2007 Awardee James Graham

Statement:

James Graham is thrilled to be awarded the 2007
Kathryn Karipides Scholarship in Modern Dance.  With
this award he will be studying and researching Modern
dance in Tel Aviv, Israel for two months this summer.
A Columbus, Ohio native, James first began to explore
performing arts through music, voice, and theatre.
James discovered dance while attending the University
of California at Berkeley, and was hooked.  While
attending UC Berkeley he danced in numerous faculty
and student pieces, including two years as a touring
member of the pre-professional student dance company
B.A.R.D (Bay Area Repertory Dance).  He was also the
resident choreographer for Barestage Productions, a
student theatre group.  While there he choreographed
three musical theatre productions and choreographed
and performed in an original evening-length
DanceTheatre production titled "One Room."

At UC Berkeley, immediately following graduation,
James taught a performance and history based course
titled "From Bauhaus to Butoh: Performance Art through
the Ages."  In this course, studying various
performance artists and movements, he focused on
developing student's abilities by utilizing movement,
text, and voice assignments paired with themes from
history.

Professionally, James has worked and performed with
Joe Goode and the Joe Goode Performance Group, Janice
Garrett, Scott Wells, Lizz Roman, Sean Dorsey and
FreshMeat Productions, Melissa Hudson, Marc Morozumi,
Chris Dolder, Lisa Wymore, and Project Bandaloop among
others.

In the Fall of 2007 James will be commencing his
graduate studies at the Ohio State University where he
was awarded a University Fellowship.  His
concentrations are in Performance and Choreography as
well as Lighting and Technology.  His work delves into
the exploration of how humans can have so many
commonalities and similar experiences, yet how we can
feel so disillusioned and isolated at the same time,
often caused by our modern culture.  James plans to
explore these issues in Israel this summer.

Kathryn Karipides Profile and Images

About The Kathryn Karipides Scholarship in Modern Dance

2007 Kathryn Karipides
Scholarship in Modern Dance Awardee

James Graham

Cleveland Arts Prize is pleased to announce the 2007 winner of the Kathryn Karipides Scholarship in Modern Dance. The scholarship, open to students nationally, was designed to assist students between undergraduate and graduate school with opportunities for summer dance study. Ms. Karipides spent three summers at Connecticut College, studying intensively with some of the greatest modern dance artists of the time: Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Lucas Hoving, Jose Limon, and Louis Horst, and remembers those summers as "transformative" times in her artistic development. It was her wish to help aspiring dancers in this way.

The 2007 Scholarship will be awarded to James Graham of San Francisco , California . Mr. Graham is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and will attend The Ohio State University Master of Fine Arts Department of Dance. During the summer, he will augment his training in the modern dance idiom cross culturally by studying modern dance and Israeli folk dance in Tel Aviv, Israel .

The jury consisted of:

Nusha Martynuk , Professor and Director of Dance, Theatre and Dance Program, Oberlin College

Kora Radella, Freelance Choreographer/Adjunct Dance Faculty, Kenyon College

Louis Kavouras, Chair, Department of Dance University of Las Vega

The board and staff of the Cleveland Arts Prize are grateful to the many generous contributors who have made this perpetual gift to the dance world possible. Kathryn Karipides is a Cleveland treasure who has inspired countless others to embrace her passionate love of dance. It is impossible to calculate the number of young lives she has positively shaped over a teaching career that spanned more than four decades.