ABOUT RALPH LEMON

Ralph Lemon is artistic director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of crosscultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. Lemon's projects expand the definition of choreography by crossing and stretching the boundaries between Western post-modern dance and other art forms and cultures. For each project, Lemon builds a team of collaborating artists from diverse cultural, national and artistic backgrounds who bring their own histories and aesthetic voices to the work. Projects develop organically over a period of years, with frequent public sharings of works-in-progress. Lemon and his collaborators derive the culminating artworks from the artistic, cultural, historic, and emotional material uncovered during his rigorous creative research process.

His most recent project, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? includes live performance for the stage and film/art installation, and will premiere in September 2010 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, IL. His multimedia installation, (the efflorescence of) Walter was exhibited at Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, 2006), The Kitchen (NYC, 2007) and Center for Contemporary Art (New Orleans, 2008). In 2005, Lemon concluded The Geography Trilogy, a decadelong international research and performance project that spanned three continents in its exploration of race, history, and memory. The project featured three evening-length dance/theater performances that toured widely: Geography (1997); Tree (2000); and Come home Charley Patton (2004); two internet art projects; the publication of three books by Wesleyan University Press; and several gallery exhibitions. Other projects include the three-DVD set of The Geography Trilogy; Konbit, a video collage about Miami's Haitian community; Three, a dance/film created with choreographer Bebe Miller and filmmaker Isaac Julien; and Persephone, a book with Philip Trager's photographs of Lemon's choreographic work, with text by Lemon and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, and poems by Rita Dove and Eavan Boland. In winter 2010, Lemon curated a critically acclaimed performance and discussion series for Danspace Project in New York City, entitled I Get Lost.

Lemon is the recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for interdisciplinary work. In 2006, he was one of 50 artists to receive the inaugural United States Artists Fellowship. He has also received a 2005 "Bessie" (NY Dance and Performance) Award in recognition of The Geography Trilogy; a 2004 NYFA Fellowship for Choreography; and a 2004 Fellowship with the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. In 1999, Lemon was honored with the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts for Choreography. He was a 2009 Visiting Artist Fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and has also been artist-in-residence at Temple University in Philadelphia (2005-06); George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); and a Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University (2002). From 1996-2000, he was Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre.

For more information, visit www.ralphlemon.net