Guest Artist Series
Raja Feather Kelly
Award-Winning Choreographer, Director,
and Artistic Director of the feath3r theory
In Conversation with Ato Blankson-Wood
Tuesday, November 12, 2024 – 7:00pm
ART/New York, 520 8th Avenue, 3rd Floor, Studio E
Award-winning choreographer and director, Raja Feather Kelly, joins Ato Blankson-Wood and members of The Actors Center’s Resident Company on Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at 7:00pm for an intimate evening of conversation exploring Raja’s creative process, his unique devised danced-theatre approach from his company, the feath3r theory, the connection between physicality and emotion, and the power of movement in storytelling.
The conversation will be followed by discussion and Q&A and will take place at ART/New York, 520 8th Avenue, 3rd Floor, in Studio E.
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), a Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company that he founded in 2009. Over the past decade, he has created 18 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim.
His most recent choreography includes Teeth at the New World Stages (2024), book and music by Anna K. Jacobs, book and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson and Directed by Sarah Benson (performances recently started October 18, 2024), and The Fires at Soho Rep (2024), written and directed by Raja Feather Kelly. He choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon) and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA), both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He was hailed by The New York Times as the choreographer who “can make your play move” for his extensive work Off-Broadway.
Other theater credits include White Girl in Danger at the Second Stage Kiser Theater, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, Lempicka (Broadway and La Jolla Playhouse), Bunny Bunny (UC San Diego), We’re Gonna Die (Second Stage Theater—his directorial debut), SUFFS (The Public Theater), The Good Swimmer (BAM), The Listeners (Oslo Opera), Macbeth In Stride (ACT, STC, PTC), and Teeth (Playwrights Horizons).
He has received dozens of awards, fellowships and honors including a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2023-2025), a Mellon Foundation grant (2021), an Obie Award and Outer Critics Circle Award honor for choreography for A Strange Loop (2020), an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2021), a Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts (2019– 2020), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019–2021), a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award (2009), a Creative Capital Award (2019), three Princess Grace Awards (2017-2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine’s inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), a Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter (2018), and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (2017), a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard (2017), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), an ImPulsTanz Festival DanceWEB Scholarship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship (2016).
Hosting Raja in conversation is Ato Blankson-Wood, Tony-nominated actor and member of The Actors Center’s Resident Company. Ato most recently played Clifford Bradshaw in the Broadway production of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, opposite Gayle Rankin and Eddie Redmayne. He also played the title role in Hamlet at Shakespeare in the Park in 2023. Prior to this, Ato starred in the off-broadway production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night opposite Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel. He originated the role of Gary in Slave Play Off-Broadway in 2018, earning a Tony nomination when the play transferred to Broadway. Other Broadway credits include Hair and Lysistrata Jones. Film credits include Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansman, Worth, opposite Michael Keaton, and Peter Hedge’s The Same Storm. Television credits include The Good Fight, She’s Gotta Have It, and Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us.