Finalist: Miriam Adams
Rita Davies and Margo Bindhardt Cultural Leadership Award
Miriam Adams, Co-founder/Director of Dance Collection Danse, is a graduate of the National Ballet School and former dancer with The National Ballet of Canada.
She and her late husband, principal dancer Lawrence Adams, went on to teach, choreograph and found 15 Dance Laboratorium, Toronto's first experimental dance venue. The Adams became publishers, producing the newspapers SPILL and Canadian Dance News, and created Visus Foundation, established to videotape dance activity in Canada. In 1983, they initiated the ENCORE! ENCORE! reconstruction project, designed to rescue Canadian choreographic works created in the 1940s and 1950s.
This led to the founding of Dance Collection Danse, Canada’s national dance archives and publishing house. To date, DCD has published over 37 dance books encompassing biography/memoir, cultural history, educational resources and reference books including the Encyclopedia of Theatre Dance in Canada/ Encyclopédie de la danse théâtrale au Canada (ETDC/EDTC). DCD also produces a semi-annual magazine promoting its discoveries and celebrating the country’s dance legacies.
Miriam Adams has been a board member of the Toronto Arts Council, the Dance Umbrella of Ontario, the Nightingale Arts Foundation, Artscape, Judy Jarvis Dance Foundation, the Dancer Transition Resource Centre and was named Adjunct Professor at York University in 2006. She received a Dance in Canada Service Award; a Mayor’s Medal of Service; and, with Lawrence Adams, the Dance Ontario Award for her contributions to dance.