Laurel Victoria Gray to Give 2009 Selma Jeanne Cohen Lecture at 32nd Annual Fulbright Association Conference

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 21, 2009) -- The Fulbright Association announced today that Laurel Victoria Gray, artistic director of the Silk Dance Road Company, will present the 2009 Selma Jeanne Cohen Lecture in International Dance Scholarship on Saturday, Oct. 31, at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C. Ms. Gray is adjunct professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at George Washington University.

Ms. Gray will discuss "A Living Legacy: Uzbek Dance” and will touch on the 1989 Seattle Soviet Theatre Arts Exchange, in which Dr. Cohen participated. Her presentation will include a performance by members of the Silk Road Dance Company of traditional Uzbek dances from the company’s Legacy Repertoire.

Ms. Gray first visited Uzbekistan in 1973 and, in 1981, joined the Seattle-Tashkent Sister City Committee. She participated in the official 1984 delegation of Seattle residents to Uzbekistan and founded the Uzbek Dance and Culture Society that same year. Gray also co-founded of an annual dance camp that hosts dance instructors from Uzbekistan. In 2007, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Uzbek Ministry of Culture at a ceremony held at Tashkent's Institute of Art in recognition of her work in promoting and preserving traditional Uzbek culture and dance. She has produced performances at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Washington, D.C. She received the Kennedy Center’s Local Dance Commissioning Project Award for her production of "Egypta: Myth, Magic, and Mystery” in 2003.

"I hope that my study of women's dance of Silk Road regions has helped to cultivate better understanding of, and respect for, traditional cultures of the East,” Ms. Gray said.

The late Selma Jeanne Cohen, preeminent dance historian and founding editor of the International Encyclopedia of Dance, endowed the dance lecture at the Fulbright Association’s annual conference to highlight dance scholarship in a multidisciplinary, international forum. Previous lecturers are Leslie Friedman, the Lively Foundation, San Francisco (2000); Robin Marshall Grove, University of Melbourne, Australia (2001); Gretchen Ward Warren, University of South Florida (2002); Wayne B. Kraft, Eastern Washington University and the Erd?ly (Dance) Ensemble (2003); London-based Millicent Hodson, dance historian and choreographer (2004); Richard Semmens, University of Western Ontario, Canada (2005); Barbara Browning, New York University (2006), Ron Jenkins, Wesleyan University (2007); and Alison M. Friedman, general manager, Parnassus Productions, Inc., Beijing (2008).

"I view this honor as a tribute to Selma Jeanne Cohen and her great enthusiasm for Uzbek dance. Twenty years after she participated in our historic delegation to Soviet Uzbekistan, we can better appreciate the significance of the seeds sewn by our cultural exchange with Central Asia,” said Ms. Gray.

The Fulbright Association is a private, non-profit organization that supports and promotes the Fulbright Program, an international educational and cultural exchange initiative created in 1946 by legislation sponsored by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. There are now more than 275,000 Fulbright alumni worldwide.