Joanne Savio — Grace: A Retrospective of Dance Portraiture and Performance 1986-2004

This exhibition of Joanne Savio’s work highlights a near twenty year period where she continually returned to the dance world for inspiration. Her portraits include some of the most celebrated dancers and choreographers in the field. The exhibition was featured in the NYUAD Arts Center Project Space in February 2017, and we are pleased the exhibition could travel to New York City.

Joanne Savio has been an Arts Professor in the Film and New Media Program at NYU Abu Dhabi since 2010. A photographer and teacher for nearly three decades, she taught at The Cooper Union and in the Film and Television Department at NYU. In 2002, she launched NYU’s first courses in documentary film and photography in Havana, Cuba. The courses remain essential to the program today.

Savio’s work has been widely published in periodicals, journals, and books such as Dance Ink Photographs, Life’s A Year in Pictures, Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, and Defining Contemporary Art. Her book, Vital Grace, published by Edition Stemmle is an extensive photographic essay on the black male dancer. Joanne’s portraiture and dance photography work has been shown in numerous gallery exhibitions, and most recently the Tate Gallery website in 2016. Images from Vital Grace were included in the exhibit ReSignifications in Florence, Italy 2015, and the show will travel to Cuba in 2017. Her work is privately collected. 

In 2015, in collaboration with Jim Savio, she completed a mixed-media film titled Home Sick. She is now working on a series of sound/image compositions. Grace, is a retrospective of her selected dance photography, portraits and performance from 1986-2004.

Image: Trisha Brown, If You Couldn’t See Me, 1994, Joanne Savio