AMY O'NEAL

Amy O’Neal (Los Angeles, CA) is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator merging contemporary and street dance since 2000 to challenge notions of race, gender, and the sampling nature of innovation. She teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for concert dance, experimental performance, dance film, music videos, and virtual reality. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, a dance/music/video performance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she creates dance experiences merging practices and values of hip hop, house dance culture, and experimental performance. O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Foundation for Contemporary Art, among others. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/Impulstanz scholar, and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, where she earned the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. After 20 years in Seattle, O’Neal moved to Los Angeles in 2016. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 where she teaches hip-hop, house, contemporary, composition, improvisation, and lectures on Black social dance history, practices, and media literacy. She is currently developing her next evening length work Again, There is No Other: The Remix and continuing to build The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures, a research/performance platform for street dance practitioners to explore their multiplicity. She works between Seattle and LA and is the Curating Artist in Residence for Velocity Dance Center in Seattle 2023-2025.