Joseph hernandez Bio
“I am a choreographer invested in the possibility that dance can articulate an otherwise invisible, crucial beauty. To me, much of this beauty is created by the value dance can place on its context; who attends, develops and participates in the work. This arc of investment, as much as its physical appearance, is the work’s shape. With this line of thinking, my collaborators and I look at shape as a political tool. I was shaped against my values by decades of classical ballet training that, while it gestured toward the sublime and the unnamable, was embedded in a logic of conservation that ultimately left me feeling empty. When I started making my own work, though those initial pieces were created inside those same spaces, I learned that dance has the capacity to resonate forever if it is shaped in a way that supports magic over misanthropy and curiosity over solipsism.
Now that I have extricated myself from those environments, my work has become a physical practice of constantly organizing ideas of shape towards a future that I believe in. Being a choreographer positions me towards an active relationship with human thinking in all of its gorgeous multiplicity, possibility, dissonance, and disaster.
My choreography is about how I (black, gay, and a little on edge) shape the world for the people I love (many of whom are the same), not how the world shapes me (or us).”
Semperoper Ballet
Staatstheater Nürnberg
Festspielhaus Hellerau
On the Boards
Theater St. Gallen
Whim W’Him Contemporary Dance Seattle
Northwest Dance Project
Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation (SFD+I)
CUNY Purchase College
Cornish College
Les Ballets De Monte Carlo (MC)
Royal Ballet of Flanders (BE)
Ballet Austin
New York City Ballet
Cornish College of the Arts
CUNY Purchase College
Royal Danish Ballet Summer Program
Northwest Dance Project MOVE summer program
THE PLAYGROUND NYC
DAF Dance Arts Faculty Rome
2025
Rekonstruktion der Zukunft, Raum - Licht - Bewegung Utopie, Tension, Break, Pattern, Intrigue with Cindy Hammer, Anna Till, and Johanna Roggan
Spector Books
2018
à cour & à jardin, Pavillon Bosio, Monaco
2018
Why We’re Stoked, Dance Magazine
2017