T. Lang, chair and associate professor of dance at Spelman, has received Creative Loafing’s Critics Pick Award for Best Choreographer in the newspaper’s annual Best of Atlanta issue.
According to CL, the awards highlight visionaries who are "making our city a better place." Lang also is director of the Spelman Dance Theatre and artistic director of T. Lang Dance.
Her works, which blend traditional and experimental contemporary movement, include 2012's “Mother/Mutha,” a stirring look at African women who were forced to breed slaves, and “For Unmarried Girls Before They Wed,” a piece that shed light on relationship issues from a woman’s point of view.
Lang earned her bachelor of fine arts in performance and choreography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her masters of fine arts in performance and choreography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
See T.Lang in Motion
A Dancer's Early Career in Retrospect
In the early part of her career, Lang danced with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and Marlies Yearby’s Movin’ Spirits Dance Theater. In 2008, Lang relocated T. Lang Dance from New York City to Atlanta. She continues to develop, direct, and produce high-impact work that blends traditional and experimental contemporary movement. In 2011, T. Lang was commissioned to create a work in collaboration with Grammy award winning artists Sweet Honey in the Rock. This work, 4 Little Girls, was presented at the Gala Concert during the historic unveiling of the King Monument in Washington, D.C.
The following year (2012), her work M O T H E R/ M U T H A was presented at Atlanta’s Goat Farm Arts Center. Creative Loafing and Arts America called this work a “powerfully thought provoking…masterfully blended work” of “unsettling genius.” M O TH E R/ M U T H A delves deeply into the complexities of American history. It thoroughly examines the origin of objectifying African-American women, a topic rarely examined so vividly and honestly through the lens of dance. In 2014, High Museum of Art and Goat Farm Arts Center produced Lang’s Post Up. Post Up pushes the boundaries of dance to create a multi-media experience of rich audio and visual adventure. T. Lang Dance also worked on a new collaborative project, Doxology Ring Shout, with American playwright Paul Carter Harrison and choreographer Dianne McIntyre for the 2014 National Black Arts Festival.
Lang began her 2015 season with a commission from Flux Projects for a collaboration with visual artist, Nick Cave. Nick Cave’s Up Right Atlanta in collaboration with T. Lang was presented at Ponce City Market. Assistant Professor in Dance, Director of Spelman Dance Theatre at Spelman College, and founder of SWEATSHOP, the Atlanta summer dance intensive, Lang stays engaged with the next generation of artists. Lang has been on faculty at the American Dance Festival since 2013.