Johnnie Cruise Mercer

Johnnie Cruise Mercer is a queer black thinker, maker, performer, educator and social entrepreneur born in Richmond, VA and based in New York City. Recently acknowledged as a 2021 Princess Grace Award Recipient in Choreography, and nominated for two 2021 Bessie NY Dance and Performance Awards (Outstanding Production for _AShadowPrince, and Outstanding BreakOut Choreographer), Johnnie’s processes and work have been supported, produced, and/or presented by: The 92Y Harkness Dance Center, The Dixon Place, Danspace Project Inc, The Fusebox Festival, Mana Contemporary, Freeskewl, The NADA Conference, Abrons Arts Center, The Clarice Performing Arts Center’s The BlackLight Summit,  The Cuny Dance Initiative, NYU Tisch Dance, Goucher College, Bates Dance Festival, The American Dance Festival, Abrons Arts Center, Ping Chong and Company, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, The New Dance Alliance, SirenArts, The Wassaic Project, and Stephen Petronio Company’s Bloodlines(future) Initiative! 

Johnnie is the founding producer and Company Director of TheREDprojectNYC (TRPNYC), a multidisciplinary network of artists dedicated to the study of movement philosophy, and its use towards building communal spaces for black/other process, documentation, and investigation.

Currently Johnnie leads the team,TRPNYC, into their fourth year of a six year project entitled; “A Process Anthology: The Decade from Hell and the Decade that Followed Suite.” Charted as ten individual memoir driven chapters, the full project will soon come to a close with two DocuEpic Works in the Fall 2022 (commissioned by Gibney), and Spring/Summer 2024/2025!

Find more info on this project and his other work on Instagram