JURY 2019
Saara Turunen (FI)
Saara Turunen. Photo: Carl Bergman.
The chair of the 2019 jury, Saara Turunen is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning author, playwright and director. Much of her work examines the themes of art, identity and social norms.
Turunen is known for her two highly acclaimed novels, Love/Monster (2015) and The Bystander (2018), but also for her work in theatre. Her plays have garnered brilliant reviews, and have been translated into numerous languages and performed all around the world. Turunen was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize in 2015, and the Finland Prize in 2016, both high-profile awards given in Finland.
Daniel Brine (UK)
Daniel Brine. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.
Daniel Brine is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Norfolk & Norwich Festival Trust. The multi-artform, contemporary, international and audience-centred Festival takes place in Norwich and around Norfolk for 17 days each May. Year-round NNF delivers initiatives and projects including Festival Bridge building partnerships between schools and arts organisations across East England and Norfolk Open Studios celebrating the creative talents of the visual arts and crafts community in Norfolk.
Between 2012 and 2017 Daniel was Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Cambridge Junction, the contemporary arts centre where art meets life. Previously Daniel has been Artistic Director and CEO of Performance Space (2009-2011), Australia’s leading organisation for the development and presentation of interdisciplinary arts and Associate Director of the Live Art Development Agency (2001-2008) supporting the development of live art practices and critical discourses in the UK and internationally.
Thomas F. DeFrantz (US)
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Dance at Duke University and specializes in African diaspora aesthetics, dance historiography, and the intersections of dance and technology. DeFrantz runs the research group SLIPPAGE at Duke University, a group that works to create innovative interfaces for the telling of alternative histories. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
DeFrantz is edited many publications, of which Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance received the CHOICE award for Outstanding Academic Publication and the 2003 Errol Hill Award presenting by the American Society for Theater Research. He has published extensively, with his monograph Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture receiving the 2004 de la Torre Bueno Prize for outstanding publication in Dance. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. DeFrantz has acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture. His ceative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty, fastDANCEpast and reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW.
Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice.