Ishmael Houston-Jones Net Worth, Age, Height, Bio, Birthday, Wiki!

Explore Ishmael Houston-Jones net worth, age, height, bio, birthday, wiki, and salary! In this article, we will discover how old is Ishmael Houston-Jones? Who is Ishmael Houston-Jones dating now & how much money does Ishmael Houston-Jones have?

Ishmael Houston-Jones Biography

Ishmael Houston-Jones is one of the most popular and richest Choreographer who was born on June 8, 1951 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States.

Ishmael Houston-Jones (born 1951 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA) is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, curator, and arts advocate known for his improvisational dance and language work. His work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for their work Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders performed at The Kitchen and he shared another Bessie Award in 2011 with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane for the 2010 revival of their 1985 collaboration, THEM. THEM was performed at Performance Space 122 (PS 122), the American Realness Festival, Springdance in Utrecht, Tanz im August in Berlin, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at TAP, Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers, France. The 1985 premier performance of THEM at PS122 was part of New York’s first AIDS benefit.

After returning to the US in 1972 Houston-Jones moved to Philadelphia. He audited dance classes at Temple University with Helmut Gottschild and Eva Gholson. He then got into the Wigman-based company Group Motion Media Theater with whom he danced for two years. After leaving Group Motion he began studying improvisation and later performing with Terry Fox and the musician Jeff Cain under the name A Way of Improvising. He also studied with Joan Kerr, Les Ditson, Contact Improvisation with John Gamble and “African” at Ile Ife, the Arthur Hall Afro American Dance Ensemble . It was during this time that he formed a strong comradeship with the visual artist Fred Holland who he met through their mutual involvement with the Painted Bride Art Center. Houston-Jones and Fox were Holland’s first dance teachers. Holland went on to make his own award-winning dance/theater works, some in collaboration with Houston-Jones. Houston-Jones began making his own work in 1976. That year, in collaboration with fellow ex-Group Motion dancer Michael Biello and musician Dan Martin, he formed the gay-men’s performance collective Two Men Dancing. This group made four evening-length works, most notably What We’re Made Of in 1980. This piece was begun during his last year in Philadelphia; after living there for seven years, he moved to New York on Thanksgiving Day, 1979.

Name	Ishmael Houston-Jones
First Name	Fernanda
Last Name	Decnop
Occupation	Choreographer
Birthday	June 8
Birth Year	1951
Place of Birth	Harrisburg
Home Town	Pennsylvania
Birth Country	United States
Birth Sign	Gemini
Full/Birth Name
Father	Not Available
Mother	Not Available
Siblings	Not Available
Spouse	Not Known
Children(s)	Not Available

Ethnicity, religion & political views

Many peoples want to know what is Ishmael Houston-Jones ethnicity, nationality, Ancestry & Race? Let's check it out! As per public resource, IMDb & Wikipedia, Ishmael Houston-Jones's ethnicity is Not Known. We will update Ishmael Houston-Jones's religion & political views in this article. Please check the article again after few days.

Houston-Jones arrived in New York in the East Village, Manhattan in early 1980. He did some Contact Improvisation performances at Danspace Project with Danny Lepkoff, with whom he had studied. The East Village community at that time was infused with punk, new wave, drag, drugs and the mixing of a hipper, younger gay population with the modern dance and experimental theater milieux. Houston-Jones, like many dancers at the time, was influenced by the gay/punk/club scene and also by break dancing, graffiti and rap music. The first time Houston-Jones heard future collaborator Chris Cochrane play was at the club 8 BC. Dancers and choreographers would go to 8 BC, Limbo Lounge, the Pyramid Club, or King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut to see shows and also to perform. There was a palpable excitement and eagerness to see what was happening at venues such as PS 122, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop and Danspace Project at Saint Mark’s Church. There were smaller, grittier spaces as well like Dixon Place and Chandelier where something new was happening almost every night. With the exception of the Wah-Wah Hut and Chandelier, Houston Jones performed at all of these venues. It was during this time that Houston-Jones first heard Dennis Cooper read from his book The Tenderness of the Wolves, and knew that he wanted to work with him. At around this time, the pall of AIDS began to hover over the dance world. People in the dance and performance art communities were becoming sick and dying. Dance contemporaries of Houston-Jones (John Bernd, Arnie Zane, Harry Sheppard, et al.) died at this time. Houston-Jones volunteered with the organization God’s Love We Deliver, and brought meals to people who were left homebound by the disease.

