Dance Professor Awarded NC Choreographic Fellowship by Trillium Arts

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Assistant Professor of Dance Ashley Tate is one of three choreographers to receive a 2025-26 North Carolina Choreographic Fellowship from Trillium Arts. The two-week fellowship will provide Tate and a group of four dancers with financial support, lodging and studio space at the Trillium Arts campus in Mars Hill, North Carolina, in June 2026.

“Trillium Arts is honored to support these artists whose diverse works reflect a broad range of dance artistry in North Carolina,” said Trillium Arts President Phil Reynolds in a press release. “The 2025-2026 Awardees were selected as Trillium’s NCCF Fellows due to their excellent artistry and also because their projects are inspired by vitally important contemporary issues.”

Tate will use the time to further develop a work that she began to choreograph before she came to UNC Charlotte. The piece, titled “Hazel,” was first imagined during her time living in her hometown of St. Louis amid the isolation of the pandemic. She said she was struck by the lack of accessible green space in her historically Black neighborhood, a daily reminder to her of the inequities that shape who has access to safe, healthy environments.

“There were no places to walk, to breathe, to just be outside. It made environmental racism feel devastatingly close – not theoretical, but embodied.”

That experience deepened her interest in environmental justice, a passion further ignited when longtime collaborator Joan Lipkin introduced her to the work of Hazel M. Johnson, an activist from the South Side of Chicago who is known as the “Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement.”

“This woman is so important,” Tate said. “She confronted environmental harm in her own backyard and turned it into a movement. Her legacy is powerful, and we should all know who she is.”

Tate started creating a dance work inspired by Johnson, with Lipkin serving as dramaturg. An early iteration was performed in St. Louis in 2021.

Dancer in Ashley Tate's piece, "Hazel."
Dancer Asia Glenn in Ashley Tate’s “Hazel” in 2021. Photo by Peter Wochniak.

“We planted the seeds,” she said, “but the pandemic limited what was possible at the time, both creatively and logistically.”

Tate is excited, therefore, to have the opportunity to further develop the work while surrounded by the mountains of western North Carolina. “The natural setting will serve as both contrast and catalyst, deepening our connection to land while amplifying the voices of communities most impacted by environmental harm.’

As she expands the work, Tate said she will prepare it for presentations both on the concert stage and in alternative – and likely outdoor – venues. She is also exploring thematic connections to history in North Carolina, where the environmental justice movement began in Warren County in 1982.

Tate’s research centers on how African Diasporic dance education, practice, and performance function as pathways for social justice. She has presented her research at multiple conferences and conventions, including the European Hip Hop Studies Network Conference in Cork, Ireland, and the Dance Studies Association Conference in Washington, D.C. At UNC Charlotte, her teaching is focused on Hip-Hop and jazz dance techniques, but the work she will create at Trillium, which blends styles, will allow Tate to also draw upon her contemporary/contemporary ballet dance training.

“I’m looking forward to the time and space to continue developing myself professionally, and my craft,” she said. “To reconnect with my artistry.”

Top image: Ashley Tate performing in the 2024 Faculty Dance Concert. Photo by Kat Lawrence.