Amy O’Neal is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography. Out of 5,000 applicants across the US and Canada in the arts and sciences, 223 fellows were chosen, 10 were choreographers. The fellowship celebrates the contributions of an artist or scholar’s past work and the promise of their future work. Amy is using this fellowship to transition into full time artist life again after seven years teaching at USC Kaufman in Los Angeles and prepping to tour her ninth evening length work Again, There is No Other (The Remix). Amy O’Neal is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator. A sought-after artist for over two decades, she teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for live performance, dance film, music video and virtual reality. She is Executive/Artistic Director of Hybrid Dance Lab, a performance and education platform for experimental street/club dance artists to challenge notions of street dance inside theater, address the inevitable process of hybridity, and nurture cultural literacy. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, an experimental multidisciplinary video, music, and contemporary dance company. Inspired by hip-hop culture and experimental cinema, locust‘s work created social commentary with humor and heavy beats. She was also the lead singer of Keeble’s band, Marrow, from 2002-2006. From 2010 until now, she creates experimental dance work merging Black social dance practices from hip-hop and house culture and contemporary dance while directly addressing race, gender and the sampling nature of innovation. She premiered her first evening-length solo in 2012 where she examined her influences, questioned her relationship to Blackness as a white woman, and paid homage to her teachers and dance heroes.
