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Joanna Haigood

She // Her // Hers

Choreographer and Site Artist

Bolinas, California

Joanna, a smiling middle-aged African American woman with shoulder-length black, curly hair, wears a bright blue sweater and a yellow and green patterned scarf.

Photo by Charlie Formenty.

Since 1980 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Haigood's stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d'Avignon. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, United States Artist Fellowship, New York Bessie Award, and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists internationally at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, the San Francisco Circus Center, and at Zaccho Studio.

Donor -This USA Fellowship was generously supported by Danny Glover. The Rainin Arts Fellowship is supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 08.20.2024

Dance
In a large Gothic cathedral bathed in violet light, an aerial dancer wearing a red jumpsuit suspends horizontally from the vaulted ceiling, seeming to weightlessly scale a hundred-foot ladder. Behind them are colorful stained glass windows.

Love, a state of grace by Joanna Haigood, 2022. Site-specific dance performance, 30 minutes. Performed at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Pictured: Saharla Vetsch.

Photo by Walter Kitundu.

Three orange armatures resembling houses are suspended by cables in the cavernous glass lobby of the San Francisco International Airport. Two aerial dancers perform within the suspended structures, while two more perform on the ground below, reaching toward another orange house planted on the floor that appears to be halfway submerged.

Departure and Arrival by Joanna Haigood, 2007. Dance performance, 30 minutes. Pictured (clockwise): Ramon Ramos Alayo, Joanna Haigood, Robert Henry Johnson, and Maurya Kerr. Performed at the San Francisco International Airport.

Photo by Stephen Phillips.

Outside of a low-lit barn, an African American man in ripped clothing and an African American woman in a long, cream-colored dress sit on a grassy mound. The man wears a steel collar with bells extending upwards from long rods and holds onto one of the rods, looking distressed, as the woman comforts him. In the background, a white farmer in overalls leads a horse into the barn while another white man prepares a wagon.

Invisible Wings by Joanna Haigood, 1998. Site-specific multidisciplinary dance performance. Pictured, from left to right: Paul Benney, Robert Henry Johnson, Amara Tabor-Smith, and Ralph Rotondo. Performed at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, MA.

Photo by Christian Duggan.