ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Loretta Livingston is an award winning choreographer and dancer who has made
Los Angeles her artistic home for over 30 years. She is the Artistic Director of Loretta Livingston & Dancers, a contemporary dance performance ensemble. She produces and directs works ranging from large scale dance/theater evenings to improvisational events with live music and video art presented in gallery-sized spaces. In addition to creating projects for her company she takes choreographic commissions, creating work for dancers as far away as New Zealand and Turkey.

A fifth-generation Californian, Ms. Livingston began her career with another native
westerner---the legendary Bella Lewitzky. She danced for ten years in the Lewitzky Dance Company, performing throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland.

Ms. Livingston has received numerous awards and honors, including the 2003 Artist Award from the California Dance Educator's Association, the 2002 California
DanceMaker Grant from the James Irvine Foundation, the 2002 City of Los Angeles
"C.O.L.A." Individual Artist Fellowship, the first commission from the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 2000, the 1995 Professional Artist Award from the California Alliance for Arts Education, the 1994 Distinguished Artist Award from the Los Angeles Music Center, and the 1990 Dewar's Young Artist Recognition Award. In addition to her individual awards, her company and artistic collaborators have received many Lester Horton Dance Awards in Los Angeles for the performance, choreography, music and design of her projects.

Special projects that cross cultural and international boundaries have interested Ms. Livingston She was invited to collaborate with Gema Sandoval and Danza
Floricanto/USA, a Los Angeles-based Mexican folklorico company in 1998, as well as to participate in a special improvisation project with master improviser Simone Forti in Paris in 2000. In 2002 she was the designated choreographer for the first round of NCCI projects (National College Choreography Initiative), collaborating with Director of Dance Jamie Jacobson and the Dance Program at the University of Central Oklahoma, and Native American visual artist Anita Fields of the Osage Nation, and Oklahoma composer Steve McLinn. In the fall of 2003 she was sent to Istanbul, Turkey, by the U.S. Department of State under Public Diplomacy and Cultural Programs, to teach and create new choreography in the Modern Dance Program at Yildiz Technical University.

An experimenter with insatiable artistic curiosity, Ms. Livingston creates dance
performance events for both large and small venues, mixes improvisation with set
choreographies, often uses voice and text with motion vocabulary, employs live music onstage and expands her dance work with visual and video collaborations.

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