Amy O'Neal
Credit: Gabriel Bienczycki
Amy O’Neal (she/her) is an award-winning, multidimensional dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator. A sought-after artist for over two decades, she teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for experimental performance, film, music video, and virtual reality. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, an avant-garde dancing garage band. Inspired by hip-hop culture and alternative music of the ’90s and 2000s, as well as experimental cinema, locust’s work created social commentary with humor and heavy beats.
From 2010 until now, she has created experimental dance work merging Black social dance practices from hip-hop and house culture with contemporary dance while directly addressing race, gender, and the sampling nature of innovation. She premiered her first evening-length solo in 2012, where she examined her diverse influences, questioned her relationship to Black music and dance as a white woman, and paid homage to her teachers and dance heroes. As a practicing guest of street and club dance culture, she has participated and judged in house, experimental, and all-styles battles. She and dani tirrell, co-taught the first House classes in Seattle at The Beacon: Massive Monkees studio in 2014 and co-produced the first house dance event in Seattle (Seattle House Dance Project) in 2017. That same year, Amy founded the street and club dance curriculum at the University of Washington Dance Department. Her passion and research meet at the intersection of the hip-hop, house, and contemporary dance communities. Within this intersection, she explores the complex differences, nuances, and layers of hybridized movement vocabularies. For example, in her eighth evening-length work, Opposing Forces, O’Neal and five Seattle-based B-Boys explored fears of feminine qualities in our culture through the hyper-masculine form of Breaking. Opposing Forces toured from 2014 to 2017, and an award-winning documentary about the show called How It Feels premiered in 2019.
City Arts Magazine wrote, “O’Neal synthesizes complex themes with a cohesive, penetrating aesthetic. Her latest work transcends disciplines and boundaries. It is a bridge between worlds, a translator for opposing points of view, a force for good.”
O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artist Trust, and 4Culture. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/ImpulsTanz scholar, and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, where she was awarded the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. While at Cornish, she danced and toured with the Pat Graney Company from 1998 to 2001 and Scott/Powell Performance from 1997 to 2004.
O’Neal has been an Artist in Residence at Bates Dance Festival, Headlands Center for the Arts, the US/Japan Choreographer’s Exchange, Velocity Dance Center, a social impact resident at The Kennedy Center/The Reach, and a Visiting Dance Innovator at Harvard.
Since 2001, she has worked both on stage and screen with musician/comedian Reggie Watts, former band leader for The Late Late Show with James Corden. She has improvised with Watts in NYC comedy clubs, toured together in original stage shows, choreographed his iconic 2010 Comedy Central video F…, S… Stack, and, in 24 hours, created an evening-length dance/music show with him. Along with NYC-based artist Ani Taj, she co-choreographed Runnin’, a virtual reality music video for Watts’ Wajatta project with electronic music artist John Tejada. Runnin’ premiered at the New Frontier VR showcase at Sundance Film Festival and won Best Interactive at SXSW in 2019. Also in 2019, she choreographed a virtual reality project for Procter & Gamble promoting more diversity in productions for the advertising and film industries called Look Again, which premiered at Cannes Lions Festival in France.
After 20 years in Seattle, O’Neal moved to Los Angeles in 2016 and landed a weekly teaching gig at Ryan Heffington’s studio, The Sweat Spot (closed in 2020). She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018, where she teaches hip-hop, house and freestyle techniques, composition and improvisation, hybrid hip-hop/contemporary, and lectures on Black social dance history, practice, and media literacy.
In 2019, she performed her work A Trio at the Versa Style Dance Company Annual Festival as well as the LAX Festival. Also in 2019, she founded The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures, a research and development platform for street dance practitioners to create inside the experimental performance context. She continues to work between LA and Seattle, but Seattle is her home base again. She feels the most at peace when she can embody her full human experience as an artist and is passionate about supporting others to do the same.
