This week we’re sharing tributes to all of the 2024 Dance Magazine Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, visit store.dancemedia.com.

For 44 years, Joanna Haigood’s vision as artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre has combined soaring imagination and deeply grounded curiosity. She aims to shift communities’ relationships with history—and to inspire fresh commitment to the future.

Haigood’s best-known works excavate the history of place, revealing the past’s hidden connection to the present. Her haunting and strangely hopeful 1998 work Invisible Wings was the result of her discovery that the grounds of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts had been a stop on the Underground Railroad for people escaping slavery. Her most recent work, 2024’s The People’s Palace, reclaimed San Francisco’s City Hall for a diverse citizenship, drawing on in-depth research about the relationship between race and architecture, and sending dancers spinning below the building’s 307-foot-high dome.

But Haigood’s process also encompasses philosophy and spirituality. For 2022’s Love, a state of grace, she drew on writings by the likes of James Baldwin and Buddhist activist Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as personal reflections on love from 100 community members. She worked with two theologians to create a guided meditation booklet that led visitors through San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral as aerialists flew between­ the stone rafters, using steel structures designed by Haigood’s longtime collaborator (and life partner), Wayne Campbell.

Though she has mounted more than 30 productions in locations across the country, Haigood’s deepest roots have remained in San Francisco’s Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood. Since 1989, Zaccho has occupied one of the city’s largest dance studios there, holding performances, artist residencies, and a youth performing arts program that has provided free dance training to more than 5,600 neighborhood children. Zaccho also organizes the San Francisco Aerial Arts Festival, which Haigood founded in 2014.

As she approaches her 68th birthday, Haigood is looking to ensure Zaccho’s work continues. She recently passed direction of the youth program to veteran Zaccho performing artist Veronica Blair. Perhaps most fervently, she hopes to tour Love, a state of grace.

“As I’m getting older, I’m thinking about what is useful,” Haigood says. “Right now, I feel that our society is lost in so many ways. Finding our way back to love—not just of family, but of community, and of the planet—that feels critical.”