Tom Truss is a performer, creator and educator. His thirty plus year career has included dancing, acting, choreographing and directing. Truss has worked with all ages and abilities from children, firefighters, and inmates to teens, older adults, and professional actors and dancers. He toured with the Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange for four years, had his own dance company for ten years, was a community artist at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for five years and taught at American Dance Festival for six years. Truss graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Acting from the University of Texas, obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in Choreography from the University of Iowa and a Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Performance from the College of Wooster. He is an AmSAT certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. He has been published in Dance Magazine, was a frequent contributor to OutRightRadio an award winning radio show on PRI. Some awards he has received are Best Choreography - Austin Critics Table Awards (HAIR), Best Actor- Austin Critics Table Awards (The Idiot), Best Actor Nominee - B. Iden Payne Awards (The Idiot). His work has been seen and he has performed at the Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow, New Zealand’s Wellington Fringe, American Dance Festival, On the Boards, Dance Place and The Foundry to name a few, as well as in parking lots, rivers, furniture stores and cars. His current projects are: Ask Your Gay Uncle, a podcast he co-creates with his gay nephew; Behind the Tapestry a solo dance theatre work that examines how a family finds resilience when tragedy strikes ;and ReWritten a multimedia evening length duet about the love relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.
His work is physically based and is athletic, gestural and quirky. Text is always present in his work. The themes of his work generally fall into the categories of love, loss, justice, sex, God and greed. It is presented through humor, silence, objects, movement metaphor, anecdotes and music.
