CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Award-winning choreographer and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dance professor Cynthia Oliver has received the 2026 Knight Choreography Prize, awarded by the National Center for Choreography-Akron to support the artistic experimentation and career longevity of U.S. choreographers.
The award honors a living choreographer whose body of work is distinguished in its artistry and originality of thought and impact, and who provides significant contributions to the dance field, expands audiences for dance and ensures the art form has a prominent place in U.S. culture. It provides an unrestricted cash award of $30,000, as well as $20,000 in programmatic support over two years. The prize, funded by the Knight Foundation, was first awarded in 2024.
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Dance artists, stakeholders and National Center for Choreography-Akron alumni are invited to nominate choreographers for the award. A committee narrows nominees to five finalists, who are asked to submit application materials. A final selection committee decides the winner.
“The 2026 Knight Choreography Prize Selection Committee was particularly impressed with how long Cynthia Oliver has been an example as a forward-thinking artist on stage and in the studio classroom,” said Christy Bolingbroke, the executive/artistic director of NCCAkron. “She is a prolific choreographer and has been inspiring students and audiences alike to listen, respond and engage in the world in which we live for decades. For Cynthia, innovation is not just a trending term of the moment but an embodied practice.”
Oliver said the Knight Choreography Prize is particularly meaningful to her because she was nominated by her peers and is recognized for her endurance and work in the dance field.
“In rooms you are not in, people are speaking highly of you and your work and are selecting you to move forward in the process. That my work is recognized by peers, facilitators, presenters and funders means everything to me,” Oliver said. “I know my art is not for everyone. We do our best at what we are moved to make and hope that it lands with folks in some way. When it does, and even when it doesn’t, I hope folks recognize that each project is its own effort, its own world, and has a distinct aesthetic, concept and direction. Artists make a lot of work over time. It is the body of work that an award like this celebrates — our sustained research, not any individual project. I respect and am grateful for that.”
Oliver creates experimental dance-theater works that explore contemporary Blackness, feminism, Black masculinity and Afro-Caribbean cultures. Her most recent work, “Turn. Turning. TURNT.,” is a triptych of three interconnected dance pieces that serve as a meditation on negotiating time and relationships through collective life-changing conditions. It had its world premiere at the Bates Dance Festival in July and was presented at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on Oct. 2-3. It will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Nov. 4-7 and will tour other venues around the country in 2027.
A previous evening-length dance work by Oliver, “Virago-Man Dem,” examined Black masculinity in Caribbean and African American cultures. It premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 2017 and toured the country.
Oliver is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, a 2021 United States Artist, a 2021 Doris Duke Artist and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She is a Center for Advanced Study professor at Illinois and the special advisor to the chancellor for arts integration. She is affiliated with African American studies and gender and women’s studies.
Oliver said she will use the cash award to offset some of the expenses, including performance fees for her project’s dancers, documentation and technical equipment support, for “Turn. Turning. TURNT.” She’ll use the additional programmatic support award to complete a memoir/meditation on choreography that she has been working on for several years.
