Judy Dworin
Executive Director, JDPP, Inc.
Artistic Director, JDPE

Dance/theater artist Judy Dworin has received widespread recognition among diverse audiences for her socially charged, visually powerful performance work. Her wide-ranging repertoire gives particular voice to gender, human rights and earth-centered issues. Judy investigates a pared-down, expressive movement vocabulary that is carefully integrated with visual elements, sound and often text. Her work creates emotionally moving and transformative images that challenge and provoke with a multi-layered intensity. She has been noted for her sharp wit as well as her ability to delve into the darker reaches of experience shaped by a sense of possibility. Her work is informed by her commitment to process and collaboration.

1989 marked the official beginning of both the Judy Dworin Performance Ensemble and the Judy Dworin Performance Project, Inc. Performing predominantly in the Northeastern United States, in 1991 JDPE made its international debut at the National Theater in Sofia, Bulgaria. Since then, the company has premiered its new work each season at its home base, Hartford, CT, in New York City at Joyce Soho as well as at the La MaMa Annex, and throughout the New England region.

Judy has created with her Ensemble in its 18-year history, ten full evening works and a myriad of shorter pieces. Her collaboration with internationally renowned Chilean poet and human rights activist, Marjorie Agosin, ¿dónde estás? (2000), focuses on the Mothers of the Detained/Disappeared in Chile and the Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo in Argentina. Judy traveled to Chile and Argentina for first hand accounts from the Mothers as well as victims of the torture during the military regimes of those two countries. A broadcast quality DVD filmed by Motion Inc. was recently aired on CPTV. Her most recent project is a multi-arts collaboration with women at York Correctional Institution in Niantic, from which Judy developed Time In for the general public. Time In looks at time as it is experienced by the women at York.

Judy has completed numerous residencies in schools and innovated the Moving Matters! long-term residency program for JDPP, Inc. with Kathy Borteck Gersten.

Judy is the recipient of a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Grant and an NEA/Regional New Forms Grant as well as numerous state and private foundation grants for her work with the Ensemble and JDPP, Inc. In addition, in 1993, she was an artist-in-residence in Sofia, Bulgaria under the auspices of Dance Theater Workshop's special Suitcase Fund for Eastern Europe, the International Theatre Institute, and the Chitalishte Foundation.

She is currently a Professor of Dance in the Department of Theater and Dance at Trinity College in Hartford. She has been selected by the Connecticut Commission on the Arts as a Master Teaching Artist for the state of Connecticut and is a recipient of a Distinguished Advocate for the Arts Award in 1998 and the prestigious Governor’s Arts Award in 1999. In 2001, she was awarded a Connecticut Bloomer Award by Northeast Magazine for her contribution to Connecticut’s cultural life for ¿dónde estás? In 2006 received the Connecticut Dance Alliance Award for Distinguished Achievement and the Charter Oak Cultural Center Vision Award for Arts and Education. She has had articles published in such journals and books as Contact Quarterly, Northeast Magazine, Ellison Findly’s (Editor) Women’s Buddhism, Buddhism’s Women and Marjorie Agosin & Betty Jean Craige’s (Editors) To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11.