Amy O'Neal
Photo credit: Gabriel Bienczycki
Amy O’Neal (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator merging contemporary and street dance. A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography, she has created and toured nine critically acclaimed evening-length works nationally and internationally and countless shorter works for concert dance, music video, dance film, virtual reality, weddings, flashmobs, and experimental performance in black boxes, galleries, nightclubs, warehouses, basements, and streets.
From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, a dance/music/video performance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she creates dance experiences merging practices and values of hip hop, house dance, and experimental performance.
She is a practicing guest of Black social dance culture participating in clubbing, sessions, battles, and advocacy. Along with dani tirrell, she co-founded the House dance classes and open session at The Beacon: Massive Monkees Studio in 2014 and co-organized Seattle House Dance Project, the first multi day House dance event in Seattle in 2017.
O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, among others. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/Impulstanz scholar, a Kennedy Center Social Impact Residency Artist, Visiting Dance Innovator at Harvard, and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts where she was recognized as Distinguished Alumni in 2014. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 as part time lecturer and works between LA and Seattle. She is the Executive/Artistic director of Hybrid Dance Lab, a research/performance platform for street dance artists to experiment in the theater context, address the creative process of hybridity, and nurture cultural literacy.
