JILL SIGMAN is a queer interdisciplinary artist and agent of change whose work exists at the intersection of dance, visual art, and social practice. She founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to think about pressing social issues through the body. In 2016, she developed Body Politic, a program of workshops, trainings, and performance laboratories to ask salient political questions somatically, and in 2022 she initiated a Social Justice Movement Lab for artist-activists. Working with things we cast off such as “garbage” and “weeds”, Sigman helps us to re-imagine our relationships with the natural world and each other in meaningful and empathic ways. Sigman has created community by building site-specific structures out of waste, dancing in public spaces, food sharing, and tea serving, and has partnered with activists, legal advocates, janitors, anthropologists, and farmers. Since 2022, she has been developing Re-Seeding, a multi-year project that investigates living as a non-Indigenous person on occupied land.
Sigman has been the first Gibney Dance Community Action Artist in Residence; a Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography; a Distinguished Guest Artist at the University of San Francisco Performing Arts & Social Justice program; a resident artist at Movement Research, Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology (Mexico), The Kri Foundation (India), and The Rauschenberg Residency; and a Choreographic Fellow at the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research at NYU. Her work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Bay and Paul Foundations, NYFA, NYSCA, LMCC, and other cultural funders. She is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University. Sigman was born and raised in south Brooklyn.
Photo by Jan Mun.
Global Performance + Sound Lab 