Shamel Pitts (Brooklyn, NY), a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, is a performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, director, and teacher. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Pitts began his dance training at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at The Ailey School. He is a first prize winner in The National Arts Competition from YoungArts. Pitts went on to receive his BFA in dance from The Juilliard School and was awarded the Martha Hill Award for excellence in dance. He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance and BJM_Danse Montreal. Pitts danced with Batsheva Dance Company for seven years under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin and is a certified teacher of Gaga movement language. Pitts has created a triptych of award-winning performances, with his multidisciplinary arts collective TRIBE, known as his “BLACK series,” as well as their newly emerging “RED series”, which has toured extensively to many festivals & performance spaces around the world since 2016. He is an adjunct professor at The Juilliard School, a guest faculty member at Princeton University, New York University, Wesleyan University and has been an artist in residence at Harvard University. He is the recipient of a Princess Grace Award in Choreography, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Choreography, Doris Duke Artist Award Recipient, Knight Choreography Prize Winner, a Jacob’s Pillow artist-in-residence, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Shamel Pitts | TRIBE has been artist in residence at 92Y Harkness Dance Center and at New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Creative Residency.

Learn more at shamelpitts.com.