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Michelle Ellsworth, college professor of distinction, is an artist whose work 鈥榙efies easy categorization,鈥� except that it is important, critics say

Michelle Ellsworth is a dancer first and foremost, but her art encompasses more than dance. As The New York Times noted in 2018, 鈥渉er eccentric and marvelously original art defies easy categorization.鈥澨�

But one categorization is beyond dispute: Ellsworth is one of four faculty members at the University of Colorado Boulder to be named a 2020 College Professor of Distinction.听

The other winners are Elspeth Dusinberre of classics, and Pieter Johnson and Katharine N. Suding of ecology and evolutionary biology.听

Citing her discomfort with being in a figurative spotlight, Ellsworth hesitated to speak at length, but in response to the question of how she responded to winning this award, she gave this response:

鈥淚 got that award? No way. How? Amazing. Grateful, unworthy, tired, pleased, honored, and totally sure I wouldn't have gotten it without the support of my colleagues.鈥�

Erika Randall, a fellow dancer and chair of the CU Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance, had a bit more to say about Ellsworth鈥檚 art:

鈥淵our first impulse might be to read Ellsworth鈥檚 work as silly or irreverent, but it is in fact a deeply sophisticated social critique of contemporary values,鈥� Randall said. 鈥淲ith the COVID 19 crisis, the prescience of her work is even more obvious.鈥� 听

鈥淪he challenges our assumptions about capacity, consumption, community, confinement and dance. Ellsworth is an interdisciplinary bender of forms. More than any other dance artist working in the United States (and perhaps the world), she has exploded what we think of as dance and what we think a dance can do.鈥�

Randall said evidence of Ellsworth鈥檚 鈥渞each and transformative impact鈥� on the art form is the fact that many of her works don鈥檛 even look like 鈥渄ance,鈥� and involve deep collaborations with scientists and computer scientists.听

鈥淚n all of her work, the centrality of the body is inescapable, and its impact on its environment and the environment's impact on it ... are always at the core.鈥�

In the COVID-19 era, Ellsworth鈥檚 work has drawn a spike in attention. Her 鈥溾�� made nine years ago and focused on Skype tips, has garnered 6,000 views because of its relevance in the age of Zoom, Randall said.听

A listing of awards that Ellsworth has won runs more than four pages on her curriculum vitae, and ranges from a prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award to being a co-principal investigator on a $1.1 million National Science Foundation grant for 鈥淚ntegrating Physical Computing and Data Science in Movement Based Learning.鈥�

In a 2019 review of Ellsworth鈥檚 work 鈥�,鈥� a critic in Art in America offered this assessment:听

鈥淓llsworth has somehow squeezed an unreasonable amount of late capitalism鈥檚 extant anxieties into one of the most affecting performances I鈥檝e seen in years. 鈥楾he Rehearsal Artist鈥� made visible a century鈥檚 worth of social accelerants stoking the Anthropocene, all in the time it takes most of us to get to our jobs. It is鈥擨 say this with sincerity鈥攁n important work.鈥�

Her newest work, 鈥淓vidence of Labor鈥� is described this way: 鈥淓llsworth works with motion capture and AI or machine learning to make a work that functions live or on-line where Ellsworth interacts in real-time with a GAN generated version of themself (a GAN is a generative adversarial network, which is a kind of artificial intelligence that learns how to independently create content).鈥澨�

The work is described as part critique of computer science (can AI really capture the nature of a fugitive dance?) and part immortality machine or mortality cure (can a GAN keep a dancer dancing indefinitely?).鈥澨�

Ellsworth says, 鈥淓vidence of Labor鈥� takes her long-standing collaboration with computer science 鈥渋nto the realm of machine learning and ontological speculation.鈥�

For more on Michelle Ellsworth, visit .听

The newly named professors of distinction will give presentations on their research and scholarly work in spring 2021. Details about those presentations are coming.