Meet the 2024-25 Bowen Award Recipients!

We are delighted to announce two recipients for Dance for PD's 2024-25 Lucy Bowen Award for Inclusive Choreography, an annual award that aims to support choreographers who want to create new dance projects in collaboration with and publicly performed by people living with Parkinson’s.

About Maïté Guérin

Maïté Guérin is the first Dance for PD certified teacher in Belgium, where she collaborated with neurologist Olivier Bouquiaux to create Kinésiphilia, a series of classes and dance performance projects for people living with Parkinson’s and their care partners. From this experience, Maïté and Olivier founded the Fit Your Mind Association, which offers accessible sports-based and artistic activities for people with neurological disorders, including Care to Dance designed for people living with Parkinson’s. Guérin’s project, What if, is an intergenerational dance film that will portray the emergence of five relationships between a person living with Parkinson’s disease and a child or young adult. Throughout the film, the camera will capture the danced encounter between these protagonists. 

About Hrishikesh Pawar

Hrishikesh Pawar is the first Dance for PD certified teacher in India, where he has been leading classes in partnership with the Sancheti Clinic in Pune for 15 years. Pawar is the Artistic Director of the Centre for Contemporary Dance, an organization dedicated to contemporary dance training, research, and community outreach since 2008. Pawar studied Kathak with Pt. Rohini Bhate and was a guest student in the Dance Teaching Program at the prestigious Palucca Hochschule in Dresden, Germany. Pawar’s project, called Rhythms of Resilience, aims to celebrate the power of movement and music in fostering resilience and well-being among individuals living with Parkinson's disease through both live performance in Pune and a documentary produced in tandem with the rehearsal and performance process. 

INTERZONE premieres next month

The 2023-24 Bowen Award-funded project INTERZONE, choreographed by Katie Elliott, artistic director of 3rd Law Dance/Theater, will premiere this November at Swoon Art House in Boulder, CO. At the core of Elliott's project is the concept that art is not as much about the specific bodies chosen to perform, so much as it is about the conceptual work that can individually and collectively generate an innovative, tangible, and accessible idea. To see a trailer for the project, please click here.

About the Bowen Award

Dance for PD's annual Lucy Bowen Award for Inclusive Choreography offers grants towards the creation and performance of original works of choreography developed in collaboration with and publicly performed by people living with Parkinson's.

The award honors the ongoing work of choreographer and Dance for PD certified teacher Lucy Bowen McCauley, whose artistic vision always placed community engagement front and center. As the Artistic Director of Bowen McCauley Dance for 25 years, Bowen McCauley created a vast repertoire of work, ranging from lyrical ballets to highly physical contemporary pieces set to rock music. This award is made possible by the generous financial support of Lucy and a community of donors who support this initiative and the Bowen Fund for Growth, which provides microgrants to launch new Dance for PD programs around the world.

Previous Bowen Award recipients include Valeria Solomonoff (New York City), Robin Dekkers (Berkeley, CA) and Katie Elliott (Boulder, CO). 

For more information and to see the work of previous recipients, please click below.