Bliss Kohlmyer
Associate Professor of Dance
Modern and Choreography
Phone: (813) 974-3867
Email: blissk@usf.edu
Bliss Kohlmyer is the Co-Artistic Director of project agora a San Francisco-based curatorial organization that promotes creative dialogue among artists through presenting evenings of work featuring interdisciplinary collaborations. Her company has received numerous grants and commissions. Summer ’15 Kohlmyer and Co-Artistic Director Kara Davis were invited emerging choreographers at the prestigious Bates Dance Festival. They performed their work, Convers(at)ions, for the Different Voices Concert. In addition, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, Dance Gallery Festival and Breaking Ground, have presented their work. Summer 2016, project agora performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. During the summer of 2018 she premiered a collaborative work, Connective (T)issues at DZINE furniture gallery in San Francisco.
Bliss has also presented at the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) conference in Trondheim, Norway, the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) conferences in Miami and Chicago, and Florida Dance Education Organization (FDEO). She has received commissions from LINES Ballet Summer Program, Dickinson College, SUNY Fredonia, Florida State College, Loyola Marymount University, Jacksonville University, Florida Dance Festival, , Sam Houston State University, Beijing Normal University, Moving Current Dance Collective, Jacksonville Dance Theatre, Péndulo Cero Danza Contemporánea (Mexico), Robert Moses’ Kin, and Sarasota Contemporary Dance Company. Her collaborative work with pianist Svetozar Ivanov (Sound Moves Duo) has been presented in Florida, New York, Michigan, Colorado, England, Austria, Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Gega New released a DVD of Sound Moves Duo’s Perpetual Tango January 2018. Recently, she presented her work at the International Creative Dance Seminar in Beijing and is currently working on a dance tutorial, “Dance Making and Watching,” which will be published by Human Kinetics Fall 2020.
In New York City, she danced and toured internationally with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the Sean Curran Company. In San Francisco, she danced with Janice Garrett and Dancers, Robert Moses’ Kin, and The San Francisco Opera Ballet, among others. Bliss has set a number of Moses’ works at University of South Florida, Cal Poly, and Jacob’s Pillow.
An artist with national/international recognition as a choreographer/performer/creative scholar, she is engaged in an ongoing and deep research process that uses the concept of liminality, or the state of being in the in-between, to investigate the layered intricacies of our inter-personal/ intra-personal interactions and the states that separate victim/villain, sanity/insanity, life/death, young/old, individual/group, earth/spirit, water/vapor, thought/action. In 2011, Bliss graduated from the University of Washington with an MFA in Dance. She is currently an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of South Florida.