raja.png

Raja
Feather
Kelly

Dance

About

Raja Feather Kelly (New Jersey and New York) is a dance artist and serves as the artistic director of dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory (TF3T), which he founded in 2009.

Kelly’s work blends dance, theatre and media to explore popular culture and ethnography. His work has garnered numerous prestigious honors, including three Princess Grace awards, a Creative Capital Award, a National Dance Project Production Grant, and Dance Magazine’s inaugural Harkness Promise Award as well as a Bessie and Obie Award. He has been honored with the Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography, an ImPulsTanz Festival DanceWEB Scholarship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship. Notably, he was named the 2022-23 Quinn Martin Director at the University of California San Diego, the 2023-24 Tow Playwright-in-Residence at Soho Rep, and Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts in 2019-20.

Kelly is currently a Princeton Arts Fellow at Princeton University and has held teaching positions at universities nationwide including Princeton, Yale University, The Juilliard School, and New York University, among others. He was born in Fort Hood, Texas, holds a B.A. in Dance and Poetry from Connecticut College, and earned a certificate as an Ecker Fellow in Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.