Bernard Brown
Assistant Professor of Dance | Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, UNITED STATES
Assistant Professor of Dance
Biography
Bernard Brown is a performer, choreographer, and educator who prioritizes the intersection of Blackness, queerness, belonging, and memory. Bernard serves as Artistic Director of Bernard Brown/bbmoves, a social justice dance theatre company, choreographing for stage, specific sites, film, and opera. In addition to presenting his scholarship on blackness, queerness, and inclusive pedagogy nationally, his choreographic and dance film commissions have been presented widely, including Seoul, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Scott Joplin's opera, "Treemonisha," for Skylark Opera. With a twenty-year tenure as lead performer and rehearsal director of Lula Washington Dance Theatre, other credits include David Rousseve/REALITY, Kamasi Washington, Aveda, TU Dance, and “Letter to a Man” with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Career highlights include restaging Donald McKayle’s canonical “Games” for the Kennedy Center's Masters of African American Choreography, performing in Donald Byrd’s “Harlem Nutcracker,” and being the titular principal dancer in Nike’s “12 Miles North: The Nick Gabaldon Story,” the first documented Afro-Mexican American surfer.
His work as a creative merges physical practice, research and theory. Current projects include “Processing Sugar Notes,” an evening length work and accompanying films that interrogate dehumanizing colonial legacies on People of Color through the lens of sugar, and the “Mason Project,” an in-depth look at Black women’s contribution to the construction of our nation’s major cities. A core member of Street Dance Activism, his work in arts activism has been featured by Dance Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. His writing can be found in The Dancer-Citizen and The Activist History Review. Bernard has also conducted residencies, workshops and master classes internationally, namely Israel and Brazil, and across the US including Social Justice and Education Conference, American College Dance Association, the International Association of Blacks in Dance and a myriad of schools and universities. A first-generation college graduate, Bernard holds a BFA in Dance Performance from Purchase College and MFA in Choreographic Inquiry from UCLA. Recipient of the Westfield Emerging Artist and Lester Horton Awards, he is Assistant Professor of Dance at Loyola Marymount University and a Certified Katherine Dunham Technique Instructor Candidate. The Los Angeles Times has called him “…the incomparable Bernard Brown…”
