BAM Affiliation Jessica Lang is a choreographer and the artistic director of Jessica Lang Dance. Having established a reputation for concocting ingenious choreographic interactions between dancing bodies and the movements of striking set and costume pieces, Lang has been described as “a master of visual composition” (Dance Magazine). Since 1999, Lang has created more than 80 works on companies worldwide including Birmingham Royal Ballet, The National Ballet of Japan at the New National Theatre Tokyo, Joffrey Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Colorado Ballet, Ballet San Jose, Richmond Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Ailey II, ABT II, Hubbard Street 2, and New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute, among many others. American Ballet Theatre has presented her work at the Metropolitan Opera House, and she has received commissions from the Dallas Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum for its Works and Process series. For opera, Lang received outstanding acclaim for her directorial debut and choreography of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater at the 2013 Glimmerglass Opera Festival. Lang is the recipient of a prestigious 2014 Bessie Award. Her ballet Lyric Pieces, commissioned and performed by Birmingham Royal Ballet earned a nomination for a coveted 2013 Manchester Theatre Award in the UK. Lang has received numerous grants for her work on ballet companies from organizations including the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the NEA, and the Choo San Goh Foundation. Her receipt of a 2010 Joyce Theater Artist Residency supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation helped launch her own company, Jessica Lang Dance (JLD) in 2011. Since its inception, JLD has made rapid success performing at renowned venues and festivals throughout the country including Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, New York City Center's Fall for Dance Festival, the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, the Joyce Theater and the Winspear Opera House in Dallas, TX, among others. In 2014, Lang premiered Scape performed by JLD, commissioned by the Kennedy Center and the National Symphony Orchestra to John Adams' Violin Concerto and played live by violinist Leila Josefowicz with the NSO. With her strong belief in the importance of education, Lang's work also has been performed by numerous institutions including The Juilliard School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, The Ailey/Fordham BFA Program, Marymount Manhattan College, SUNY Purchase College, Southern Methodist University, Princeton University, University of Richmond, and Point Park University, among others. She is on faculty of American Ballet Theatre's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School as well as a teaching artist for the Make A Ballet program. Through her experience working with students for the past 15 years, Lang recently developed her own methodology called LANGuage, a unique creative curriculum that teaches individuals from all populations to cultivate the habit of creative thinking through exercise. Lang, a graduate of The Juilliard School under the direction of Benjamin Harkarvy, is a former member of Twyla Tharp's company, THARP!