Choreographer, performer, educator, writer Kimberly Bartosik creates viscerally provocative, ferociously intimate choreographic projects that dramatically illuminate the ephemeral nature of performance while critically, tenderly, and violently etching away at deeply distressing threads of our society.

Bartosik is a 2021 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Artist Recovery Fund in the New York Community Trust and a 2020 “Bessie” honoree for Outstanding Performance and Outstanding Performer (Burr Johnson) for through the mirror of their eyes (New York Live Arts, 2020). Other recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Virginia B. Toulmin Women Leaders in Dance Fellowship at Center for Ballet and the Arts, Map Fund, National Dance Project, and others. Bartosik’s work has been commissioned by BAM Next Wave, New York Live Arts, LUMBERYARD, American Realness, Crossing the Line, Danspace Project, and others. She has toured extensively in the US and internationally. Bartosik’s current project, The Encounter, is an intergenerational work for professionals and pre-professionals being created with communities around the world. As a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Bartosik received a “Bessie” award for Exceptional Artistry in his work.

The Blanket is thrilled to be working with Kimberly, and her company DAELA, to produce and tour her new work bLUr. This project is a recipient of a 2024 National Dance Project Production Award - a program of New England Foundation for the Arts with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and The Mellon Foundation.

ALL CONTRIBUTIONS ARE FULLY TAX DEDUCTIBLE

Featuring performers Burr Johnson, Joanna Kotze, Jacoby Pruitt, Donovan Reed, Hannah Straney.

Original composition by Sivan Jacobovitz
Design by Roderick Murray

from the Doris Duke/SHS Foundations Award for New Works. bLUr is Presented by New York Live Arts in partnership with L’Alliance NY’s Crossing the Line Festival. The work is also made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and The Mellon Foundation. General Operating Support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation. bLUr is also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and with Project Support from The Harkness Foundation for Dance. The creation of the bLUr Community Engagement Workshop, made possible through NDP, was also developed with support from the 92Y Harkness Dance Center and in collaboration with Recanti-Caplan teen scholars. bLUr was developed in residency at Marble House Project, the Ragdale Foundation during a Sybil Shearer Fellowship, and as an Artist in Residency at Bates Dance Festival. bLUr is also supported through the generosity of individual donors, with major support by John Robinson.

THE ENCOUNTER is an intergenerational physical-theatre project being developed with diverse communities around the world merging professional, pre-professional, and non-professional performers. The work pulls from what we are currently carrying in our bodies – grief, hope, fear, desire, newfound power – and pairs it with our dreams in this moment of reconciliation with time, as we dig our lives out of the pandemics of this age. The burgeoning result is a cross-geographic, global conversation about the ferocious power of the body as a form of communication and the potency of movement as a connective language.