Join us on Wednesday, October 14, at 5:30 pm, for a discussion with
acclaimed choreographer Pam Tanowitz, Skidmore’s 2026 McCormack Visiting
Artist-Scholar in Residence, about her latest full-length dance work, Pastoral.
Alongside two of her collaborators, artist Sarah Crowner and artistic
director Gideon Lester, Tanowitz will provide a look into the creative
process that shaped this piece. April Bernard, Professor of English,
will join the panel discussion, which will be moderated by Brian Lawson,
Assistant Professor of Dance. Pastoral, which features a score
by composer Caroline Shaw, premiered in the summer of 2025 at Bard
College, and used Beethoven’s 6th Symphony as a springboard for
multidisciplinary creation.
This event is part of Tanowitz’s 2026
McCormack Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar Residency at Skidmore, and is
free and open to the public.
About the Participants
Pam Tanowitz
is a celebrated New York–based choreographer and founder of Pam
Tanowitz Dance who has steadily delineated her own dance language
through decades of research and creation. She is the first-ever
choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center at Bard in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and is an assistant professor of
professional practice at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers
University. Other honors include the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, LMCC
Liberty Award for Artistic Leadership, Doris Duke Artist Award, Herb
Alpert Award, BAC Cage Cunningham Fellowship, and Bessie Awards, among
others. She has created works for The Australian Ballet, New York City
Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance,
The Royal Ballet, Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America, Vail Dance
Festival, Juilliard Dance, Ballet Austin, and New York Theatre Ballet.
Originally from New Rochelle, New York, Tanowitz holds degrees from Ohio
State University and Sarah Lawrence College.
Brooklyn–based artist Sarah Crowner’s
diverse practice explores the spaces where geometry abuts gesture,
materiality merges with composition, and the graphic confronts the
handmade. Incorporating two- and three-dimensional works across a
variety of media (painting, sculpture, installation, and set design),
Crowner’s work points to an expanded field of painting, investigating
the relationship between the element and the whole, and how parts build
an entirety. Her work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of
Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Contemporary Austin;
Dallas Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Recent exhibitions and installations include Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan, The Bass Museum, Miami (2025–26); Platform as Platform, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2025); and Around Orange, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2023–24).
Gideon Lester
is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Fisher Center at Bard,
and Senior Curator at the Open Society University Network’s Center for
the Arts and Human Rights. A Tony- and Olivier Award–winning creative
producer, festival director, and dramaturg, he has collaborated with and
commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across
disciplines, including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Tania El
Khoury, Brice Marden, Sarah Michelson, Claudia Rankine, Kaija Saariaho,
Peter Sellars, and Anna Deavere Smith. Recent projects include the world
premiere of Justin Peck and Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise; Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food; Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony Award; Olivier Award); and Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets and Song of Songs.
April Bernard’s The World Behind the World, her sixth book of poems, was published in 2023 by W. W. Norton; previous collections are Brawl & Jag, Romanticism, Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her novel Miss Fuller was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award; she has also published short fiction in Little Star, Electric Literature, and The Southampton Review, and is a contributor of reviews and essays to The New York Review of Books and Book Post, among other journals. She teaches at Skidmore College and is currently at work on a volume of new and selected poems.
Brian Lawson,
Assistant Professor of Dance at Skidmore, is a dance performer and
educator. He graduated summa cum laude with a BFA in dance performance
from SUNY Purchase in 2010. Lawson performed with Pam Tanowitz Dance
before joining the Mark Morris Dance Group in 2011. With MMDG, he
originated numerous roles and had the pleasure of touring the US and the
world performing Morris’s dances. He earned his MFA in Dance from the
University of Washington in 2020 and began teaching at Skidmore in 2022.
His choreographic research is collaborative in nature and focuses on
queerness in concert dance. He also engages in pedagogical research with
regard to contemporary balletic practices. He continues to research via
performance as a dancer with Pam Tanowitz Dance and MMDG. Lawson enjoys
teaching dance to diverse populations and has given master classes at
Purchase College, NYU Tisch, and the American Dance Festival, among
others. He acts as a guest ballet teacher for the José Limón Dance
Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, and Gibney Dance.
About The McCormack Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar Residency
The McCormack Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar Residency
exemplifies Skidmore’s commitment to experiential learning, close
faculty-student collaboration, and interdisciplinary exploration. The
residency is a signature academic program that brings internationally
recognized artists and scholars to Skidmore College for an intensive,
week-long residency during the academic year. It is designed as a
total-immersion experience that embeds the visiting artist directly into
the academic and creative life of the College, with sustained focus on
student learning and faculty collaboration.
McCormack Residents
represent the highest levels of artistic achievement across visual,
performing, and literary arts, including recipients of major honors such
as the MacArthur Fellowship, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award,
Grammy Award, Tony Award, and Nobel Prize in Literature. Through
classroom engagement, studio practice, mentorship, and public
scholarship, the McCormack Residency advances Skidmore’s mission by
uniting theory and practice and modeling interdisciplinary inquiry
within a liberal arts context. The residency is presented by Skidmore’s
Office of Special Programs, in partnership with the Dance Department for
the 2026 residency.