Visiting Artist Lecture: Deneane Richburg

Please join us on Wednesday, March 27 for a visiting artist lecture with Deneane Richburg at 1:00 p.m. in Auditorium 150.

The visiting artist lecture will also be available via Zoom.

Deneane Richburg is the founder and Artistic Director of Brownbody. As the creative home for Richburg’s choreographic work, through Brownbody, she honors the complex narratives of U.S. based Black diasporic communities by taking participants on journeys that disrupt assumptions, ideologies, and disenfranchising popular narratives around blackness. As a modern dance choreographer and former competitive figure skater, Richburg is interested in pushing the boundaries of creative expression on the ice via engaging these narratives as a framework in which somatic based movement exploration occurs. Richburg blends different movement worlds and creates work for both the ice and the stage.

Deneane grew up a competitive figure skater—spending time in a world that excluded her ancestry’s truths. Working and growing in this space, to quote Zora Neale Hurston, she always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” She quickly realized she needed to carve out a space for herself and her ancestral history hence her decision to create Brownbody.

Richburg received her MFA in dance and choreography from Temple University, an MA in Afro-American Studies from UW Madison, and a BA in English and African American Studies from Carleton College. She has created 15+ works for the ice and stage. Richburg is a recipient of a 2017 and 2022 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, administered by The Cowles Center and funded by the McKnight Foundation, a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

This lecture is sponsored by Grey Fund.