Will Rawls joins the faculty of UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
UCLA Arts welcomes a new member to the faculty of the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance: associate professor Will Rawls.
Will Rawls is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses choreography, dance, video, sculpture, works on paper and installation. He is best-known for his choreographic work that employs repetition to explore the limits of language and gesture as tools for staging performances of Black presence and becoming..
In 2020-2021, Rawls held an appointment as the UC Regents Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance, and in 2022 he was a Lecturer in the Department of Art’s New Genres area.
Rawls’ His new work, [siccer], will premiere at The Momentary in 2023 and continue on a five-city national tour to Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, On the Boards, MCA Chicago and The Kitchen in NYC.
Rawls’ prior multi-part installation at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Everlasting Stranger (2021), consisted of performances, a stop-motion animation, wall paintings, and nylon sculptures. He has also presented work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, Performa 15, Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory Theater, High Line Art, REDCAT, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and the Hessel Museum at Bard College.
He has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Alpert Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Mellon Foundation, United States Artists, the Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, MAP Fund, the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Movement Research and several universities and museums.
In 2016, Rawls co-curated Lost and Found—six weeks of performances at Danspace Project that addressed the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS on dancers, women, and people of color. He lectures widely in academic and community contexts and his writing has been published by the Hammer Museum, MoMA, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Dancing While Black Journal, Brooklyn Rail and Artforum. Rawls graduated with a bachelor’s in art history from Williams College.
“I am thrilled to join the unique and esteemed faculty of UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance, and to join and shape a curriculum that offers diverse and dynamic approaches to choreography, dance and writing. The department is in a moment of growth and change and it feels really right to join these colleagues in this activity now,” said Rawls upon his appointment. “Based on prior teaching experiences in both WAC/D and the art department at UCLA, the school student body is urgently committed to innovative and socially-minded work. It's been an honor to encounter them. I look forward to conducting my research with and alongside their brilliant minds at the intersection of performance, writing and visual media. Over the years, I have been lucky to meet L.A. artists whose practices I now look forward to experiencing and supporting in close proximity, and to find a place for my work here.”
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