About Abdul Latif
New York, New York
Abdul Latif (CBA ’20) is a choreographer, composer and writer-director from New York City who began as in independent producing artist over the course of his tenure as the inaugural Lincoln Center Education Artist-in-Residence of Lincoln Center Institute, Artist Mentoring Lab, where he was the founding Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellow 2012-2014. Latif’s choreographic work with the Martina Arroyo Foundation Prelude to Performance and Harlem Opera Theater Company provided him the opportunity to set work in opera productions from 2014-2017. He broke out with his first choreographic commission, created for Joffrey Ballet/Winning Works in 2015. In 2016 Latif was commissioned to choreograph a work on principals of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for the 22nd Fire Island Dance Festival in which his conceptualized set revolving design facilitated his first installation exhibition and artist residency with Alpha Development and through Wallplay Mgmt at Gallery 151. In 2017 Latif and the collective of multidisciplinary artist collaborating in partnership with Smoke&Mirrors Theater Company and the producers of HERE Arts received the Rauschenberg Foundation Prize and Artist for Social Justice Award for their 2019 Off-Broadway production of B.H.M. According to the United States of America. This same year he was a Dance Lab/New York, formerly Broadway Dance Lab Guest Choreographer in Residence, where he began his entry into the development of an adaptation for Anton Chekhov’s modern classic play The Seagull into a contemporary dance theater musical. In 2018 Latif was commissioned to create a work for the Joyce Theater Ballet Festival on the dancers of New York City Ballet performing in the Ashley Bouder Project. His contemporary ballet and modern dance performance background juxtaposed to his commercial theater and Broadway musical resume make Latif’s concert dance and theatrical works an amalgamation of immersive live performance presentations.
A Seagull: The City Swan and The A+ _ B+ Projects Untitled Works
At CBA, Latif collaborated on the next stage development of his adaptation A Seagull: The City Swan with New York Jazz Harmonic Founder and Orchestra Conductor, Ron Wasserman, Composer/Sound Designer Avi Amon, 2019 Jonathan Larson Grant recipient and Film Director Zoey Martinson, and 2019 New York Foundation for the Arts Recipient of the Women’s Made in New York Film Fund Grant. This work of the modern classic play The Seagull, written in 1896 and set in St Petersburg, Russia, was contemporized into a dance musical theater work. Additionally, Latif collaborated with dancers from various ballet companies, such as American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet, on the creation of works that explore his integration of classical ballet port de bras, the multi-armed modality of Hindu gods, and the moving mechanics of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vesuvius Man, all through the lens of his urban-contemporary dance sensibilities and fusion of the street and studio.
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