As the owner of the Brooklyn-based AbunDance Academy of the Arts, Karisma Jay works to help Black and brown dancers discover their individual potential through art, and reach their professional goals within the dance industry.
Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown has been researching, writing about and championing an approach to dance pedagogy that centers on integrating the cultural backgrounds of students into the class curriculum.
Doug Risner has been an educator in many forms throughout his long teaching career. But it’s his current role, as the co-founder and director of the master’s degree in dance and theater teaching artistry at Wayne State University, that perhaps offers him the best synthesis of his research and teaching philosophy.
Alice Teirstein has built an entire career “passing on to others what I had received from dance,” she says. She founded the dance program at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the 1970s, and in 1996, the Young Dancemakers Company, bringing creative dance education to public school students.
The 2021 Dance Teacher Awards will take place virtually on Wednesday, October 6 at 6 pm Easter/3 pm Pacific. Join us as we honor a group of outstanding educators for their contributions to our field!
Every year in our summer issue, we honor four dance educators for their outstanding contributions to the field. Recipients have included studio owners, professors, program directors, K–12 teachers and more, whose specialties run the gamut of dance genres. We need your help to identify this year’s best in the profession. Do you have a colleague […]
Ask Michele Larkin-Wagner and Molly Larkin-Symanietz what sets them and Maplewood, Minnesota–based Larkin Dance Studio apart, and they immediately give the credit to their mom. Shirley Larkin founded the school in 1950 and continued to oversee the growing business until she passed away in 2011. “She put Minnesota on the map for dance training and […]
In Macarena Gandarillas’ jazz class at California State University, Fullerton, a sign in the studio reads, “Never underestimate the power of determination.” This simple mantra embodies what has made this self-described “danceaholic” such an impactful teacher. When Gandarillas came to Los Angeles at age 6 with her family from Santiago, Chile, the language barrier was […]
It was the morning of November 8, 2018, and Jarrah Myles’ first-period choreography students were in last-minute rehearsals for their fall dance concert that evening. “All of a sudden my students’ phones started ringing like crazy,” says Myles, a teacher at Inspire School of Arts and Sciences, a Chico, California, high school whose dance and […]
While taking class in 2006, Marisa Hamamoto felt a tingling sensation in her elbows, then suddenly collapsed to the floor. She was hospitalized and diagnosed with spinal cord infarction, a rare spinal stroke that left her paralyzed from the neck down. Despite being told by her doctor that she may never walk again, let alone […]