About Netta Yerushalmy
New York, New York
Netta Yerushalmy (CBA ’19) is an award-winning choreographer based in New York City. Her work aims to engage with audiences by imparting the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known, and to challenge how meaning is attributed and constructed. Honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Jerome Robbins Bogliasco Fellowship, a National Dance Project Grant, a NYFA Fellowships, a Six-Points Fellowship, and recently a 2018 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Yerushalmy’s dances have been commissioned and presented by venues such as the Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, Alvin Ailey Foundation, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Centre National de la Danse (Paris), Suzanne Dellal Center (Tel-Aviv), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin).
Yerushalmy works across genres and disciplines: she contributed to artist Josiah McElheny’s Prismatic Park at Madison Square Park, choreographed a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video, collaborated on evenings of theory and performance at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin), and is involved in the production of Spinning by composer Julia Wolfe and cellist Maya Beiser. She has received repeated support from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Djerassi Art Program, and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Guest artist engagements include The Juilliard School, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, University of the Arts, and HaMaslool Conservatoir. Commissions from repertory companies include Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Zenon Dance Company, and SPDW. As a performer, Yerushalmy has worked with Doug Varone and Dancers, Pam Tanowitz Dance, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and Joanna Kotze, among others. Originally from Israel, Yerushalmy relocated to New York in 1996 to earn a BFA in dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Conversations With Merce
During her fellowship at CBA, Yerushalmy will research and create a performance work that synthesizes and deconstructs different physical and conceptual aspects derived from the work of Merce Cunningham. The project will be presented at the Skirball Theater in May 2019 in tandem with the Cunningham Centennial celebrations. Yerushalmy’s project bridges modern dance, critical theory, experimental performance, aesthetics, and history. Her work uses material from five works by Cunningham as the portal for interrogating the physical limits of Cunningham’s iconic dances, and as a nexus point from which to explore discourses such as modernism, post-humanism, and sexuality. Performed by an ensemble of dancers and scholars, this work is a special off-shoot of Yerushalmy’s acclaimed Paramodernities project.