USC professors Thaddeus Davis and Tanya Wideman-Davis have spent decades telling stories rooted in Black Southern life through movement, memory and history. In 2025, that work earned national recognition.
The United States Artists Fellowship selected Davis and Wideman-Davis as 2025 recipients, awarding them $50,000 to support their interdisciplinary creative practices. The fellowship recognized the pair for their sustained contributions to contemporary dance, storytelling and community-centered performance grounded in Black history and culture, according to United States Artists program director Anne Ishii.
United States Artists awards fellowships annually to artists across a wide range of disciplines surrounding dance, theatre and writing, honoring those whose work demonstrates artistic excellence and meaningful impact within their communities. Fellows receive $50,000 in unrestricted funding to further their creative vision and expand their practice.
"The wonderful thing about this award is it allows us to resist being just one thing," Davis said.
Wideman-Davis said that the fellowship wasn’t just given for a specific project they’ve done collaboratively, but for their commitment to their practice. It’s about their legacy that is currently flourishing within the vast eccentric realm of creativity and beyond, Wideman-Davis said.
Davis and Wideman-Davis met in 1993 at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. They were young artists learning perspective as they focused on the continuation of the legacy of Black artists through storytelling. In 2005, they co-founded Wideman Davis Dance, an interdisciplinary dance organization focused on narrative-driven performance that blends dance, theater and film.
For the past 15 years, Davis said he and Wideman-Davis have focused on fostering intergenerational conversations and learning more about who they are as people within the Southern landscape.
"I oftentimes call the work that we do transdisciplinary art, and that just encompasses making work inside of multiple creative disciplines to produce content that is collaborative and people-centered," Wideman-Davis said.
Michael McManus, a performer and social media coordinator with Wideman Davis Dance and a USC alumnus, said his relationship with Davis and Wideman-Davis began in the classroom before evolving into a professional collaboration.
“I learned about the legacy of Blackness inside of the contemporary movement," McManus said. "They genuinely cared about me as more than just a student. They wanted me to do well in life."
According to Davis, their performances draw on real-life stories, bringing experiences from the margins to the center and transforming them into embodied, performative work.
Davis said these stories often emerge from Black spaces, which the artists view as sites that reflect and preserve those rural Southern spaces with cultural significance to Black history.
"(We're) trying to find ways to mobilize spaces or to activate spaces that are not often activated anymore," Davis said. "(We're) trying to do site-specific work where the work is taken into location and trying to transform those spaces into performative spaces.”
Davis said the pair's achievement through the fellowship reflects a long-standing commitment to the art of practice shaped by their years of interdisciplinary work as professors, dancers and creative artists in general.
“We’re standing on the shoulders of some amazing people who came before us," Davis said.
Davis and Wideman-Davis said they plan to use their grant to help expand their creative landscape through collaboration on a multitude of projects.
"This fellowship feels like an opportunity for us to get some fuel to give us courage and strength to go on and continue the journey,” Davis said.
Their previous work can be found at Wideman Davis Dance. Their next performance is titled "Migratuse Reimagined" and will be held in March at the Wideman Davis Dance Lab.