ABOUT

Dean Moss

Dean Moss is an interdisciplinary choreographer and video artist whose practice investigates the sense of becoming and the fluidities of identity. His performance projects are media entwined choreographic works that are deeply concerned with visual detail. These projects often include artist collaborations, and the conceptually foundational use of audience participation. His self-taught digital film works are intimate impressionistic narratives exploring perception, with image sequences featuring video collage and animation techniques. Since 2002 Moss’ creative endeavors have been organized through a project based production company called Gametophyte Inc. based in Brooklyn.

To date these endeavors have been commissioned and variously presented internationally by New York Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art; PS 1 Contemporary Art Museum; The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; The Walker Art Center; Yale University/World Performance Project; The Bitgoeul Citizen Cultural Center; The Seoul International Dance Festival; The New Visions Art Festival, Hong Kong, China; Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna Austria; FNB Vita Dance Festival, Johannesburg, South Africa; Ksirarnawa Art Center, Denpasar Indonesia; and The Kitchen, NYC among many others. With screened works presented by Anthology Film Archives; Danse Visions Festival International de Cin´e-Video-Danse, Nantes France; Factory Gallery, Seoul Korea; Venice Intercultural Film Festival; Tokyo International Short Film Festival; Moving Body Film Festival, Varna Bulgaria; Under the Radar Festival, Vienna Austria; and the Video Art & Experimental Film Festival in NYC.

Moss arrived in New York City in 1979 on a ballet scholarship with the Dance Theater of Harlem. He studied directly under Martha Graham, toured with the Louis Falco Dance Company, and performed in the Paris company of Broadway’s revival West Side Story, all in the early 1980’s. Subsequently he danced ten years with the post-modern choreographer David Gordon in The Pick-up Performance Company: leaving in 1993 to pursue his own work.

Moss acquired an analogue super-VHS video camera and editing decks in 1991. His first self-taught video work was completed in 1992 and titled “adventures in assimilation”. It won the Jury Award in the New York Festival of Short Film and Video and is still distributed by Thirdworld Newsreel. Moss continued to make a number short single channel videos through the 1990’s but found videotape unreliable and digital film initially too expensive, so until the pandemic, he relegated media work mostly to short clips supporting his performance projects.

In 1999 Moss became the Curator of Dance and Performance at The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art and the Avant-Garde, and remained a Curatorial Advisor until 2009. During that time his curation was noted by dance critics in several publications and he was profiled as a curator by The New York Times in both 2001 and 2002.

Moss’ interdisciplinary experience has made him a skillful visiting artist and faculty member. At Harvard University he led workshops in performance creation in the Visual Arts department and received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. At Yale he lectured in the Theatre department investigating audience participation. At Rhode Island School of Design, and at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture as Resident Faculty, he mentored visual artists as they integrated performance and media. He was long time dance faculty at Princeton University, and at Sarah Lawrence College mentoring Choreography MFA students. Moss has also taught internationally including a year in Japan lecturing on Arts Management, at Tokyo University of the Arts. Most recently Moss was Distinguished Visiting Faculty in the department of Kinetic Imaging (hybrid media, video, performance, sound and animation) at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Moss is an Asian Cultural Council Fellow; American Academy in Jerusalem Fellow; a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident; Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center Resident; and a Bali Purnati Center for the Arts Resident. He is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography; the Doris Duke Impact Award in Theatre; a Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artists Grant; plus Fellowships in both Choreography and Multidisciplinary Works from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has received five Multi-Art Production Grants; a Rolex Institute Production Grant; and Asian Art Theater, Project Development Initiative funding. Moss was given an artist profile interview in BOMB Magazine by celebrated Korean-American director/playwright (and occasional collaborator) Young Jean Lee. He won a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for the work “Spooky action at a distance”. His most recent film/video pieces “untitled:embrace” (2022) and “surface tension” (2024) are Official Selections in several international film festivals including most recently the 2025 Video Art and Experimental Film Festival in NYC.

Collaboration pervades Moss’ projects. Most notably his 2005 performance collaboration with painter, visual artist Laylah Ali on “figures on a field” which was, twenty years later, restaged on Viennese performers at Tanzquartier Wein in October of 2025. Other important collaborations include two with Korean artists: “Kisaeng becomes you”, with dance artist Yoon Jin Kim premiered in 2008/09, and “Nameless forest” with sculptor, visual artist Sungmyung Chun premiered in 2011. Both works focused on Korean cultural assets and history. Both premiered in Korea. Both were critically acclaimed and engendered academic texts published in Theatre Survey (2013) and Theater Magazine (2012).

Collaboration extends also into Moss’ work as a secondary artist, often as a hired choreographer or dramaturge. Notably working on Young Jean Lee’s plays “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven”, and “LEAR”. Additionally Moss assisted on several dance works by Japanese dance artist Yasuko Yokoshi, including her “Bessie” awarded 2003 work “Shuffle”.

Moss further has served on local institutional committees and boards. He was for several years on the Artist Advisory Boards of The Danspace Project and The Brooklyn Arts Exchange; and for five years on the Executive Board of Performance Space 122 (now Performance Space New York). Currently, he serves on the Selection Committee for Princeton University’s Hodder Awards and Princeton Arts Fellowships. And since 2018, he delights in serving as a Trustee for the Foundation for Contemporary Arts: an artist run grant giving organization founded by Jasper Johns and John Cage.

(CV) (Artist’s Statement) (Archive)