Teaching & Pedagogy

Background

Love has fueled my 30 + year teaching practice that spans studio, professional, community, public school, conference, and university settings.

Pedagogy

i often describe my approach as all-in, a method of teaching that invites every participant, to welcome all of their expertise into the room. my pedagogies foreground personhood, artistry, and complexity. When in the role of teacher, i prioritize rigor, CARE, trauma-informed principles, depolarization, belonging, participation, agency, and non-othering praxis. i seek to nurture spaces that support active questioning as a means to consciously acknowledge the knowings of each body in the room. Among many things, i propose an ecosystems approach to course design that formally invites and acknowledges co-authorship, and ongoing feedback loops. I believe learning environments can genuinely celebrate the temporary community that forms during each class, workshop or course. And that each course can be perceived as a collectively devised artistic work.

Areas of Expertise

Areas of expertise include the following

  • choreographic approaches/trusting personal artistic voice

  • improvisation (as generative process and as performance practice),

  • inderdisciplinarity, working at the intersection of the visual, literary, and performing arts

  • multi-platform-experimental performance (developing fluency across mediums, contexts and their site sensitive applications),

  • technical movement practices ranging from ballet to hybrid post-post-modern forms, sometimes referred to as “contemporary,”

  • directing and devising/facilitation of textual and movement-based dialogue,

  • intertextuality/interdisciplinary cultural and knowledge production processes,

  • constructive feedback methods,

  • developing creative practices across genres and disciplines

i also facilitate workshops and consult in the following areas

  • arts-integration practices (i.e. arts as a learning strategy),

  • artist professional development [Topics: workshop development (pre-K through professional); budget forecasting; grant writing (aligning ideas with opportunities); articulating ideas in writing; demystifying contracts, etc.],

  • critical dance studies (delving into, gutting and fervently revising repeatedly narrowed epistemologies),

  • organizational collaborations and partnerships,

  • organizational visioning and strategic planning (i believe the impossible can always become possible), as well as

  • program design

Selected Current roles

my current teaching practices include the following roles

  • Lecturer in Improvisation, Advanced contemporary modern technique (311/411), and Orientation to Dance studies for the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music dance program.

  • Adjunct faculty in Dance and Humanities at Miami-Dade College.

  • resident Teaching Artist for Arts for Learning Miami’s South Florida Wolf Trap initiatives. This work with very young people and their awe-inspiring teachers has urged me to re-imagine the word “energy.”

  • Guest teacher, Syncopate Collective

  • Teaching Artist, Armour Dance Theatre