BERNARD J. BROWN 

BERNARD BROWN is a Los Angeles-based performing artist, choreographer, filmmaker, educator, and arts activist working at the crossroads of Blackness, Queerness, and belonging. As artistic director of Bernard Brown/bbmoves, a social justice dance theater company, he choreographs for stage, specific sites, film, and opera which has been presented across Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe, including REDCAT (LA) On The Boards (Seattle), Centre de Developpment Choregraphique La Termitierre (Ouagadougou), Seoul International Dance Festival in Tank, Dance Camera West, American Dance Festival’s ADF Movies by Movers, Oscar-qualifying African Diaspora Cinema Festival (Italy), The Getty, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Royce Hall. Brown has developed work in residencies with The Music Center, Johns Hopkins University, Dance Italia, and B Street Theater. 

For nearly 3 decades, Brown has toured with and performed the choreography of leaders of the dance field including Lula Washington Dance Theatre, David Rousseve/REALITY,  Donald McKayle, Rennie Harris, Rudy Perez, Pat Taylor, Doug Elkins, Janessa Clark, and Lucinda Childs, to name a few. By invitation, he has joined casts of productions like the Kennedy Center’s Masters of African American Choreography, Los Angeles Opera’s AIDA, and Robert Wilson’s Letter to a Man with Mikhail Baryshnikov. 

As a sought-after educator, Brown has conducted workshops and master classes internationally, namely in Israel, Burkina Faso, Panama, Korea, and Brazil, and across the US for institutions such as UCLA, Northwestern University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, and LA Commons, sharing his inclusive pedagogy across multiple communities. He is a core member of Street Dance Activism and an ongoing collaborator with Dancing Through Prison Walls, an abolitionist project. His activism has been featured in Dance Magazine, the Los Angeles, and New York Times. A first-generation college graduate, he is an Assistant Professor of Dance at University of California, San Diego (with previous appointments at Loyola Marymount University and Sacramento State University), a Certified Katherine Dunham Technique Instructor, and currently a California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow. The Los Angeles Times has called him “…the incomparable Bernard Brown…”