Victoria Marks

VICTORIA MARKS creates dances for the stage, for film, in community settings, and for professional dancers. Her work addresses the body itself, as it serves as a touchstone for larger discourses on wellness, desire, rhetoric and power. Victoria is a Professor of choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA where she has been teaching since 1995. Before taking her post at UCLA she lived in London, where for three and a half years she worked on her own choreographic projects and served as head of choreography at London Contemporary Dance School, a conservatory for the training of professional dance artists in Europe. Marks is a 2005 Guggenheim fellow, and a 2004 recipient of the Irvine Foundation “Dance: Creation to Performance” Grant as well as an NEA Company Grant. She is a 2002 recipient of a California DanceMaker Grant through the Irvine Foundation and a 2001 COLA grant recipient from the Cultural Affairs Council of Los Angeles, which yielded the work, “Against Ending.” This work went on to win four Los Angeles based Lester Horton Dance Awards. In 1997, Marks was honored with the Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the London Arts Board, among others. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Choreography, and numerous awards for her dance films, including the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival (1996 and 1995), the Golden Antenae Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association’s Dance and the Camera Festival.