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Artists

Will Rawls

Choreographer and Dancer

Brooklyn, New York

Photo of Will Rawls.

Photo by Luis Rodriguez.

Will Rawls is a New York-based choreographer, performer, curator, and writer. His work explores the relationship between dance and language through the prisms of blackness, abstraction, and opacity. His choreographic work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Danspace Project, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Issue Project Room, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Fisher Center at Bard, and Abrons Arts Center. In 2016, he co-curated Lost and Found, a six-week program of performances and artist projects at Danspace Project focused on the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS on dancers, women, and people of color. His writing has been published by Artforum, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and les presses du réel. Rawls is a recipient of a “Bessie” New York Dance and Performance Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.

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

This artist page was last updated on: 12.15.2024

Photo of dancers performing Will Rawls choreography.

Sister Spell (image still) by Will Rawls, 2018.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Photo of Will Rawls performance.

The Planet-Eaters by Will Rawls, 2013.

Photo by Brian Rogers.

Photo of Will Rawls performance.

Personal Effects by Will Rawls, 2016.

Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Performa.