“Tiffany Rea-Fisher is audacious, serving, integrity.”
EMERGE125's Artistic Director TIFFANY REA-FISHER is a NDP Award winner, a 2022 Creatives Rebuild New York Grantee, a 7-time consecutive AUDELCO Award nominee, a 2021 Toulmin Creator, a 2022 Toulmin Fellow, a National Dance Project Awardee, a John Brown Spirit Award recipient, a Mellon Grant awardee through her company, and was personally awarded a citation from the City of New York for her cultural contributions. As resident choreographer with the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH), she has collaborated on their productions of Macbeth, The Three Musketeers, A Christmas Carol in Harlem, Antigone, The Bacchae, Seize the King and the company's 2024 work MEMNON, recently staged at The Getty Villa in Los Angeles. Following her 2022 contributions to CTH’s Twelfth Night, for which The New York Times suggested she should have been nominated for a Tony Award, Rea-Fisher’s choreography was prominent in The Public Theater’s 2023 Delacorte production of The Tempest as part of their Public Works program. Her choreography has been produced in NYC at the Joyce, the Apollo, Joe's Pub, Aaron Davis Hall, New York Live Arts and was recently featured within The New York Times Critics Pick theater production Gun & Powder. She has worked extensively with fashion designers to present their works, including for events and films with Louis Vuitton and Paola Hernández. Among Rea-Fisher’s more recent accomplishments is the premiere of her 2022 Dance Theatre of Harlem commission, Sounds of Hazel, celebrating the life of the classical pianist, singer, Hollywood star, and trailblazing activist Hazel Scott. Rea-Fisher has been commissioned by Dance Theater of Harlem, Dallas Black Dance Theater, NYC Department of Transportation, Utah Repertory Theater, The National Gallery of Art in D.C., and has seen her work performed before the Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg. She curates the Bryant Park Picnic Performances Summer Dance Series, providing free access to art for thousands of audience members while exposing upcoming and established artists to a wider audience, and also acts as the Executive Director of the Adirondack Diversity Initiative. Rea-Fisher was the first dance curator for the New York interdisciplinary arts organization The Tank, where she now sits on their Board of Trustees. Rea-Fisher is much sought out as a lecturer, speaker, and policy contributor on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts. She subscribes to the servant leadership model and uses disruption through inclusion to influence the culture of her work with her company, in dance education, and all of her many satellite projects.
“Using the arts to address pressing social issues, to cross racial lines. Disruption through inclusion. Developing artists as people in the community. It’s not just dancers as an instrument of the choreographer’s vision––there is a dynamic interplay between the art she [Tiffany] creates through the company and the opportunities for each of these dancers to become artists in their own right.”
