his works throughout the US, Europe, South America and Canada. O’Connor has created numerous commissioned works for other dance companies around the world. Among these are works for the De Rotterdamse Dancgroup in the Netherlands; Carte Blanche in Bergen, Norway; Lyon Opera Ballet commissioned for the renowned Irish dancer, Jean Butler. In addition to his 1996 work Greta in the Ditch for the White Oak Dance Project, he created a solo entitled Indoor Man for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 2003.

O’Connor received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2013. He is a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow. He is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Award, Arts International’s DNA Project Award and a Creative Capital Award. O’Connor is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2021, he received his 25th grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for his new work, Rivulets. He is also the recipient of repeated grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, NEFA/National Dance Project, the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance and Mid Atlantic US Artists International. He has received three New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards- One for Heaven Up North in 1988, another in 1999 for Sustained Achievement and one for his work Frozen Mommy in 2005.

An articulate and provocative educator, O’Connor has taught with Movement Research in NYC for 30 years and continues each summer with his workshop for their MELT Festival. He has taught repeatedly at American Dance Festival, The Bates Dance Festival, Colorado Dance Festival, Ohio State University, University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, at the School for New Dance Development (The Netherlands), Impulz Tanz (Austria) and many other festivals and universities across the globe. O’Connor was an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts from 1989-1997. He is currently a Center for Advanced Studies Professor at the University of Illinois at Urana, Champaign.