Navigation Menu
Dance/USA’s National Conference offered grounding keynote speakers, illuminating panels, opportunities for 1:1 consulting, energizing movement workshops, and vibrant performances.
Celebrate the start of the conference at the Harris Theater, Chicago’s home for music and dance. Enjoy performances by Najwa Dance Corps, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Red Clay Dance Company, and Joel Hall Dancers. Grab light bites, drinks, and celebrate this year’s Dance/USA honorees.
Ra Joy is an executive leader and strategist with experience in public policy, cross-sector collaboration, and community-driven change. On day one of the Biden-Harris Administration, Ra was appointed to serve as Chief of Staff at the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also served as executive director of Arts Alliance Illinois.
Dance, Democracy and the Arts in Civic Life
Ra Joy will be exploring the sector’s current reality, identifying the critical role the arts (specifically dance) will play in rebuilding our country, and invoking a collective call to action to movement build together
Presented by Grounded Growth Marketing
Watch performances by Chicago dance artists: Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, Benji Hart, Yin He Dance, Amanda Saucedo, Unfolding Disability Futures, MADD Rhythms, Emma Draves, Aaron Choate, Natya Dance Theatre, and DanSeries Collective
Creative Responses to Money Matters: Pay Equity, Financial Transparency & More (HYBRID)
This session will highlight creative administration responses to resource sharing, financial transparency and pay equity. These strategies counter scarcity mindset and challenge traditional gatekeeping of financial information (which keep the least-resourced of us in that position) and can benefit artists, arts workers, and the entire dance field.
“Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from NCCAkron, by Tonya Lockyer, Editor”: Jonathan Meyer, Julia Antonick, Makini, and Tonya Lockyer
The No Boundaries Archive: A Model for Democratizing Dance Legacies
The lecture-demonstration will walk attendees through the new digital archive, demonstrating its novel features, and sharing ideas for how the resource can be used to represent the voices currently excluded from the archive – especially those of women and BIPOC dance artists.
Gesel Mason and Rebecca Salzer
Dancing on Business: Negotiating Your Worth
This panel will help dancers navigate the contracting process, covering key contract elements, researching and advocating for your worth, and effectively communicating needs during negotiations. Attendees will engage in dialogue with legal and business experts, gaining insights and shifting paradigms around compensation and negotiation in the dance ecosystem. Through education and dialogue, attendees will leave with a basic understanding of service agreements, standard contract negotiation practices, and empowerment to implement these tools in their own negotiations.
Bertrand Evans-Taylor and Guests
Body as Altar
This workshop invites intentional rest and reflection. How can the dancing body be a place for community-building, intention-setting, and imagination? Through guided breath, stretches, and moments of pause, participants will be led through recent queer Fil-Am gatherings, while also asking historical and diasporic questions as it relates to practices of embodiment.
Al Evangelista and Jay Carlon
SmArt Bar sessions are one-on-one consultations between Conference participants and industry leaders (or ‘SmArt Bar Bartenders’) who give their expertise in service of their fellow dance makers and cultural workers.
SmART Bar presented by RADAR Nonprofit Solutions
Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project: Documenting, Celebrating and Advocating for Chicago’s Rich Traditions of Black Dance (HYBRID)
The CBDLP is a cohort based model created to support the long-term sustainability of Black dance organizations in the City of Chicago. The CBDLP is a two-year cohort based model with four pillars in mind: Presenting, Advocacy, Capacity Building and Archiving.
Ennerèssa LaNette, iega, Mashaune Hardy and Robin Denise Edwards
Dancing While Being Deaf and Disabled
This panel offers a unique opportunity to explore Deaf culture and the experiences of Deaf disabled individuals in the dance world. We will discuss best practices for working with Deaf dancers, dispel common myths, and address the layers of discrimination that Deaf disabled dancers often face.
Lead By Antoine Hunter, with panelists: Fred Beam, Zahna Simon, and Brandy “Unique the Deaf Dancer”
Dancing Across Borders: Strengthening U.S.-Mexico Cultural Collaborations
Over the past two decades, the dance scene between Mexico and the United States has undergone a remarkable evolution, marked by an intense cultural collaboration. Through a short overview, we will reveal the dynamic interplay between these two countries, characterized by diverse artistic influences, choreographic styles, and innovative approaches to movement.
Cristina Vázquez, Daniela Urías and Lillian Manzor
Inclusive Choreography: Utilizing the unique creativity of neurodiverse and intellectually disabled dancers in choreographic process
In this workshop, delve into the dynamic world of choreography, focusing on harnessing the unique creativity of neurodivergent and intellectually disabled dancers. This session offers insights, strategies, and practical activities to empower choreographers and dance educators on this inclusive journey.
Amber Johnson, Camerin Allgood McKinnon Watson, Davian DJ Robinson and Mia King
Federal Policy & the Future of Dance: What’s Happening, How We’re Responding, and Where You Fit In
Federal policy changes are hitting the dance field hard—from civil rights concerns to grant terminations and the erosion of agency infrastructure. This session offers a collaborative space to process what’s happening, ask questions, and build strategies together. During this group coaching conversation, we’ll share Dance/USA’s latest policy insights, hear directly from participants about their experiences, and explore concrete ways you can take action and support your community. Come ready to connect, reflect, and move forward—together.
Bertrand Evans-Taylor
Let’s Move
This Movement class will introduce participants to the history and fundamentals of Chicago footwork. The class will begin with the basic steps that are foundational to Chicago footwork. Students will learn how to construct a proper round and build up to a 16-count combination. By the end of the workshop, students will have the opportunity to learn several combo sets.
MurdaMommy
Access Guide to Presenting and Touring the Performing Arts (HYBRID)
Intended for venues and presenters specifically, this guide is meant to address long overdue work to make dance spaces accessible to disabled artists, venue workers, administrators, and audiences. It serves as a valuable resource to empower venues to make the necessary changes that foster an increased inclusive and vibrant artistic community.
Nadia Adame Rojas, Jane Raleigh, Maura LaRiviere and Vanessa Hernández Cruz
Artist Residencies: Transforming the Field through Sustainable Support
This panel brings together voices experienced with designing, producing, and participating in artists residencies. Session attendees will leave with tools to design equitable residencies to enhance current and future programs.
Danni Gee, Duke Dang, Jeremy Williams, and Monique Martin
DEMBOW RELOADED, a Latinx social expressionist movement
Through the exploration of different Latin American aesthetics, participants will be guided through an agile warm up, soft stretching and shared choreography while simultaneously experiencing a “mezcolanza” (or mix) of traditional, modern and contemporary Latin American soundscapes.
Camila Rivero Pooley, Alberto Christopher Mendoza, Amanda Boike, and Ariel Zetina
Supporting Workers: An Opportunity for Dance Employers
In an era marked by a deepening affordability crisis, unstable arts funding, mounting pressure on dance organizations, and the erosion of democracy and justice-aligned policy, the labor movement is gaining momentum—demanding attention from employers across the arts. This timely conversation brings together organizers from both the worker and management sides to explore how dance employers can proactively advance worker protections, improve conditions, and support workforce sustainability. Panelists will share insights and actionable strategies to help employers align their practices with a more equitable, justice-centered future.
Presented by Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts
Whitney Parnell is the founder and CEO of Service Never Sleeps, an organization that serves as a resource for justice-minded individuals by providing them with the knowledge and tools to advance racial equity within their own spheres of influence.
What Does it Mean to be Black-Led?: Black Leaders’ Values, Experiences, and Needs to Thrive
Parnell will share Service Never Sleeps’ Black-led research, her lived experience as a Black leader, and what systems / conditions need to be in place for Black led leaders and organizations to thrive.
Experimentation in Performance: Hip Hop, Blk Arts and Chicago
An hour long conversation and sharing on experimentation, Blk Arts Movement, and Elastic Art’s Dark Matter Residency program in Chicago. Through individual, cross-collaborative and organizational endeavors the panelist are part of the weavings of Futurity and Tradition in Hip Hop and in Blk Radical Arts in Chicago.
Fabulous Freddie, Jonathan Woods, cat mahari and Jarius V. King
Who’s in the Room? Reimagining Audience Engagement Across Chicago’s Dance Ecosystem
This panel aims to delve into practical applications of audience development strategies, inspired by the Wallace Foundation’s report, In Search of the Magic Bullet. We will bring together Chicago-based professionals who have successfully navigated the challenges of building and sustaining dance audiences. The discussion will focus on actionable insights and real-world experiences that can benefit organizations of all sizes.
