Biography
2026 TED Fellow, Tushrik Fredericks is a multidisciplinary creative artist born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was first drawn to the expressive and visceral language of krump, which continues to inform his physical and emotional approach to performance. Fredericks received the Princess Grace Award, nominated in 2021 by Tribe under the direction of founding artistic director Shamel Pitts. He graduated from the Peridance certificate program in New York City in 2015 and has since worked with Ate9 Dance Company, Sidra Bell Dance New York, and Una Productions.
He served as an assistant lecturer to Sidra Bell at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and in 2021 he received the 3rd prize for dance at Solo Tanz in Stuttgart for his self-choreographed solo (territory) Of The Heart. In 2023, he presented the complete work at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporian Arts in Brooklyn, New York. He is a recipient of the Baryshnikov Arts Open Fall 2023 residency for a choreographed duet with Rebecca Margolick and was awarded the 2024 Princess Grace Special Projects Grant.
Synopsis
(territory) of the heart is a solo dance work that emerges from my experience of living abroad for eight years and confronting the shifting realities of identity, belonging, and otherness. The work explores what it means to exist as both insider and outsider, tracing the emotional and psychological landscapes that arise from displacement.
Through a physically driven practice, the piece translates the human heart into movement—its pulsations, tensions, ruptures, and expansions. The body becomes a site of negotiation, where conflicting impulses coexist: contraction and release, fragmentation and continuity, resistance and surrender. These embodied states reflect an ongoing grappling with self-identity and the complexities of inhabiting multiple cultural and emotional territories at once.
