Keith Glassman grew up playing basketball in Philadelphia and earned a degree in Sociology from Brown University. He began making dances soon after he started his dance training at San Diego State University as a post-bac student. He then moved to New York and studied with, among others, Sara Rudner and Bessie Schonberg and performed in the companies of Kenneth Rinker, Bebe Miller and Catlin Cobb. He formed Keith Glassman & Dancers in 1989.
Keith was awarded a Lester Horton Award from the Los Angeles Dance Resource Center for Choreographic Excellence in Re-mounting and Re-staging “Slip Knot” in 2007 and was selected as the 2011 Choreographer-in-Residence at the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica. He has received numerous awards and/or commissions for his work, including support from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the Durfee Foundation, the James A. Doolittle Foundation, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, Dancing In The Streets, the Maine Arts Festival, the Bootleg Theater Dance Festival and P.S. 1 The Institute for Art and Urban Resources.
Once relocated to Southern California, Keith was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Knowing that his control of his body may lessen over time, he began video documenting a project for his Master’s thesis Chair, Donald McKayle. In 2011, he put together a 3-minute video of his own archival home movies and Youtube clips, Ghosts. Soon after that, with the support of a grad school friend and filmmaker, Jerome Thomas, Lives Beyond Motion began to take shape. Over the next decade+, the feature length documentary that seeks to answer Keith’s existential question, “Why do I dance?” became his primary focus.
He has taught dance and Pilates in private studios and on Zoom, in colleges and universities in New York, Rhode Island, California and Vermont and he has choreographed for students at Rio Hondo and Saddleback Community Colleges. He earned an MFA in Dance from the University of California, Irvine.
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