William Frederking has been photographing dance and dancers in Chicago since 1989. As a faculty member of the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago for thirty-four years, he taught studio lighting and performance photography. In 2013, Frederking began a personal project he calls Transcendence:
Dancer Portraits. The focus of this project has been three-fold: to capture moments of deep union between a dancer and their dance, to provide pro-bono solo "movement portraits" to current dance artists, and to document the beauty, scope, diversity, and depth of dance in Chicago.