Arnie, a short Jewish-Italian young man, was born in the Bronx, New York, and educated at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. On St. Patrick's Day, 1971, Binghamton's African American freshman Bill T. Jones met 22-year-old photography major Arnie Zane.
After forming a relationship with Arnie, to whom he was immediately attracted, Bill began to envision their partnership in dance. Working first in solos and duets based on contact improvisation, the pair made an unlikely but striking couple.
Their creative interchange defined each other's artistic vision and led to one of the most celebrated collaborations and explorations of movement, gender, race, and politics in late twentieth-century dance.
Arnie took up the camera in earnest in 1971; the year he and Bill met. Over the short period of the next five years Arnie's photography examined the body's physicality, sexual identity, and potential for harboring beauty and decay.
Arnie's primary focus moved from photography to dance though he continued to introduce photography and slide projections into his danceworks.
Arnie soon convinced Bill to leave school and travel with him to Amsterdam to explore Europe and pursue their romance. They shared their personal and creative lives together for the next seventeen years, forging a relationship and a dance company that made them the most visible gay couple in American dance in the 1980s.
After their return from two years in Amsterdam, they moved to Brockport, New York, where Bill enrolled as a dance major at SUNY-Brockport.
Arnie and Bill began their long collaboration in choreography and in 1973 formed the American Dance Asylum, a collective of choreographers, in Binghamton with improvisationist Lois Welk. They soon followed Welk to San Francisco.
Arnie's first recognition in the arts came as a photographer when he received a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Fellowship in 1973.
Arnie was the recipient of a second CAPS Fellowship in 1981 for choreography, as well as two Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983 and 1984). In 1980, Arnie was co-recipient, with Bill, of the German Critics Award for his work, Blauvelt Mountain. Rotary Action, a duet with Bill, was filmed for television, co-produced by WGBH-TV Boston and Channel 4 in London.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater commissioned a new work from Arnie and Bill, How to Walk an Elephant, which premiered at Wolftrap in August 1985. Arnie (along with Bill) received a 1985-86 New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Award for Choreographer/Creator.
Both Bill and Arnie were diagnosed with HIV infection in 1984. When Arnie died of AIDS-related lymphoma at the age of 39, Bill made the decision to keep Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company alive as a memorial to his partner of seventeen years. The Dance Company continues to bear Arnie's name and to be inspired by his spirit.