Ishmael Houston-Jones Net Worth

Ishmael Houston-Jones is one of the richest Choreographer from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Ishmael Houston-Jones's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Charles Houston Jones, born 1951 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was the only child of North Jones and Pauline Jones, née Houston. He attended public primary and secondary school there and he attended his first dance class when he was 16 years old and a junior at William Penn High School. The Harrisburg Community Theater offered free dance classes to teenagers, and as he was involved in theater in school he went. This jazz-based show was his first experience performing dance. He enrolled as an English/Drama major at Gannon College, (now Gannon University) in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1969. There was no dance program and he only studied there for two years before he “accidentally” dropped out. He was traveling the summer after his sophomore year of college with the intention of returning to school in the fall, but he found himself in Israel, and decided to stay there for a year. He worked as a pig farmer for nine months at Kibbutz Lahav in the Negev Desert. Then he worked for three months on a banana plantation at Kibbutz Adamit in the Galilee on the border with Lebanon. Houston-Jones found 1971 to be a propitious time to be in Israel; it was the years between The Six-Day War and The Yom Kippur War and there was a calm atmosphere among the Israelis. He had always been fascinated by collective socialist living situations, so the idea of being on a kibbutz intrigued him. He had never done any kind of heavy farm work and while there he had to get up at 4 AM: feeding pigs, mating them and working in the slaughterhouse. When he moved north to Adamit he worked harvesting bananas, and at the end of most days, he and his comrades would go skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean. He would sometimes dance on the beach in the nude. Houston-Jones was able to take just one dance class that entire year; the African-American choreographer and dancer Gene Hill Sagan was teaching on a nearby kibbutz. It was around this time that he began to use Ishmael as his first name and hyphenated his parents’ surnames, though he never legally changed either.

Net Worth	$5 Million
Salary	Under Review
Source of Income	Choreographer
Cars	Not Available
House	Living in own house.

In addition to his own choreography, Houston-Jones has performed in the work of John Bernd, Ping Chong, Dancenoise, Terry Fox, Beth Gill, Miguel Gutierrez (choreographer), Lionel Popkin, Mike Taylor, and Yvonne Meier. He has a small role, (Dancer) in the John Sayles 1984 film The Brother from Another Planet. and he appears in Caspar Strache’s 1998 film Circle’s Short Circuit and The Situation Room, 2004, directed by Steve Staso.

In 1999 Houston-Jones, along with Yvonne Meier, curated a festival of New Swiss Dance, at the Swiss Institute New York. Ishmael Houston-Jones is also the current curator for the DraftWork series for works-in-progress at Danspace Project.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

Ishmael Houston-Jones height Not available right now. Fernanda weight Not Known & body measurements will update soon.

Height	Unknown
Weight	Not Known
Body Measurements	Under Review
Eye Color	Not Available
Hair Color	Not Available
Feet/Shoe Size	Not Available

Also during the early 1980s Houston-Jones traveled twice to Nicaragua. He was there while the Sandinista government was at war with the US-funded Contras. For two weeks in 1983 he was part of a North American delegation at a theater festival and as a guest of the state. He was chauffeured in buses, housed in a hotel, fed in restaurants and generally pampered. The following year, 1984, he returned on his own, staying in a family’s rented room and getting around on his own, which he found extremely difficult. He had met some people on his first trip who had arranged for him to teach at the University of Central America, Managua. He taught contact improvisation to Sandinista soldiers. Students would show up in their fatigues, wearing leotards underneath. They would change and prop their rifles against the wall. He was in Nicaragua only over a month but after this second visit he became much more engaged with progressive politics and social issues. It was from these experiences, plus losses due to AIDS, and Reaganomics that his work began to shift and pieces like f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/g, Radio Managua and THEM were created. He also made several collaborative pieces, some with Fred Holland and later with the writer Dennis Cooper. He collaborated with several musician/composers who came from the punk and club scenes, most notably, Chris Cochrane from the bands No Safety and Suck Pretty. During this time he was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and other agencies and he traveled several times to Europe and Venezuela to perform and to teach.

From 2002 – 2007 Ishmael Houston-Jones was the Coordinator for the Lambent Fellowship in the Arts of Tides Foundation. In this capacity he spearheaded and structured a program that awarded unrestricted, multi-year grants to individual visual and performing artists in metropolitan New York. For five years under Houston-Jones’ guidance, fellowships of $21.000 were awarded to six artists annually.

Who is Ishmael Houston-Jones Dating?

According to our records, Ishmael Houston-Jones is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Ishmael Houston-Jones’s is not dating anyone.

Relationships Record: We have no records of past relationships for Ishmael Houston-Jones. You may help us to build the dating records for Ishmael Houston-Jones!

In the early 2000s Houston-Jones made a deliberate decision to stop making dance pieces. He felt that he didn’t know what he wanted to say and that he didn’t want to just make work just for the sake of making work. He was committed to performing in other people’s pieces ( Yvonne Meier, Lionel Popkin, and others), but he didn’t feel he had anything new to offer of his own. He did, during this time, make pieces with students at Alfred University, the New School, and at the American Dance Festival. He concentrated on teaching, writing, and serving on the boards of several not-for-profit dance organizations: ( Headlong Dance Theater, Danspace Project, Movement Research, and Ashley Anderson Dances .)

Facts & Trivia

Fernanda Ranked on the list of most popular Choreographer. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Ishmael Houston-Jones celebrates birthday on June 8 of every year.

He is a subject of the chapter “Speech as Act” in the book Dances that Describe Themselves by Susan Leigh Foster (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). and the chapter “Crossing the Great Divides” in the book Taken by Surprise by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).

You may read full biography about Ishmael Houston-Jones from Wikipedia.