Join choreographer Tere O’Connor for a conversation about his most recent feature-length work titled The Lace with dance historian and theorist Clare Croft. Their conversation will be followed by a Q & A led by Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Curator of Campus Arts Research, Krannert Art Museum and the Office for Arts Integration. This event is presented alongside the exhibition Degrees of Archive: contemporary art and the shape of history on view at Krannert Art Museum (February 4–July 3, 2027).
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Tere O’Connor has created over forty works for his dance company and toured these throughout the US, Europe, South America and Canada. He has created numerous commissioned works for other dance companies, including the Lyon Opera Ballet, and White Oak Dance Project, and solo works for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jean Butler, among others.
O’Connor has received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and was United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, among numerous other grants and awards. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project, The MAP Fund, and many others. He has received three “BESSIES,” New York Dance and Performance Awards. In October 2014, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
O’Connor is an active participant in the New York dance community mentoring young artists, teaching, writing, and volunteering in various capacities. An articulate and provocative educator, O’Connor has taught at festivals and universities around the globe for thirty years. He is a Center for Advanced Studies Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2006 and a longtime faculty member at Movement Research. He splits his time between Champaign and New York. In December 2025, O’Connor and his company presented Construct a Guy, a revival of the first solo he ever made, and a new work entitled The Lace, at New York Live Arts. This program will continue touring through spring 2028.
Clare Croft is a dance historian and theorist, as well as a dramaturg, curator, and dancer. Croft is the author of Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life and the editor of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, both published by Duke University Press in October 2024. Croft is also the editor of the book and website Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), a collection of essays by scholars and artists, which will be republished in an expanded form in 2026. In connection to this volume, Croft also curates the EXPLODE: queer dance festival, which began as a series of performances in Ann Arbor, and has since toured to New York, Chicago, and California. Clare’s first book, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford, 2015), was a study of the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. Croft is the founder and curator of Daring Dances, a curatorial initiative based in southeast Michigan, that focuses on how dance—both watching it and making it—can help people find their ways toward sometimes difficult, yet necessary conversations. Croft is Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan.
This event is supported by the Frances P. Rohlen Fund and the School of Art & Design Visitor Series.
Krannert Art Museum acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
