The Artist
What you’ll want to know…
The Artist
2018 Chita Rivera and Drama Desk Nominee Nejla Yatkin, famed choreographer and dancer, is originally from Berlin, Germany with Turkish roots, now residing in Chicago. Inspired by great female choreographers, Ms Yatkin has been choreographing solo works since 2000, including five evening-length solo works that have toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim.
Ms. Yatkin choreographs for her own project-based company NY2Dance and for other companies including the Washington Ballet, River North Dance Chicago, the Dallas Black Dance Theater, the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and the Modern American Dance Company among others.
Besides her creative work in the Contemporary Dance Arts world, Ms. Yatkin has choreographed for Isaac Mizrahi Fashion in New York, L’Oreal in Paris and Avantgarde Fashion Show in Berlin as well as Opel Car in Germany.
Ms. Yatkin has performed her solo works in over 40 countries. She has been awarded numerous grants to create and perform from Arts International, the National Performance Network, Kennedy Center, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Turkish Cultural Foundation. Recently, she choreographed for Dallas Black Dance Theatre and Washington Ballet, the Darpana Performing Group in India as well as the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble.
For 7 years, Ms. Yatkin was a Professor of Dance at the University of Maryland. In July 2008, she was Artist in Residence for the Film, TV and Theatre Department at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to her commitment to choreography, Nejla Yasmin Yatkin is also passionate about sharing her knowledge and experience with the next generation. Ms Yatkin is also the subject of the documentary “Where Women Don’t Dance”, showcased in New York in 2016 and due to be released in 2017.
Ms. Yatkin has choreographed for Isaac Mizrahi Fashion in New York, L’Oreal in Paris and Avantgarde Fashion Show in Berlin as well as Opel Car in Germany.
The Artistry
Nejla Yasemin Yatkin’s NY2Dance Company is a project based virtuosic dance theatre company of engagingly individual dancers from around the world, exploring the abstract telling of humanities story.
In her dance projects, Ms. Yatkin explores the beauty as well as complexity of memory, migration, transformation, identity and multiculturalism through movement, using a dynamic mix of multimedia and diverse theater techniques.
In addition to its concert offerings, NY2Dance offers workshops, special events, site specific dances and residencies tailor made for the community or company that it is engaged with.
In what is perhaps one of the most ambitious modern dance works of the 21st century, Ms. Yatkin conceived and executed “Dancing Around the World” a worldwide performative, virtual, and interactive tour of 18 cities exploring the ways in which people interact with each other and move and mingle within a spectrum of global environments.
During that yearlong 2015-2016, her initiative engaged, connected, and collaborate with citizens, visitors, centers, sites, and the environment. She and highly skilled videographer Enki Andrews explored the five themes of geography long discussed in social science literature as well as long realized by observers of societal processes. These include: 1) location, 2) place, 3) human environmental interaction, 4) movement, 5) regions; all viewed through the prisms of dance, video, and online tools. Click here to see videos.
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What Others Say
“Nejla Yatkin doesn’t disappear for an instant, not within a role and not under the impact of movement. She’s a performer inside and outside, from a piercing gaze to expressive shoulder blades and from the coils of her long black hair to her finger tips and toes. As a dancer, she measures on a major scale, thanks to a strong, long body and the amplitude she sustains. Watching her can become hypnotic, even off stage”. -Dance View Times
“Ms. Yatkin is a magician, telling tales and creating worlds with understated images. She is behind more than choreography.” – New York Times
“Before a full house Sunday at Dance Place, Nejla Y. Yatkin’s show was innovative in both form and content” – The Washington Post
Choreographically Yatkin used the entire stage as she created her luminous images, framed in dramatic clarity and passion” – New York Times Journal
“In her five year retrospective Yatkin danced three of her solos, her dancing and conceptual designs broad enough to encompass juxtapositions and multiple characters.” – Washington Post
“Nejla Yatkin brings to the stage an exotic air, an erotic note and an artistic intellect that’s stiletto sharp.” – DanceViewTimes
“Echoes’ is not a complex work, but it demonstrates the possibilities of Yatkin’s visual and choreographic sensibilities. She has a sharp eye for designed elements, an introspective soul and exceptional technical capabilities.” – Lisa Tragier
“Ms. Yatkin is a serious artist who tackles important themes in a way that is highly intellectual but always vividly provocative and dramatic.” – Washington Times
“Each of the three works — one by modern dance legend Jose Limon, two by Yatkin — was a multilayered experience, and together they left a lasting impression of a woman with a distinctive voice in firm control of her art,” – Washington Post
“Wheather she nested on the ground, arms undulating swan-like on the cushion of her black tulle skirt, or stood up to step out of that skirt into freedom, each motion was drawn slowly, carefullt, deliberately.” – DanceView Times
“Her body floats as her skirt, but what is most extraordinary are the muscalr strength. steely focus and precision underlying the loveliness…..” – Washington Post
“…Given current events it was Americans, not surprisingly, who caught the eye with their statement dances. Nejla Yatkin’s “After” was a ravishing solo reflecting on the aftermath of 9/11. A magnificent fusion of dance, video and text fragments, Washington-based Yatkin’s metaphor was a linr of empty shoes, and when she added her own to the line, and faded back into the darkness, it was profoundly moving moment…” – Paula Citron, The Globe and Mail, Toronto
“Nejla Yatkinspromising choreographiy displayed in her Saturday Dance Place show ‘Gravity’ proved whoy she’s quickly gained a place in Washington dance…” – Washington Post
“The developing D.C.-based choreographer pulls from a rich accumulation of dance tradition: from Turkish folk dance to classic Americanmodern forms, including the Martha Graham and Jose Limon techniques, to the expressionistic modern dance tradition of Germany and the apocalyptic theeatricality of Japanese butoh.” – Washington Post
“Ms. Yatkin has arms and legs that seem to defy nature with their detailed expressiveness” – Play DC