Molissa Fenley

Molissa Fenley (born 15 November 1954) is an American choreographer, performer and teacher of contemporary dance.

Molissa Fenley (née Avril Molissa Fenley) was born in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 15, 1954.

She is the youngest of three children born to Eileen Allison Walker and John Morris Fenley.

At the age of six months Fenley and her family moved to Ithaca, NY where her father was a professor of Agricultural Extension at Cornell University.

At the age of six, her family moved to Ibadan, Nigeria where her father worked for the US State Department's USAID program.

Fenley attended high school in Spain, and at 16 returned to the US where she received her BA in Dance from Mills College in 1975.

Immediately after graduating from Mills, Fenley moved to New York City to begin her career as a choreographer and dancer.

Upon arriving in New York City in 1975, Fenley trained with Merce Cunningham, Viola Farber and studied at the Erick Hawkins School.

During her first years in New York Fenley danced for several choreographers including Carol Conway and Andrew deGroat.

She began creating her own work and formed Molissa Fenley and Dancers in 1977.

Her early career (1977–1987) was focused on presenting ensemble work.

She has created over 90 works since founding her company Molissa Fenley and Dancers in 1977.

After a tour of European festivals in 1980 her work began to receive more critical attention in the United States and abroad.

Fenley and her dancers displayed remarkable stamina through complex patterning and sustained passages of intense speed, exemplified in works such as Energizer (1980).

In addition to more traditional dance classes, Fenley and her dancers did workouts that included running, calisthenics and weight training in order to achieve the strength and endurance needed to execute her physically demanding choreography.

Fenley has maintained this aesthetic of athletic virtuosity throughout her career.

Fenley received a Bessie Award for Choreography in 1985 for her work Cenotaph and again in 1988 for State of Darkness.

She is the Executive Director of the Momenta Foundation which she founded in 1986.

Mills College and Higher Education Teaching

In 1987 she disbanded her ensemble and made a shift to performing solo works, often in collaboration with visual artists including Kiki Smith, Richard Long and Tatsuo Miyajima and composers such as Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros.

It was during this period that she created her seminal work, State of Darkness (1988), which was commissioned by the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. Set to Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, this 35 minute solo received critical acclaim for both its physical rigor, innovative use of Stravinsky's score and intense sense of ritual drama.

State of Darkness received a Bessie Award for both Fenley's original performance in 1989 and for Boal's reconstruction in 1999.

After a decade of solo work, Fenley began creating ensemble pieces performed by herself and her company.

She continues to create and perform in the United States and abroad.

Fenley has maintained a long-time collaboration with composer Philip Glass and continues to collaborate with visual artists, composers and writers.

Fenley reconstructed State of Darkness in 1999 at the request of New York City Ballet principal dancer Peter Boal, and again in 2007 for Pacific Northwest Ballet.

In addition to being one of Mills College's most esteemed alumna, Fenley worked as a professor in Mills College Dance Department faculty from 1999 to 2020.

She began as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in 1999 and became an Associate Professor of Dance in 2006.

Fenley received a 2000 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

She is a Guggenheim Fellow (2008), a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2008) and recipient of the American Masterpieces Initiative from the National Endowment of the Arts (2010).

Fenley is a member of many professional arts organizations such as the Atlantic Center for the Arts, American Dance Guild, Asian Cultural Council, CHIME Mentorship program, Dance USA, International Dance Council and New York Live Arts.

Recent works include The Vessel Stories (2011), choreographed to music by Glass and featured at the Days and Nights Festival in Carmel, CA, and Credo in Us (2011) set to the John Cage piece of the same name and performed at the Mills College Art Museum and the Judson Memorial Church in New York City.

Over the course of her career Fenley has created over 90 works, which have been presented in the United States, South America, Europe, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Her work has been commissioned by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Seattle Dance Project, Marymount Manhattan College, The American Dance Festival, Deutsche Opera Ballet of Berlin, Robert Moses' Kin, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the William Hale Harkness Foundation, The New National Theater, Tokyo, The Ohio Ballet, Australian Dance Theater, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barnard/Columbia, Repertory Dance Theater, Oakland Ballet, and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

She was made Full Professor in 2013.

Fenley taught courses in technique, choreography and oversaw MFA candidates' thesis projects.

In 2015 Seagull Press/University of Chicago published Rhythm Field: The Dance of Molissa Fenley about her life and work.

Recent works in include: Archeology in Reverse and Artifact in 2018, Untitled (Haiku) and Some phrases I'm hoping Andy would like in 2019, and The Cut Outs (Matisse) in 2020 with longtime collaborator and poet Bob Holman on In 2020, Fenley revisited her 1988 work State of Darkness, setting the solo on Jared Brown, Lloyd Knight, Sara Mearns, Shamel Pitts, Annique Roberts, Cassandra Trenary and Michael Trusnovec.

Fenley's contribution to her field has been recognized with awards in the United States and internationally.

She is an eleven-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowship.