Camille A. Brown and Juel D. Lane Receive $40,000 UNCSA Alumni Artpreneur Award: Where They Are Now

In April 2019, Dance Mogul Magazine reported that two graduates of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts had been named the school’s Alumni Artpreneurs of the Year. Both had come out of its School of Dance. Both had danced for Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE. And both were, at that moment, working side by side in the same New York company. Their names were Camille A. Brown and Juel D. Lane.

UNCSA gave each of them $20,000. Seven years later, it looks like one of the smartest investments a school ever made in its own alumni. This is the original report, retold and updated with where both artists have gone since.

The 2019 Award: $40,000 for Two Dance Alumni

Chancellor Lindsay Bierman announced the second annual Chancellor’s Alumni Artpreneur of the Year Awards in April 2019. The program had launched the year before to back alumni who build creative projects or creative enterprises of high merit, artistic excellence or innovative potential.

Brown, a 2001 graduate, received $20,000 for creative enterprise. The money was meant to sustain her New York company, Camille A. Brown & Dancers. Lane, a 2002 graduate, received $20,000 for a creative project: new choreographic work. Together the two awards totaled $40,000.

“Camille A. Brown and Juel Lane exemplify what it means to be an artpreneur.”

Chancellor Lindsay Bierman, UNCSA, April 2019

Bierman described an artpreneur as an artist “not defined by what is, but inspired by all that could be”: someone business-savvy, willing to take creative risks and devoted to creating value through their work. He praised the two choreographers for taking risks while staying grounded in sound business practice, and he framed the awards as part of a larger push. That fall the university planned to offer its first-ever minor, a concentration in entrepreneurship, because, he argued, artists need the grit to carve their own paths in a creative economy he valued at $800 billion.

At the time, UNCSA’s School of Dance was led by Dean Susan Jaffe, a former American Ballet Theatre principal dancer, and the school was ABT’s exclusive educational affiliate, with concentrations in classical ballet and contemporary dance.

Where They Stood in 2019

Camille A. Brown

By 2019 Brown had already built a remarkable résumé. She had won four Princess Grace Awards, a Bessie Award, a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and a Doris Duke Artist Award, and she was a TED Fellow. In 2016, TED curator Chris Anderson named her TED-Ed film A Visual History of Social Dance in 25 Moves one of the year’s most notable talks.

She had choreographed for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Complexions and Urban Bush Women, and for theater productions including Once on This Island, A Streetcar Named Desire and tick, tick… BOOM! In April 2018 she choreographed NBC’s Emmy-winning Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert.

Her company, founded in 2006, was touring ink, the final part of its trilogy about culture, race and identity, after the Bessie Award-winning Mr. TOL E. RAncE (2012) and the Bessie-nominated BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play (2015). The New York Times called ink “rousing and incisive.” The company blended modern, hip-hop, African, ballet and tap, and it took its work beyond theaters to students, young adults and incarcerated women and men. Brown had last returned to UNCSA as a guest artist in 2015.

Juel D. Lane

Lane, an Atlanta native, had danced nationally and internationally with Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE and was a member of Camille A. Brown & Dancers. In 2012 he became the first Black, independent, Atlanta-based choreographer ever commissioned by Atlanta Ballet, creating Moments of Dis for the company.

He was selected for the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation’s New Directions Choreography Lab in 2015–16, and he won two Celebration of Dance Awards in Atlanta, Choreographer of the Year and Best Choreography for Live Performance, for Touch & Agree. He had choreographed for Ailey II and Dallas Black Dance Theatre, released three dance films (Just Another Day, How to Kill a Ghost and When The Beat Drops) and danced in NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert. In September 2018 he premiered DM, for two men and 16 women, at UNCSA’s Fall Dance concert.

A Shared Line

The two artists were not just classmates a year apart. Their careers ran on the same track: UNCSA’s contemporary dance program, then Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, then Brown’s own company. When the Ailey foundation chose Lane for its 2015–16 choreography lab, its organizers told ArtsATL they had heard about him through Brown, who had taken part in the program’s first lab in 2011.

There is one more thread. Trish Casey, the UNCSA composition teacher who helped a young Camille A. Brown discover her choreographic voice, now mentors choreographers alongside Lane at the school’s Choreographic Institute. The classroom where one career began is still shaping the next ones.

Where Is Camille A. Brown Now?

Brown’s rise since 2019 has been extraordinary. She earned her first Tony nomination for Choir Boy in 2019 and has five in all, for Choir Boy, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (both direction and choreography, 2022), Hell’s Kitchen (2024) and Gypsy (2025).

In 2021 she became the first Black artist to direct a mainstage production at the Metropolitan Opera, co-directing and choreographing Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones. In 2022 she became the first Black woman to direct and choreograph a Broadway play since Katherine Dunham in 1955. UNCSA gave her an honorary doctorate in 2023, when she returned as its commencement speaker, and in 2025 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Today she is the announced director and choreographer of the first newly staged Broadway Dreamgirls. Producers said in August 2026 that it will no longer open in fall 2026 but is moving forward, with the theater, dates and cast still to be announced. In September 2026, USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance named her its next Claude and Alfred Mann Endowed Artist in Dance. The company that UNCSA’s 2019 award helped sustain, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, is in its twentieth year.

Where Is Juel D. Lane Now?

Lane has become one of the most versatile artists of his generation, working across concert dance, theater, film and teaching.

He is the director of UNCSA’s Choreographic Institute, a two-week residency for professional choreographers. Its 2026 session ran June 28 to July 11, with Lane and Trish Casey as mentors. He is also an executive artistic associate of the Black Acting Methods Studio, and in fall 2025 he was a visiting faculty member in Bennington College’s BFA Dance Lab.

His choreography has been presented by Ailey II, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, BODYTRAFFIC, Hubbard Street, Carolyn Dorfman Dance and Atlanta Ballet. In 2025 alone he choreographed the new musical Co-Founders at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size at The Shed in New York. His short film The Maestro, honoring the painter Ernie Barnes, won an award at the BronzeLens Film Festival.

He kept dancing with Brown, too. His biography lists performances in Fire Shut Up in My Bones at the Metropolitan Opera and in Amazon’s series Harlem, and calls him a long-standing member of Camille A. Brown & Dancers.

In June 2026 he took his biggest new step: his directorial debut. He directed True Colors Theatre Company’s reimagined, all-Black production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, set in the 1980s and inspired by the 1997 television version with Brandy and Whitney Houston. It ran June 12 to July 5 at Atlanta’s Southwest Arts Center.

“It’s about the art of transforming your life.”

Juel D. Lane on Cinderella, to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 2026

Looking back on his return to Atlanta, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “It was at that time in 2009 when I started to believe in myself.” The 2019 award came a decade into that belief. The years since have proved it right.

Why It Matters to Dance Mogul Magazine

“Artpreneur” is a word DMM understands from the inside. This magazine was built the same way: independent, self-funded and grounded in the belief that artists can own their paths instead of waiting for permission. The 2019 award recognized two dancers doing exactly that, one building a company and the other building a body of work.

Their stories show what happens when an institution invests in an artist early, and what the artist does with that trust. Brown turned a company into a platform that reached Broadway, the Met and millions of viewers online. Lane turned a choreographer’s voice into a career that now trains other choreographers. Both kept lifting the people around them. Explore more artists who built their own paths in our Exclusive Interviews, browse the Dance Styles Hub, and visit The Legacy, where DMM preserves the stories of dancers who changed what the world could see.

The Story Continues

In 2019, $20,000 apiece was a vote of confidence from the school that trained them. Today Brown is shaping one of Broadway’s most anticipated revivals and preparing to teach at USC, while Lane is directing, choreographing and mentoring choreographers at the very school that once rewarded him.

Dance Mogul Magazine first told this story when it was news. We are updating it because it has become something bigger: proof of what a dance education, a little early support and a lot of self-belief can build.

© 2026 Dance Mogul Magazine. Black-owned. Est. 2010. Originally published April 23, 2019; updated November 1, 2026.