Mills College Dance Professor Molissa Fenley Receives Guggenheim Fellowship

OAKLAND, CA (05/14/2008)(readMedia)-- World-renowned dance choreographer and Mills College associate professor of dance, Molissa Fenley, has received a Guggenheim fellowship in choreography. She is one of 190 artists, scientists, and scholars to receive the prestigious award this year out of more than 2,600 applicants from the United States and Canada.

Guggenheim fellowships are awarded to individuals who demonstrate an exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

"The Guggenheim is considered one of the highest honors a choreographer can receive, and allows me to completely focus on my work," said Fenley. "I will search through my archive in the Mills Special Collections and find a thread of choreographic and artistic pursuits that comprise the last 30 years of dance making. I will be able to reconstruct older dances, sort through my writings and writings by others about my work, and compile a book."

In the forefront of the dance world for nearly 30 years, Fenley has presented her choreography and performances throughout the United States, Europe, South America, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Japan as a solo performer and with her ensemble, Molissa Fenley and Dancers. Over the years, she has developed her own style and focus. Her early performances focused on group work. In her middle years, she shifted to solo performances that were created in collaboration with contemporary visual artists and composers. Most recently she re-explored the dynamics of ensemble dance.

Fenley's recent works are "Calculus and Politics" (2007), "Dreaming Awake" (2006), "Four Lines" (2006), and "Patterns and Expectations" (2005). She has received major commissions, including from organizations such as the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Deutsche Oper Ballet of Berlin, Australian Dance Theater, the New National Theater (Tokyo), and the American Dance Festival.

Fenley has been honored with numerous choreography fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Bessie choreography awards, and grants from more than a dozen foundations and trusts nationwide.

An alumna of Mills College (‘75) with a BA in dance, she teaches choreography and dance at Mills every spring.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted more than $265 million in fellowships to nearly 16,500 individuals since 1925. Fellowship recipients include Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prizewinners, including Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Vladimir Nabokov, Linus Pauling, James Watson, and Eudora Welty. A hallmark of the Guggenheim program is the diversity of its fellows in their fields of study, geographic locations, and ages. This year's fellows represent 75 disciplines and 81 academic institutions.

Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity to approximately 900 undergraduate women and 500 graduate women and men. Since 2000, applications to Mills College have more than doubled. The College ranks as one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report and one of the Best 366 Colleges by the Princeton Review. For more information, visit http://www.mills.edu/.