The Doris Duke Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2024 Doris Duke Artist Awards, the largest prize in the United States specifically dedicated to individual performing artists. This year’s honorees are Nataki Garrett (theater), Shamel Pitts (dance), Acosia Red Elk (dance), esperanza spalding (jazz), Chay Yew (theater) and Miguel Zenón (jazz), each of whom is being awarded $525,000 in unrestricted funds and up to $25,000 in retirement funds.
The Doris Duke Artist Award was established in 2012 to unlock the power of creativity and to shape our society for the better. The award and associated programming are designed to create conditions in which artists can thrive. In addition to providing a cash prize, the foundation also gives the award winners support including professional development, financial planning and management services, enhanced networking and performance opportunities.
In conjunction with the 2024 Awards, the Doris Duke Foundation will further expand its support of the community of award winners, some of society’s greatest living theater, dance and jazz artists. In April, the foundation will host the first in a series of annual convenings in New York that will feature a marquee symposium about the future of the performing arts entitled “Creative Labor, Creative Conditions: A Symposium and Celebration of the Doris Duke Artist Awards” and will inaugurate an annual retreat for Doris Duke Artist awardees at Duke Farms, the foundation’s 2,700-acre environmental center.
The award program recognizes artists for their established record of achievement within the disciplines of contemporary dance, jazz and theater. The unrestricted nature of the award allows artists to use the funds for either personal or professional needs and enjoy the freedom to pursue projects of their choosing. Last year, the foundation doubled the amount of the award to signal the power of sustained support for individual performing artists and to celebrate the immense shared benefits to society when artists are invested in as whole people and as creative laborers. Including the 2024 recipients, the foundation to date has provided 135 artists with $38.8 million through the Doris Duke Artist Award program.
Doris Duke Foundation President and CEO Sam Gill said, “The Doris Duke Artist Award is more than an award—it is a platform to fight for the future of all performing artists. In illuminating the full range of human possibility, these six remarkable artists show us why that struggle is so important.”
Doris Duke Foundation Arts Program Director Ashley Ferro-Murray added, “With the 2024 Artist Awards, we are excited to introduce a platform to advocate and fight for the future of artists, including more opportunities for award winners such as the retreat at Duke Farms. This allows all award winners to come together to build community, exchange ideas and collaborate as they tackle some of the most pressing issues affecting artistic industries today.”
Chay Yew (New York, NY), a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, is a theater artist, playwright and stage director born in Singapore. He was artistic director of the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago from 2011 to 2020. Yew’s breakthrough work came from his early plays “Porcelain” and “A Language of Their Own,” which, along with “Wonderland,” make up what Yew calls the Whitelands Trilogy. His work has been produced all over the country including at the Public Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Manhattan Theatre Club, Long Wharf Theatre and La Jolla Playhouse. As a director, his credits include “Mojada,” “Oedipus el Rey,” Universes’ “Ameriville,” Pulitzer Prize finalist Kristina Wong’s “Sweatshop Overlord” and “Cambodian Rock Band,” one of the 10 most produced plays of the 2019-2020 season. During his tenure as artistic director at Victory Gardens, 18 plays received world premieres, two went to Broadway and four were produced off-Broadway. Under his artistic leadership, Yew instituted an intentional focus on work that valued and celebrated the diversity of Chicago and the nation. For his plays, he has received the London Fringe Award for best playwright and best play, the George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award and a GLAAD Media Award.
Nataki Garrett (Oakland, CA), a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, is widely recognized as an innovative and influential artist and arts leader. She is the former executive artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the former acting artistic director of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently co-artistic director of One Nation/One Project, leading their national arts and health initiative #ArtsforEveryBody. She is also the CEO of Ladder Leadership Services. Across her career, she has fostered and developed new work for the stage and award-winning work for the screen—Garrett’s vision is to support artists; to manifest innovation; to inspire creativity and to ensure the future of performing arts by centering artists as thought leaders and change makers who transform culture. Garrett co-created the Professional Non-profit Theater Coalition to advocate to ensure that nonprofit nonprofit arts organizations were included in the Small Business Administration’s Shuttered Venue Operators Grant during the pandemic. Garrett conceived the award winning interactive and immersive digital platform O! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and created QuillsFest – intersecting extended reality (XR) and theater in a virtual festival setting. She executive produced 71 films and XR projects through 10 QuillsFest programs including the Visual Sovereignty Project, which focused on producing XR projects and films about Indigenous sovereignty, and You Go Girl, which received a Sundance Award in 2022. She is the recipient of the Ammerman Award for directing in 2019, a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship and the 2005 Theater Communications Group/National Endowment for the Arts Career Fellowship for Directors.
