Jared Williams is a visual artist, dance-improvisor and dance-arts curator primarily interested in ideas of wilderness, multiplicity, emergent structure and futurity. He has been focused exclusively on programming and curating dance since 2014 with a focus on experimental performance and somatic dance practices.
From 2014-2020 he, along with Sarah Mae Gibbons, co-directed New Movement Collaborative, an organization dedicated to the cultivation of contemporary dance practices in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the co-founder, director and lead curator for the Lion’s Jaw Festival, a boston-based annual performance and dance festival, housed at both Green Street Studios and MIT, that ran from 2016-2020.
In 2021 he initiated (along with Nuria Bowart, Anya Smolnikova and Lilianna Kane) the Field Center. The Field Center is an educational center for performance and dance arts practices in rural Vermont, that aims to provide an alternative and supplemental avenue to academic models in performance, dance and interdisciplinary arts education.
Jared is a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts (unceded territory of the Nonantum and Massachusett). He is a father and a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design.
THE FIELD CENTER: center for contemporary performance, dance and interdisciplinary arts
About The Field Center
Located in southern Vermont, the Field Center is an educational center for arts practices that serves as a resource for working artists at all stages of their career to develop their teaching and performance practices and build stronger collaborative relationships with one another. Through working together, with an emphasis on dance and performance, we help to create and curate structures, solutions and events that inspire equitable, socially and environmentally sustainable practices, interrogate systems, drive creativity and encourage courageous exploration. The primary aim of our programs is to provide an alternative and supplemental avenue to academic models in performance, dance and interdisciplinary arts education. As an ‘incubator’ space we support artists of all identities through time to experiment, time to develop work, and time to connect and train with one another.
The Field Center is located in what is now known as the Town of Rockingham, Vermont near the village of Bellows Falls/Kchi Pôntegok [Great Falls] about 30 miles upriver from Brattleboro/Wantastegok [At the River Where Something Is Lost]. It is home to nearly 50 acres of forest rising up from the banks of the ‘Williams River’ and is used by bobcat, coyote, bear, moose, frog, deer, rabbit, fox, turkey, porcupine, hawk, eagle, weasel, owl, beaver, opossum, skunk and vast communities of non-human beings.
These are also the traditional and ongoing homelands of the Algonquian-speaking Abenaki [a-BEN-aki], one of the five nations in the Wabanaki [Dawnland] Confederacy. The Abenaki and their ancestors have lived and thrived as part of this land, and throughout what is known today as northern ‘New England’ and southern Quebec. Today this area is home to the Elnu Abenaki, one of four Vermont State-recognized Bands [2011].
Financial Transparency
As a registered non-profit [501c3] arts organization we function through a combination of earned income through our year-round programming, gifts, and donations from individuals and grants. Founded in late 2021 we are still very new and our team of 5 work long hours for little compensation [salaries are between 13 + 21k per year ]. Our annual running costs are currently 280-320k per year. We are dedicated to open access ‘non application based’ programs. We offer tiered pricing, scholarships, work exchange and payment plans in all of our programs.
We supplement our spring|summer|fall programs with food grown on site. We are currently raising funds to support our BIPOC scholars program as well as our annual F.I.R.E. [Forums for Indigenous Research and Exchange] residency. Please specify how you would like any donations to be used.
DONATION INFORMATION
To donate to The Field Center please visit our DONATIONS PAGE [ https://www.thefieldcenter.com/donate ]
