Solo artist Margie Gillis dancing her work Blue West 1812 (Cylla von Tiedemann/Canada Council for the Arts)

International solo dance artist Margie Gillis has won the $50,000 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.

The prize, administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, recognizes career achievement by Canadian performing artists.

Montreal-based Gillis is in her 35th year as a solo dancer. She also is a prominent choreographer and works with other dance companies, such as Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, the National Ballet of Canada, Ballet British Columbia, Momix and the Bruce Wood Dance Company.

But she is best known for her solo dance performances, which have been acclaimed throughout the world. In 1979, she was the first modern dancer to perform in China.

She has created more than 80 dances in her career, choreographing her own work.

"I create dance poems, [crystallizations], condensations, essences … like holding a sparrow in your hand … small but clear in its heart," she says on her website. "It is like spilling water … abundant with life."

A peer assessment committee chose Gillis for "her emotional intelligence, artistic generosity and deep connection to audiences."

"Gillis has been revered by generations of dancers for her mastery of her form; her choreography is characteristically brave, thoughtful, emotional, intimate and elegant," the committee added.

Gillis was born in Montreal in 1953 to an athletic family and first began studying dance and gymnastics at age three.

She began as a professional dancer at 18 and has redefined the dance career by remaining a soloist.

She formed the Margie Gillis Dance Foundation in 1981 to help support and promote her work and touring.

Gillis has performed twice with the Paul Taylor Dance Company in pieces by her brother, the late dancer/choreographer Christopher Gillis.

She has been named as an honorary cultural ambassador for both the Quebec and Canadian governments and won the Order of Canada in 1988. She also is active in humanitarian causes.

Gillis was asked to choreograph two solos for the Cirque du Soleil's newest production Love, set to the music of the Beatles, which premiered in Las Vegas in June 2006.

Her latest works are a stone's poem, Fluid Stability, Voyages and the group opus M.Body.7.

"I choreograph and dance from the inside out in order to make transparent the imagery that lives inside the body. I have researched and developed techniques which give integrity to the form," she says on her website.

"I reveal and work with what is essential, vulnerable and true in our nature. My life's study is in the miraculous nature of the physical communication of intellect, emotion and spirituality. Dance as catharsis, transformation and revelation."