Choreographer/Artistic Director
Doug Elkins Choreography

Doug Elkins is a two-time New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award-winning choreographer and 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Creative Arts Fellow. He began his dance career as a B-Boy, touring the world with break dance groups New York Dance Express and Magnificent Force, among others. Doug is a recipient of significant choreographic commissions and awards from the NEA, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation, Choo-San Goh & H. Robert Magee Foundation, Dance Magazine Foundation, Metropolitan Life/American Dance Festival, Hartford Foundation, Arts International, The Greenwall Foundation and The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.  In 1994, he received a Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal, sharing the stage with author Philip Roth and photographer Nan Goldin.  In 2006, he was honored in New York City by the Martha Hill Award for Career Achievement; in 2010, he was honored in Boston with an Elliot Norton Award for Choreography (for Doug Elkins & Friends’ Fräulein Maria, a loving deconstruction of The Sound of Music).

Doug has taught and choreographed extensively in the US and Europe and has created original work for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, Flying Karamazov Brothers, MaggioDanza, Pennsylvania Ballet, Union Dance and CanDoCo of London, as well as a number of university dance companies and the renowned Mini & Maxi of Holland. His theater work includes collaborations with Joanne Akalaitis and Philip Glass, Robert Woodruff, Pavel Dubrusky, Annie Hamburger, Molly Smith, Craig Lucas, David Henry Hwang, Barbara Karger and Michael Preston (including Fräulein Maria), Anne Kauffman, Arin Arbus and, most recently Janos Szasz for The Master & Margarita at Bard SummerScape.  A graduate of SUNY/Purchase, Elkins received his MFA in Dance from Hollins University/ADF in 2007.  His tenure at The Beacon School on the upper west side of Manhattan is the subject of Where the Dance Is, a short film by Marta Renzi.  In fall 2013, he became a full-time faculty member at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey.