Twyla Tharp is an American choreographer, dancer, ballet dancer, film director, and writer born on July 1, 1941, in Portland.

Her education took her across several institutions, including San Bernardino Valley College, Pomona College, Barnard College, and Columbia University — a range of study that preceded a career encompassing dance, choreography, film direction, and writing. Working in English, Tharp has moved across disciplines in ways that resist easy categorization, bringing to each field the precision and physical intelligence central to her practice as a dancer and choreographer.

The honors she has received over the course of her career reflect both the breadth and the sustained quality of her work. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, two of the more demanding distinctions in American cultural and intellectual life. Her contributions to dance were further recognized through the Capezio Dance Award and the National Dance Awards. The performing arts community acknowledged her with a Drama League Award, while her work in television earned her a Primetime Emmy Award. At the national level, she received the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, the latter representing one of the highest forms of recognition the United States extends to artists who have made sustained contributions to American culture.

Throughout her career, Tharp has worked across choreography, performance, film, and the written word, returning again and again to movement as both subject and method. Her identity as a ballet dancer sits alongside her broader work as a choreographer, and it is this commitment to the body in motion — examined from multiple angles, through multiple forms — that runs as a consistent thread through everything her name has come to represent.