About Shamel
New York
Shamel Pitts (CBA ’25) is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award winner. A performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, director, and teacher, Pitts was born in Brooklyn and began his dance training at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at the Ailey School. He won a first prize in the National Arts Competition from YoungArts, earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in dance from the Juilliard School, and was awarded the Martha Hill Award for excellence in dance. He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance and Ballet Jazz Montreál. Pitts danced with Batsheva Dance Company for seven years under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin and is a certified teacher of Gaga movement language. Pitts has created a triptych of award-winning multidisciplinary performances, with his arts collective TRIBE, known as his “BLACK series,” which has toured extensively to many festivals and performance spaces around the world since 2016. He is an adjunct professor at the Juilliard School, and was an artist-in-residence at Harvard University and Jacob’s Pillow. He received a Princess Grace Award in Choreography, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Project: Pitts plan to continue discovering his embodiment practice of movement, dance, choreography, and multidisciplinary performance art as well as prioritizing an intentional focused space towards deeper excavation within his roles as artistic director and teacher.
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