Biography: Bill Evans

Modern

Bill Evans is active internationally as a choreographer for modern, ballet and tap dance companies, and he performs solo concerts regularly. He was choreographer and artistic director of the Bill Evans Dance Company, based primarily in Seattle and then Albuquerque, from 1975 through 2004. (The company worked full-time for eight years, after which it worked on a project basis.) BEDC performed in all 50 states and was among the most-booked companies in the country for several years under the Dance Touring and Artist-in-the-Schools Programs of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). He founded the Evans Rhythm Tap Ensemble, which he still directs on a project basis, in 1992. For seven years, he was a dancer, choreographer and artistic coordinator for Utah’s Repertory Dance Theatre, and he serves now on RDT’s advisory board. For two years, he was artistic director and then choreographer in residence of Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers and its professional training program, where he is now a permanent guest artist.

He has choreographed more than 200 works for more than sixty professional dance companies throughout the world and been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous grants and fellowships from the NEA, and more than seventy other awards from public and private arts agencies in the U.S. and Canada. He received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and two Bravo Awards for Excellence in Dance from the Albuquerque Arts Alliance. He was named Scholar/Artist of the year by the National Dance Association in 1997 and was awarded the National Dance Education Organization Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. 

An article about his national impact was featured in the October, 2003 issue of Dance Magazine. He was voted one of the three top American tap dance artists (with Savion Glover and Brenda Bufalino) in the 2004 Dance Magazine Readers Poll. His book, Reminiscences of a Dancing Man: a Photographic Journey of a Life in Dance, was published in November, 2005. 

He earned an MFA from the University of Utah and is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst. He has been a professor of dance at the Universities of Utah, Washington, Indiana and New Mexico, where he is now professor emeritus. He is currently serving as a guest artist in residence at the State University of New York College at Brockport Department of Dance. He is artistic director of the annual Bill Evans Dance Intensives, founded in 1977, and the Evans Technique Certification Program, both currently in residence at SUNY Brockport.