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Biographies

Bill T. Jones (Artistic Director/ Co-Founder/Choreographer: Bill

T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) is recipient of the 2022 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for Black No More; 2014 Doris Duke

Performing Artist Award; 2013 National Medal of Arts; 2010

Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed Fela!; a 2007 Tony Award, 2007 Obie Award, and 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Callaway Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; 2007 USA

Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for The Seven; 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps

American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; 2005

Harlem Renaissance Award; 2003

Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 2010, Jones was recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage

Coalition named Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”

Bill has been nominated for the 2022 Tony Awards for his work on Paradise Square.

Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie

Zane Dance Company in 1982. He has created more than 140 works for his company. Jones is Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting, and educating.

Howard W. French: My latest work of non-fiction is titled “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World,” Liveright, Oct. 2021, named a book of the year by the Financial Times and by Amazon. It was also the winner of the 2022 MAAH Stone

Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. For details, see: howardwfrench.com

I am a professor at the Columbia

University Graduate School of Journalism. I am also a former foreign correspondent and senior writer for The New York Times, having worked as a bureau chief in China, Japan, West and Central Africa and Central America and the Caribbean.

My most recent previous book is, “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Explain China’s Push for Global Power,” published by Knopf in March 2017.

Prior to that, I wrote China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. (Knopf 2014) Second Continent was named by The New York Times, The Economist and by The Guardian as one of the most notable books of the year.

My other books include A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, (2004) and Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life, a collection of my documentary photography, published with original poetry by Qiu Xiaolong. (2012) column at Foreign Policy, and I am a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. I tweet at @hofrench

I write a weekly global affairs