Bio

David Taylor has been professionally involved in the Colorado dance community for the past forty-two years. During the course of a twelve-year dance career, he began choreographing in 1976, and since then has created over 100 original works. In 1979, he founded the David Taylor Dance Theatre, which for thirty-two years was recognized as one of the Rocky Mountain region’s most acclaimed dance organizations, and Denver’s original contemporary ballet company. Mr. Taylor has received three National Endowment for the Arts grant awards along with the City and County of Denver’s first Individual Artist Fellowship award for dance. In March of 1997, he and his company were proud recipients of the State of Colorado’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and in 2008 he received the Carson-Brierly Dance Library’s prestigious “Living Legends of Dance” Award. He has been commissioned to create ballets for numerous symphonies, opera and ballet companies across the USA and his original and innovative productions of “The Nutcracker” and “Rainforest” garnered national critical recognition and were booked extensively across North America for twenty years. At CSU, Mr. Taylor teaches dance appreciation, ballet technique, and ballet history. He teaches advanced ballet technique at Denver Ballet Theatre and Longmont Dance Theatre and is a master class teacher for schools, companies and summer programs throughout Colorado. In 2009 he founded the Zikr Dance Ensemble, which offers a spectrum of works based on transcendent dance rituals from ancient world cultures along with original and contemporary dance/theatre realizations.