David Brick

David Brick co-founded Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater with Amy Smith and Andrew Simonet in 1993. Over the next two decades, these three co-founders created over forty dances as Headlong, performing nationally and internationally at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, PICA's Time Based Art Festival, Mass MoCA, PS 122, Washington DC’s Dance Place, the Yale Festival of Arts and Ideas—among many others. Early in their collaboration, Headlong was awarded a Bessie in choreography for its production of Star Wars and Other Stories. 

Headlong’s work has been supported by an array of foundations and granting agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation MAP fund, The New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project, the Wyncote Foundation, The William Penn Foundation and the Pew Center for Arts and Culture. David has been awarded an Independence Foundation Fellowship, and together with Andrew Simonet and Amy Smith, he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. 

In 2008, David co-founded the Headlong Performance Institute, a training program for creating experimental performance. He directs the program and a constantly evolving curriculum that trains artists to research, create and embody performance worlds that grow from cultivating iterative artistic practices. David has also taught at the Volcano Conservatory in Toronto, the ‘Whenever, Wherever’ Festival in Tokyo, and with Ishmael Houston Jones at the American Dance Festival. He works extensively with artists’ residencies and offers ongoing open classes in Philadelphia. David has taught Dance Composition at Bryn Mawr College since 1998, and he serves as the mentor to artists every summer at The Yard as part of The Bessie Schonberg Choreographic Mentorship Residency. 

David collaborates broadly in creating performance, participatory events, and community. His experience of growing up as a hearing member of a Deaf family continually influences David’s understanding of human bodies as active manifestations of culture. His recent work includes a residency at Dance Place in Washington DC to work on Island of Signs—a performance that explored growing up in a family with two languages, one that was shared and one that was not. He shared this residence with Carolyn Brick, his 78-year old Deaf mother who attended nearby Gallaudet University and was featured in a 1959 documentary about her experience there. Even more recently, David directed a large-scale public art project called The Quiet Circus, which began with a 2012 Creative Artist Fellowship from the Japan-US Commission and concluded in 2017 after a 36-week run of public performances at Philadelphia’s Washington Avenue Pier. Quiet Circus brought together a network of artists and Philadelphia residents to create an inclusive work of art that welcomed public participation and trans-disciplinary creativity; the project also initiated a partnership with Phiadelphia Contemporary to create River Charrettes, a series of performances and dialogues that brought accomplished performance artists into conversations with city planners and urban thinkers for innovative and reflective consideration of bodies in civic motion.