Solomon Bowser, Julia Mayer, and Vershawn Sanders-Ward
Wellness for Dancers
This lecture will review the wellness challenges that dancers must work through in order to achieve peak performance. It will explore solutions and references scaled to dance companies of all sizes and the freelance dancer.
The Dance/USA Task Force on Dancer Health is composed of medical professionals who work directly with professional dance companies and professional dancers across the USA and Canada. The mission of the Dance/USA Task Force on Dancer Health is to maintain the health, safety and well being of professional dancers.
Jennifer Jankowski, Dance/USA’s Task Force on Dancer Health (PT, DScPT, OCS, FAAOMPT, CSCS, Athletico Physical Therapy)
Machine to Body: Digitally Archiving Black Diasporic Dance
As dancers and dancemakers address artificial intelligence’s place in their creative process, Black dance artists are also exploring artificial intelligence as a means of archiving their work.
Judy Tyrus, Eric Waldman, Roger Ellis, Jorie Goins and Gesel Mason
Seeing, Listening & BEing Together as Black Femme Praxis
Join us for a listening session to be with curiosities of artist sustainability, living, and survival for Black girls. This will be a space for recalibration, restoration during the conference; a dreaming studio; playground.
Blair Ebony Smith, paris cyan cian and Kamari Smalls
DounDance with Ayodele Drum and Dance
Does African drumming make you move? Learn West African dance technique and play rhythms on a doundoun drum. This class is 90 minutes of pure energy for all levels that combines West African drumming and dance for a full body workout.
Ayodele Drum and Dance
SmArt Bar sessions are one-on-one consultations between Conference participants and industry leaders (or ‘SmArt Bar Bartenders’) who give their expertise in service of their fellow dance makers and cultural workers.
SmART Bar presented by RADAR Nonprofit Solutions
Enjoy performances by We Are Collective and Amanda Ramirez
Joy & Juneteenth One Foot on Stage and the Other in the Street: Navigating Black Identity in Dance and Activism (HYBRID)
This session seeks to delve into the potent role of Black dancers and choreographers who utilize their artistic platforms for activism, focusing on how dance can catalyze social change and embody decolonized narratives.
Jeri Rayon and Geysa Castro
When Black Women+ Speak
Join UBW for a landmark talk series that will convene women+ of color leaders to explore the nuances of identity, community, values, support, and success among BIPOC women+ producers.
Lai-Lin Robinson and Pia Monique Murray
Steps in Time: Weaving Cultural Memory and Urban Space
This session will explore Dance Educator Cristin Carole’s and Urban Planner Jenna Pollack’s trust-based partnership, research methodologies, and the importance of centering Black perspectives through practices of deep care. Together, they reveal the histories and counterhistories of Chicago dance woven through SDST’s living legacy.
Cristin Carole and Jenna Pollack
Welcoming Refugees and Immigrants Into the Local Dance Ecosystem
In this panel, individuals from Dance Peace and its affiliates discuss what support can look like for refugees and immigrants in dance. What can integration look like in dance education, festivals, and professional dance ecosystems? With Chicago as an example, panelists explore the importance of opportunities in dance across the refugee and immigrant experience.
Shalaka Kulkarni, Shawn Renee Lent, Shireen Nassar and Rubén Pachas
Activating the Numbers: Leveraging the Data of Advocacy and Strategic Decision Making In Dance
A Research panel by Dance/USA
Shakira Segundo with Jennifer Benoit-Bryan of SMU Data Arts
Embodying Shared Leadership
Participants will engage in movement, but previous dance experience is not required. The workshop focuses on the wisdom of the body with activities that can help reveal patterns and behaviors in leadership from an embodied perspective, giving an alternative viewpoint regarding relationships, communication, and diverse leadership styles.
Cherie Hill, jose e. abad and Rebecca Fitton
Join us for P-Top’s The Ring, a Chicago footwork event where talented young dancers come together, settle their differences in the circle and earn respect.
Although this session is designed for Dance/USA members, we are happy to open the doors to other Conference registrants who wish to learn more about membership and the future of Dance/USA
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
This site uses cookies for WordPress, YouTube, and Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site and the most popular pages. Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
