Amelia Rudolph

Founder, Artistic Director

Amelia is a choreographer and dancer/athlete. Her work is informed by aesthetics, non-traditional relationships with gravity, ecology, natural and built spaces, community and human relationships. She founded Project Bandaloop in 1991, bringing together dance, climbing and varied off-the-ground movement through site-specific work on cliffs, buildings and in theaters. She teaches youth in Oakland through Destiny Art Center, lectures as a public speaker and is involved in Creative Capital’s Artist Development Program.

Amelia holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in comparative religion from Swarthmore College and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Her intellectual and artistic sensibilities inform her work inspiring practical, spiritual, theoretical and political creativity. Living in India for five years, especially the years she spent in the central Himalaya, have influenced her as a global citizen, and an artist. Her work has explored site-specific dance on buildings and cliffs in Africa, Argentina, and Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Lithuania, Oman, twelve states in North America and Portugal.

Since 2000 she has been named an Irvine Fellow in Dance and awarded funding and commissions for new work from the National Dance Project, Creative Capital, National Performance Network, the NEA, The Creative Work Fund, The Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, San Francisco Foundation, City of Oakland, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the Paul Allan Foundation among others. Project Bandaloop is a 2004 multi-year grant recipient for organizational support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Amelia is an artist/athlete who has been a student of movement since beginning ballet lessons at six. Developing first as a dancer/gymnast, her early training was with the Ellis Duboulet and Lou Conte studios in Chicago. She spent seven years at the school of the Hubbard Street Dance Company where she became a company apprentice at 17. She has performed with Mark Morris, Dance Brigade, Clay Taliaferro and Sarah Elgart among others. She competed as a gymnast for eight years and was captain of the women's cross-country team in college. She began climbing in 1989 in California's Sierra Nevada range and her experiences have ranged from back-country peaks and big walls to sport climbing and three seasons as a national competitor. In 2005 she began to surf. Amelia is continually challenged and educated by her experiences in nature. Those experiences unearth and clarify her values, identity and art.

Grants and Commissions