Camille A. Brown

Camille A. Brown is a prolific Black female choreographer, who is reclaiming the cultural narratives of African American identity. Her bold work taps into both ancestral stories and contemporary culture to capture a range of deeply personal experiences. Ms. Brown has received numerous honors including an Obie Award, a Guggenheim Award, Bessie Award, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, a United States Artists Award, 2 Audelco Awards, 5 Princess Grace Awards, and a New York City Center Award. She has received a Tony nomination, 3 Drama Desk, and 3 Lortel nominations for her work in Theater. She is a TED fellow and the recipient of a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, among others.  Camille has been commissioned by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Urban Bush Women, Complexions, Ballet Memphis, Hubbard Street II, Broadway theaters, the Metropolitan Opera and other prominent institutions.

As Artistic Director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers (CABD), Ms. Brown strives to instill curiosity and reflection in diverse audiences through her emotionally raw and thought-provoking work. Her driving passion is to empower Black bodies to tell their story using their own language through movement and dialogue. Through the company, Ms. Brown provides outreach activities to students, young adults, and men and women across the country. 

Her trilogy on race culture and identity has won accolades across the country:  Mr. TOL E. RAncE  (2012) was honored with a Bessie Award and BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play was Bessie-nominated. ink (2017), the final installation of the trilogy, premiered at The Kennedy Center to critical acclaim; “What unfolds is a parade of the beautiful diverse spectrum that is blackness...at once performing yet simply being.”-Theresa Ruth Howard. Following ink’s  NYC premiere in 2019,  Ms. Brown and the Company were invited to partner with Google Arts & Culture to film a site-specific performance of ink at the Brooklyn Historical Society for Black History Month. ink’ s finale  was also performed at the 2019 Bessie Awards and Broadcast on WLIW. Ms. Brown’s City of Rain, originally created on CABD in 2010, entered the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in December 2019.

Broadway and Off-Broadway theater & television credits include: Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy (Tony and Drama Desk nominations), Tony Award-Winning Broadway revival, Once On This Island (Drama Desk, Outer Critics, and Chita Rivera Nominations), Toni Stone (Drama Desk, Lortel nominee), Emmy Award- Winning Jesus Christ Superstar Live on NBC, Broadway’s A Streetcar Named Desire, The Fortress of Solitude (Lortel Nomination), BELLA: An American Tall Tale (Lortel, Audelco nominee), for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (Drama Desk, Lortel nominations, Antonyo award) Much Ado About Nothing (Audelco winner, SDCF finalist) for Shakespeare in the Park, among others. 

Ms. Brown is the choreographer of The Metropolitan Opera’s Porgy & Bess. She will make her feature film debut in the soon-to-be-released Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: directed by George C. Wolfe (Netflix). Brown will make her directorial debut with Ain’t Misbehavin’ at Westport Country Playhouse in July 2021.

 Ms. Brown has been featured on the cover of Dance Teacher Magazine (2016) and Dance Magazine (2018). She has performed at the 2015 and 2018 TED Conferences in Vancouver, Canada and given talks at both TEDxBeaconStreet and TEDx Estée Lauder Companies. Ms. Brown’s TED-Ed talk, “A Visual History of Social Dance in 25 Moves” was chosen as one of the most notable talks of 2016 by TED Curator, Chris Anderson, and has over 15 million views on Facebook and counting.  Most recently,  Ms. Brown was featured on PBS' Articulate, a nationally syndicated PBS documentary series on the arts.

Ms. Brown is a graduate of the LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts and received a B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.