Adam Weinert

Adam is a New York City native as well as a dancer, choreographer, and media artist. He has danced with The Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company, The Mark Morris Dance Group, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and Christopher Williams, and for four years served as the Artistic Associate to Jonah Bokaer. In 2008, he founded In Situ Arts, a non-profit organization with a mission to develop, nurture, and support works of contemporary performance that challenge preconceived frameworks for interpreting and experiencing art. He began his training at The School of American Ballet, and continued to Vassar College and The Juilliard School before coming to Gallatin.

When looking at graduate schools, he looked for a program which could allow him to bring together his interests in performance, digital technology, and arts activism. Gallatin has provided him access to the various colleges of NYU—as well as New York City—and this access has helped him approach his areas of interest from multiple angles while maintaining a high degree of both theoretical and practical excellence. In addition to the hands-on and pragmatic training Gallatin offers, the School supports a multifaceted approach to the more humanitarian aspects of scholarly research. Adam studied with Professor Matthew Aaron Gregory in his Proseminar: Works in Progress, which explored the creative process from a number of different perspectives. Understanding Social Enterprise, a course taught by Professor Andrew Greenblatt in the Reynolds Program, and the course Performa taught by Steinhardt professor RoseLee Goldberg were also highlights of his first year of graduate study.

His thesis project, "The Reaccession of Ted Shawn," is on display at the Museum of Modern Art as a digital exhibition. Creating the work involved remounting a number of solos choreographed in the 1930s by the dance pioneer and choreographer and installing them with the use of Augmented Reality, a technology which allows the user to discover video layers or 3-D animated characters on printed material and spaces. “Shawn was a champion of new technology in his day,” says Adam. “I wanted to bring his legacy into the 21st Century and challenge the dynamics for how dance is presented in museums, which stories are told, and who gets to be seen.”