Jade Solomon Curtis

"She is a riveting performer (as anyone who saw her when she was with Spectrum can attest),
but in her own work, her terrific facility coalesced with her unique artist’s voice to transfixing effect."
 
— Mariko Nagashima, SeattleDances

Jade Solomon Curtis is a dance artist and choreographer who integrates classical and African-American vernacular movements with mixed-media and Hip Hop culture. Through the lens of a contemporary black woman, Curtis’ works ponder tradition and reinvention, social justice, social constructs as well as intuition and logic–often resulting in the subversion of an idea. She is the founder of Solo Magic, a non-profit arts initiative collaborating with innovative artists to create socially relevant performances; Activism is the Muse.

She is a 2018 Artist Trust Fellow and a 2017 University of South Carolina Inaugural Visiting Fellow. Curtis received the 2017 Seattle Office of Arts & Culture CityArts Project Award, and the 2017 4Culture Artist Project Award. Her work has received support from the Bossak-Heilbron Charitable Foundation, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Artist Trust (GAP Grant), Central District Forum for Art & Ideas (Showing Out: Seattle Black Choreographers), and 4Culture (Tech Specific Grant). Curtis is a 2017 Velocity Dance Center artist-in-residence and a 2018 Base Experimental + Art artist-in-residence. In March 2019, Curtis will be an artist-in-residence at SLIPPAGE Lab at Duke University.

A celebrated soloist of Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater for four seasons, Curtis is the subject of an Emmy Award-winning short film, Jade Solomon Curtis directed by Ralph Bevins. She received SeattleDance’s first Dance Crush Award for Performance/Choreography in the riveting workshop of Black Like Me that led to further development and funding from the National Dance Project.

Black Like Me: An Exploration of the Word Nigger is a multidisciplinary evening length work that explores the reverb of a single word in a global community. It considers the effects of the word nigger, all its permutations, its history and its casual use in Hip Hop culture. In collaboration with two of America’s leading Black media-design technologists, original sound composition and local activists; it asks if it is possible to redefine a word that was intended to belittle a people. National Dance Project funding is available through December 2023.

Currently in development, Keeper of Sadness gives voice to the pain that lays dormant in the bellies of so many Black Women ignored throughout history. Keeper of Sadness is a multidisciplinary evening-length immersive dance work that integrates innovative VR/AR technology, classical and contemporary dance and activism to explore and bring to the forefront the transgenerational effects of trauma, imposed stereotypes and erasure of the Black women's contributions to the existence of so many others.