Bill T. Jones

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Research record

Bill T. Jones · Staged record CTL-P-0997 · Entity Depth Program · 626 words · Evidence grade: VERIFIED (canonical master, carried unchanged) · Researched 2026-10-25

Bill T. Jones enters this archive through a category most dance records never touch: he has won the Tony Award for Best Choreography twice, and the official Tony Awards winners record — the master verification source for this record, beginning with the 2007 ceremony — confirms the first of them, for Spring Awakening. The second came in 2010 for FELA!, the musical about Fela Kuti that Jones co-conceived, co-wrote, directed, and choreographed: a single production carrying four of his crafts at once. CultureTechLens's graph records both honors against his name. Between and around those bookends sits one of the most decorated careers in American concert dance.

Jones trained in classical ballet and modern dance at the State University of New York at Binghamton. In 1973 he co-founded the American Dance Asylum, an experimental collective; in 1982 he formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company with his late partner, the photographer and choreographer Arnie Zane, building a repertory company whose integrated casting and confrontational subjects — race, sexuality, illness, faith — redefined what an American dance company could say on stage. He serves as artistic director of New York Live Arts. The National Gallery of Art's program record lists the evening-length works that anchor the repertory: Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990), Still/Here (1994) — his meditation on survival and mortality, made in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic — Blind Date (2006), Chapel/Chapter (2006), Story/Time (2012), A Rite (2013), and Deep Blue Sea (2021).

The honors ledger, drawn from his Boston Symphony Orchestra profile and the institutions themselves, runs across four decades: a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1994; designation as an “Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” in 2000; Lucille Lortel Awards in 2006 for The Seven and again in 2022 for Black No More; election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009; Kennedy Center Honors and France's Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, both in 2010; the National Medal of Arts in 2013; a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2014; and the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award in 2016. The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery awarded him its Portrait of a Nation Prize in 2017; his portrait there, a 1985 photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, remains the foundation's copyrighted work, which is why this record carries no photograph — a point documented in this batch's photo pass. In 2022 he returned to the Tony ballot as a choreography nominee for Paradise Square, nearly three decades after the MacArthur and fifteen years after Spring Awakening: a working choreographer's record, still open.

Two stage works explain the Tony pair better than the awards list alone. Spring Awakening (2007) asked concert-dance vocabulary to carry a rock musical about repressed adolescents, and Jones's choreography — first honored with an Obie for the 2006 off-Broadway run — won the Tony when the production moved up. FELA! (2010) was the fuller demonstration: Jones co-conceived and co-wrote the book, directed the production, and choreographed it, building a theatrical Afrobeat engine around the music and defiance of Fela Kuti. The Boston Symphony profile's honors list, drawn on above, adds the frame those wins sit in — the same artist who made Still/Here in 1994, out of workshops with people living with life-threatening illness, was collecting choreography's commercial crown sixteen years later, and was still on the Tony ballot in 2022 for Paradise Square. Range of that order is why the graph carries him as a person rather than as a credit line on two shows. The company he built with Zane remains the repertory's vehicle, and the National Gallery program record that lists the evening-length works is itself a performance document — the dances are still staged, still touring, still the medium in which the honors were earned.

Sources for this record

• Winners — 2007 (official Tony Awards winners record) — Tony Awards
  Claims supported: Master verification source: Bill T. Jones won the Tony Award for Best Choreography in 2007 (Spring Awakening); the official record also carries his second win in 2010 (FELA!).
• Bill T. Jones (artist profile) — Boston Symphony Orchestra
  Claims supported: Choreographer, dancer, director, and writer; dance training at SUNY Binghamton in classical ballet and modern dance; co-founded American Dance Asylum (1973); formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company with Arnie Zane (1982); artistic director of New York Live Arts; Tony Awards for choreography 2007 and 2010; MacArthur Fellowship 1994; Kennedy Center Honors 2010; National Medal of Arts 2013; Doris Duke Performing Artist Award 2014; Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 2010; American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2009; HRC Visibility Award 2016; Lucille Lortel Awards 2006 and 2022; Tony nomination 2022 for Paradise Square; FELA! co-conceived, co-written, directed, and choreographed by Jones.
• Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (program record) — National Gallery of Art
  Claims supported: Evening-length repertory works: Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990), Still/Here (1994), Blind Date (2006), Chapel/Chapter (2006), Story/Time (2012), A Rite (2013), Deep Blue Sea (2021).
• Portrait of a Nation Prize Recipient: Bill T. Jones — Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
  Claims supported: Portrait of a Nation Prize, 2017; the Smithsonian portrait is Robert Mapplethorpe's 1985 photograph, held under the Mapplethorpe Foundation's copyright — the rights position documented in this batch's photo pass.

Citations

Published October 25, 2026, from the head-verified staged record in the Entity Depth Program (Batches 004–008). Source: CultureTechLens