Grace: A Retrospective Of Dance Portraiture And Performance 1986-2004
American photographer Joanne Savio’s portraits of dancers and choreographers take centre stage at NYU Abu Dhabi
Throughout her career, American photographer Joanne Savio has repeatedly turned to the world of dance for inspiration. This fascination is recorded in her new exhibition, Grace: A Retrospective of Dance Portraiture and Performance 1986-2004, at The Project Space at NYU Abu Dhabi’s Arts Centre, where Savio is a faculty member.
The exhibition is presented by the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, in collaboration with the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center’s Trisha Brown Dance Company performance, and includes portraits of celebrated dancers and choreographers taken over the 20 year period. Subjects include Pina Bausch, the German modern dancer and choreographer, the American choreographer Trisha Brown, and Elizabeth Streb, an American contemporary dance performer and choreographer.
A graduate of The Cooper Union in New York, Savio has been an Arts Professor in the Film and New Media Program at NYU Abu Dhabi since 2010. Before that, she taught in the Film and Television Department at NYU for some 15 years, where in 2002 she launched the NYU’s first production courses in documentary filmmaking and photography in Havana, Cuba.
Savio’s work concentrates on documentary and portraits, largely within the worlds of music and dance. Perhaps best known among her work is the portrait of singer Norah Jones on the cover of her bestselling 2002 album Come Away With Me. She has also published a book, Vital Grace, devoted to photographs of the black male dancer, images from which were included in the exhibit ReSignifications in Florence in 2015. The same year, she worked with her husband Jim Savio on a mixed-media film titled Home Sick and is now in the process of making a series of sound and image compositions.
To accompany the show, the Trisha Brown Dance Company will do a series of talks at the Arts Center.
Grace: A Retrospective of Dance Portraiture and Performance 1986-2004 runs from 9-25 February 2017 at The Project Space, NYU Abu Dhabi (inside the Arts Center). For more information see Nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/arts-center-project-space/joanne-savio/