Jodi Melnick is a NYC based choreographer, performer, and teacher.
The profound expression of the dancing body and lucid performing instincts drive her creative process as the work is transformed through the phenomenon of dancing.
Melnick’s work has been presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Little Island, The Joyce Theater, City Center, the Kitchen, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Spoleto Festival, Jacobs Pillow, The Dublin Dance Festival, Moats, Quarries, and Beaches, to name a few.
Melnick danced in the Twyla Tharp Dance Company (1990-94, 2009’), and continues creative collaborations with Sara Rudner, David Neumann, Rashaun Mitchell, Jon Kinzel, Charles Atlas, and playwright Sibyl Kempson. She spent significant time assisting Trisha Brown and had the privilege collaborating and performing their solo work ‘One of Sixty-Five Thousand Gestures’. With this rich history of dancing, collaborating, and freelancing, Melnick garnered the importance of inclusion in her own work, pushing post-modern sensibilities and engagement with other dance disciplines and backgrounds including middle and high school movement programs and creating work on NYCBallet principal dancers Sara Mearns, Lauren Lovette, and Taylor Stanley.
Honors include: Doris Duke Impact Award, Guggenheim Fellow, Jerome Robbins New Essential Works Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two Bessie Awards, Gibney’s DIP Residency Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center 2 -year extended Life Grant, and Center for Ballet Arts Fellow.
Teaching has been part of Melnick’s artistic process for many years and currently, as an adjunct, she teaches at Barnard College and Sarah Lawrence College.
