Skip to main content

Header Navigation

Artists

Dianne McIntyre

Choreographer, Dancer, and Dance-Driven Dramatist

Cleveland, Ohio

Photo of Dianne McIntyre.

Photo by McKinley Wiley.

Dianne McIntyre is a dancer, choreographer, researcher, mentor, director, producer, and dance-driven dramatist. McIntyre's artistic intention is to “express dance as music moving.” She has sustained a career over many decades with choreography in concert dance, theatre, film, and opera.

In the 1970s, after moving from Ohio to New York City, she founded Sounds in Motion in Harlem, which grew from a dance/music company into a school into a mecca for artists, scholars, and activists through the 1980s.

Current work for her company and others is performed internationally and encompasses dance connections with live “jazz” music, cultural history, social movements, personal narrative, and legend. She has transformed words into dance, from the work of acclaimed writers Ntozake Shange, James Baldwin, and August Wilson to the aviator stories of her mother. Her work spans genres and collaborators including Olu Dara, Lester Bowie, Cecil Taylor, Amina Claudine Myers, Bartlett Sher, Regina Taylor, and Jonathan Demme. She has choreographed for Broadway plays, London’s West End, over forty regional theatre productions, and for film with Beloved. She received an Emmy nomination for HBO’s Miss Evers’ Boys.

Her mentors are Gus Solomons, jr., Louise Roberts of Clark Center, Vera Blaine, and Helen Alkire as dance faculty of The Ohio State University and Elaine Gibbs Redmond. McIntyre's numerous accolades include a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Bessies, two Honorary Doctorate Degrees, two Audelco Awards, and a Helen Hayes Theatre Award.

Donor -This award was generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 12.15.2024

Photograph of dancers performing Dianne McIntyre choreography.

Time is Time by Dianne McIntyre, premiere April 26, 2014. Commissioned by New York Live Arts for Live Ideas: James Baldwin, This Time!, 43 minutes.

Photo by Ian Douglas.

Photograph of Dianne McIntyre in performance.

we carry our homes within us which enables us to fly by Dianne McIntyre, December 9-12, 2015. Commissioned by New York Live Arts. 20 minutes.

Photo by Ian Douglas.

Photograph of dancers performing Dianne McIntyre choreography.

Change by Dianne McIntyre, Premiere, February 2016. Commissioned by Dance Theatre of Harlem. 18 minutes. Columbia, SC, at Koger Center for the Arts.

Photo by Kent Becker.

A group of black dancers dressed in white move onstage underneath a sign that reads "colored only."

Open the Door, Virginia! by Dianne McIntyre, January 2005. 90 minutes. Theater of the First Amendment.

Photo courtesy of George Mason University.

Photograph of dancers performing Dianne McIntyre choreography.

Time is Time by Dianne McIntyre, premiere April 26, 2014. Commissioned by New York Live Arts for Live Ideas: James Baldwin, This Time!, 43 minutes.

Photo by Ian Douglas.