He is a recipient of significant choreographic commissions and awards from the NEA, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation, Choo-San Goh & H. Robert Magee Foundation, Dance Magazine Foundation, Metropolitan Life/American Dance Festival, Hartford Foundation, Arts International, The Greenwall Foundation and The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.  In 1994, Elkins received a Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal, sharing the stage with author Philip Roth and photographer Nan Goldin.  In 2006, he was honored in New York City by the Martha Hill Award for Career Achievement; in 2010, he was honored in Boston with an Elliot Norton Award for Choreography (for Doug Elkins & Friends’ Fräulein Maria).  Elkins has taught and choreographed extensively in the US and Europe and has created original work for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, Flying Karamazov Brothers, MaggioDanza, Pennsylvania Ballet, Union Dance and CanDoCo of London, as well as a number of university dance companies and the renowned Mini & Maxi of Holland. His theater work includes collaborations with Joanne Akalaitis and Philip Glass, Robert Woodruff, Pavel Dubrusky, Annie Hamburger, Molly Smith, Craig Lucas, David Henry Hwang, Barbara Karger and Michael Preston (including Fräulein Maria and Peter & The Wolf, Amsterdam), Anne Kauffman, and Arin Arbus.  A graduate of SUNY/Purchase, he received his MFA in Dance from Hollins University/ADF in 2007.  Until recently, Elkins taught at The Beacon School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where his tenure is the subject of Where the Dance Is, a short film by Marta Renzi.