UCLA Distinguished Professor David Roussève to Deliver 2025 UCLA Arts Commencement Address
Choreographer, director, filmmaker, performer, and Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance (WACD) Distinguished Professor David Roussève will deliver the commencement address at the 2025 UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts) commencement ceremony on Saturday, June 14.
Roussève is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellow. He has taught choreography at UCLA since 1996. For UCLA Arts, Roussève has served as associate dean (2014–15), acting dean (2015), and interim dean (2015–17).
“I'm thrilled to be delivering the commencement address in my last year as a distinguished professor at UCLA,” Roussève said. “Speaking to students about completing one leg of their journey and beginning the next feels particularly meaningful—because I'm doing the same myself. In many ways, regardless of age, I hope to always be a student, and I realize that the advice I’m giving to students is also advice I’m giving to myself as we all begin this next chapter.”
His dance/theater company, REALITY, has performed across the United Kingdom, Europe, South America, and the U.S., including four commissioned works for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Among others, his commissions include the Houston Ballet, Ballet Hispánico, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Dancing Wheels, Atlanta Ballet, and Ilkhom Theatre Company of Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
In 2017, Roussève choreographed Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars for director Anne Bogart, the SITI Company, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as Enough? for the San Francisco duet company RAWdance—a work that explores whether dance can address social movements like Black Lives Matter. In June 2018, Enough? was performed by the Lula Washington Dance Theatre at The Ford.
In 2018, Roussève premiered Halfway to Dawn, an evening-length work by REALITY. The piece explores the life of Billy Strayhorn, a gay, intensely private African American jazz composer and longtime Duke Ellington collaborator. Halfway to Dawn debuted at REDCAT in Los Angeles before embarking on an international tour from 2019 to 2021, with performances at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, and the Festival Internacional de Artes Escénicas in Panama City. Roussève is currently developing DaddyAF, his first full-evening solo in 25 years, set to premiere this fall. The interdisciplinary work is an intimate mediation on life’s purpose, created and performed by a queer African American acutely aware of the finite time he has left on the planet.
Roussève has created four short films, most recent of which screened at 56 festivals across 11 countries, earning 10 awards, including four for “Best Film.” His other accolades include a Bessie Award, a Creative Capital Fellowship, three Horton Awards, the Herb Alpert Award in Dance, and seven consecutive National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships.
Roussève’s work has been published in collections by Bantam Press and Routledge Press. He was twice a Fellow in the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab and recently completed Stardust, a feature-length screenplay based on his dance/theater work of the same name. He plans to develop the screenplay into a feature film with longtime collaborator, videographer, editor, and WACD alum Cari Ann Shim Sham M.F.A. ‘09.
“It has been an immense pleasure to know David as a colleague and friend over the past 20 years,” said Lionel Popkin, interim dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. “His unwavering commitment to art, social justice, education, and community—along with his unparalleled work ethic—have long inspired me. David leads by example, always demanding the best of himself and encouraging the same in others. As he retires from UCLA, I will miss him dearly as a colleague, but I look forward with great anticipation to the next chapter of his artistic journey. I invited him to deliver this year’s commencement address because I am certain he will meet the moment with his characteristic wisdom, courage, and humor.”
Details:
- Saturday, June 14 at 4 p.m.
- Dickson Court North (Perloff Quad)
- For more information about the 2025 UCLA Arts commencement ceremony, visit the school’s commencement website.
Header image: Portrait of Distinguished Professor David Roussève teaching. (Rose Eichenbaum)
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