Shamel Pitts (Brooklyn, NY), a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, is a performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, directorand teacher. Born in Brooklyn, Pitts began his dance training at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at The Ailey School. He is a first prize winner in The National Arts Competition from YoungArts. Pitts went on to receive his BFA in dance from The Juilliard School and was awarded the Martha Hill Award for excellence in dance.He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance and BJMDanse Montreal. Pitts danced with Batsheva Dance Company for seven years under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin and is a certified teacher of Gaga movement language. Pitts has created a triptych of award-winning multidisciplinary performances with his arts collective TRIBE, known as his “BLACK series,” which has toured extensively to many festivals around the world since 2016. He is an adjunct professor at The Juilliard School, a guest faculty member at Princeton University, New York University and Wesleyan University, and has been an artist in residence at Harvard University. He is the recipient of a Princess Grace Award in choreography, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, a Jacob’s Pillow artist-in-residence and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Acosia Red Elk (Pendleton, OR) is an enrolled member of the Umatilla Tribe from the northeastern Oregon territory and a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient. She is a 10-time World Champion Jingle Dancer and world-renowned performing artist. She is also an international yoga instructor, snowboarder, glass artist, cultural teacher and wellness advocate. She is known for public speaking and storytelling, tribal dance performance, indigenizing fitness, teaching yoga through a tribal lens and instructing powwow dance to tribal youth across Turtle Island. Acosia travels the world performing and sharing cultural knowledge, movement and meditation. She is passionate about using yoga and universal movement as a way to heal from historical and intergenerational trauma. She created Powwow/Yoga, a fusion practice that braids together tribal dancing and yoga for a well-rounded workout with an Indigenous approach to wellness. Acosia leads classes with a seventh generation approach, teaching that all actions should be taken with a sustainable mindset to protect what is sacred. She is an advocate for health and wellness and encourages all people on earth to recognize the Indigenous knowledge within them so that they can continue to build bridges and protect earth’s resources for future generations.
esperanza spalding (Portland, OR), a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, is a jazz artist trained and initiated in the North American jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves various combinations of instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land stewardship and artist-sanctuary custodianship. She co-founded and co-directs Prismid Inc., a nonprofit that creates and stewards artist residency, performanceand workshop space in Portland. spalding continues to collaborate and perform in new productions of “…(Iphigenia),” an opera written by Wayne Shorter, for which she wrote the libretto and co-produced its 2021-2022 premieres. spalding is developing a mockumentary in collaboration with brontë velez and the San Francisco Symphony, and researching and developing liberation rituals in jazz and Black dance. Through the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, spalding is continuing a lifelong collaboration with practitioners in various fields relating to sound, healing and cognition to develop music with enhanced therapeutic potential. The first jazz artist to be recognized with the Grammy for best new artist, spalding has received four other Grammys, most recently for best jazz vocal album in 2020 and 2022.
Miguel Zenón (New York, NY), a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient. is a jazz artist who represents a select group of musicians who have masterfully balanced and blended the often-contradictory poles of innovation and tradition. Widely considered as one of the most groundbreaking and influential saxophonists and composers of his generation, he has also developed a unique voice as a conceptualist, concentrating his efforts on perfecting a fine mix between jazz and his many musical influences. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Zenón has built a distinguished career as a leader and has released 16 albums under his own name. In addition, he has honed his artistic identity by collaborating with both established jazz masters and the music’s younger innovators, irrespective of style and genre. Zenón has toured or recorded with artists including the SFJAZZ Collective, Charlie Haden and Doris Duke Artists Fred Hersch and Danilo Perez. He has given hundreds of lectures and master classes worldwide and serves as a faculty member in the music and theater arts department at MIT. In 2011, Zenón founded Caravana Cultural, a program that presents free-of-charge jazz concerts in rural areas of Puerto Rico.
For more information about the Doris Duke Artist Awards, visit dorisdukeartistawards.org.
Backstage Pass with Lia Chang 