Marta Renzi

Marta Renzi has made more than 75 dances for her Project Company, as well as creating work for groups across the U.S. and abroad, including the Wagon Train Project in Nebraska, Balletteatro in Portugal - and Ben & Jerry's dancing ice cream flavors. Her site-specific pieces in locations such as the Guggenheim Museum, Union Station and the Staten Island Ferry, led naturally to her work in video and film. In 1981 You Little Wild Heart, to music by Bruce Springsteen, was Marta's first half-hour for PBS, followed by Mountainview, made in 1989 in collaboration with indie filmmaker John Sayles, featuring Jane Alexander. As part of a continuing commitment to making dance accessible to a wide audience, Renzi helped inaugurate the "Inside/Out" program of public performances at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, and her Project Company frequently appeared for free outdoors in public spaces. Since 2005 Marta has self-produced over three dozen short videodances, which have been presented at over 300 festivals nationally and internationally. Her debut feature film Her Magnum Opus was released in 2017. Retrospectives of her film work have been screened at BAAD! in the Bronx, at Rivertown Films in Nyack; at Compartimiento Cinematografico in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; at University College Cork, Ireland and at the Rockland Center for the Arts. In 1992, Marta received a New York Dance & Performance Award (a "Bessie") for her dance Vital Signs, and in 1995 was the first recipient of a Dancing in the Streets award as "a fearless explorer of all manner of unconventional sites, integrating art into everyday life." She was a 2013 Bogliasco fellow at the Liguria Study Center for Arts & Humanities and received a 2015 CSA grant from Rivertown Artists Workshop. In fall of 2019 she was selected as one of the inaugural artists to be awarded a “Mabel Residency” at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown, Rhode Island, during which she created the short film Through Mabel’s Eyes. Marta has served on the Board of Advisors for the New York Foundation for the Arts and was a consultant for the New England Foundation for the Arts' program "Building Community Through Culture." From 2010-18 she served on the Board of Directors of Dance Films Association, a 65-year-old member-supported institution based in NYC which has presented the Dance on Camera Festival for over 45 years. Renzi has taught in Chile and Paraguay through the International Linkages program of the American Dance Festival and and is a seven-time recipient of Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been funded by the Jerome Foundation, Metropolitan Life, Con Edison and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. In August of 2008, Renzi presented a new quartet as part of "Through a Choreographer's Eyes", curated by Martha Myers at The Yard in Massachusetts, and returned for several years subsequently to present new work. In fall of 2022 she will create new work at Firkin Crane in Cork, Ireland with an international trio comprised of Anna Sedlackova (Bratislava); Selina Shida Hack (Berlin); and Tina Vasquez (Raleigh-Durham). During the pandemic Marta was particularly in demand, directing two dance film works for Newport-based Island Moving Co both of which aired on RI PBS, as well as directing a full-length Nutcracker for Coupe Dance Theater and creating the multiple-award-winning DANCING IS AN OLD FRIEND with Leah Barsky and Jenny Tortorello Walker. In pre-history, Marta performed with Douglas Dunn & Dancers, in David Gordon's PickUp Company, with Kei Takei's Moving Earth and with Twyla Tharp on the film of Hair. In theater she has collaborated with William Finn on In Trousers, Andre Gregory in The Primavera String Quartet Tonight! and with Cecil MacKinnon on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet performed with the Prokofiev score played live by the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra.