Evolving Practice
This category celebrates the ways in which independents and companies balanced the need for safety, the logistics of creating performance in constrained circumstances, and the determination and creativity it's taken to deliver high-quality training and support programs for professional artists.
Achieving Miracles
This category celebrates the achievements of those who managed to inspire others with their ability to survive challenges and offer support to others. With loneliness, isolation, poverty for some, and for others work denied by lockdowns and curfews, the category highlights the positivity and creative energy that triumphed in 2020.
Profiling Accessibility & Diversity
This category celebrates the artists who created inclusive communities, supported disadvantaged populations, such as communities at risk, remote and regional areas, or marginalised peoples dealing with racism, poverty or mental health and found ways to bring dance to all in 2020.
Creating Community Benefit
This category recognises imaginative approaches to teaching and learning in schools and communities during the pandemic. The relationship between dance students and a dance studio or other dance education setting is special—the industry is part of the lives of thousands of people.
Lifetime Achievement
This category celebrates an individual who has spent 40 years or more significantly contributing to Australian dance. In 2020 we focus particularly on their ability to continue to inspire their community during the pandemic.
- The nominee’s body of work in dance should have clearly earned them national and/or international recognition.
- Nominees should be recognised as Australian even where they have worked outside Australia.