GAR Foundation is proud to announce David Shimotakahara as its 2025 Glass Half Full Award recipient. In 1998, David founded GroundWorks DanceTheater, determined to challenge the preconceptions about dance. This desire to push boundaries is evident in David’s bold initiative: To seek collaboration and input from guest choreographers of the highest caliber and to constantly evolve the repertoire of the company.
Over the span of 25 years, GroundWorks created and produced 118 original works. Sixty-seven of these were commissioned from nationally and internationally renowned guest artists. In addition, David contributed 51 pieces to the company’s rep. His work is about here and now. He is interested in framing issues surrounding individuality, privacy, place, and connectivity through movement that speaks through its musicality and physicality.
David’s performance history includes: a member of the Atlanta Ballet, Boston Repertory Ballet, Kathryn Posin Dance Company, and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. He performed with Ohio Ballet under the direction of Heinz Poll from 1983-1999. He also served as Rehearsal Assistant for Ohio Ballet from 1989-1999. From 1989-97, David founded and was Director of New Steps. This acclaimed dance project offered a variety of programs that stimulated the creation and growth of new choreography in Northeast Ohio.
David has choreographed for opera and theater with the Cleveland Opera, Great Lakes Theater Festival and the Dallas Theater Center. He served on the Carlisle Project advisory panel in 1996, and dance panels for the Ohio Arts Council, Illinois Arts Council, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts. He received seven Individual Artist Fellowships for Choreography from the Ohio Arts Council from 1996 to 2012. In 1998, he received a McKnight Foundation Fellowship from the Minnesota Dance Alliance to create new work in the Minneapolis, St. Paul communities.
David was awarded the 2000 Cleveland Arts Prize for Dance. In 2002 his work with GroundWorks DanceTheater was recognized by Dance Magazine in their prestigious “25 to Watch” issue. In 2007, he received the OhioDance award for Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of the Dance Artform. David was a 2008 recipient of the first COSE Arts and Business Innovation awards as the founder of GroundWorks DanceTheater. In 2010, David received a Creative Workforce Fellowship, a program of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, funded by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. He was most recently awarded Summit Artspace’s 2023 Arts Alive Award.
After 25 years of groundbreaking contemporary dance performances, GroundWorks DanceTheater put on their grand finale performances in August of 2024 in Akron and Cleveland, leaving a profound legacy of artistic and educational dance service to the Northeast Ohio community.
David’s inspirations in life include: his wife Pandora, Thelonious Monk, the ocean, Montreal smoked meat, full houses, short stories, his cat Zoey, and asymmetry.
On Tuesday, March 4, GAR Foundation honored David at a private ceremony at Andrew Jackson House.
View photos from the reception
Glass Half Full Award
Learn more about GAR's Glass Half Full Award and its list of previous winners by clicking the link below.
