Gus Solomons Jr. (dancer)

Gus Solomons, Jr. (1940-2023) danced, made dances, wrote about dance for Dance Magazine, Gay City News, and DanceInsider.com, and was an Arts Professor at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts.  He earned an architecture degree from M.I.T. before dancing with the companies of Pearl Lang, Donald McKayle, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, among others; he bicycled everywhere.  In 2000, Solomons received a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Sustained Achievement in Choreography.  In 2001, he was the first recipient of the Robert A. Muh Award for a distinguished artist/alumnus of M.I.T., in 2004, was honored with the American Dance Festival's Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2006-2007, was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, lecturing at universities across the country.  In January 2008, he played the title role in Shakespeare's Othello off-off-Broadway.