2019 Conference-Philadelphia, PA

October 17th – October 19th, 2019

2019 Women in Dance Leadership Conference Highlights

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Keynote Speaker – Brenda Dixon Gottschild

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner, 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of American Performance. Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016); and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017).

Honorary Guest Speaker – Elizabeth Yntema

Elizabeth Yntema

Elizabeth Yntema is the President & Founder of the Dance Data Project™. She is a member of the Joffrey Ballet Board of Directors as well as WTTW and a member of the Advisory Board of the Trust for Public Land in Illinois. Liza was graduated from the University of Virginia in 1980 and is 1984 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, where she was awarded the annual prize for Outstanding Contribution to Social Justice.

Ms. Yntema is a past member of numerous organizations in the Chicagoland area, including the Hubbard Street Dance Company, Women’s Bar Association, Winnetka Board of the Northwestern Settlement House and the Children’s Home and Aid Society and the Junior League of Chicago, where she was named as Volunteer of the Year for her work advocating for homeless women and children. Named to the 2018-2019 cohort of The Philanthropy Workshop, Liza will spend a year as part of a global network of 450 program graduates designated as “the next generation of strategic philanthropists” with modules in London, Cambodia and San Francisco.

Featured Presenters

Hannah Bates, WID Talk Speaker

Hanaah joined Flamenco Vivo in 2011 as Company Manager and Managing Director and was named Executive Director in July 2017. She is a graduate of Florida State University with a BFA in Dance and Spanish and completed the 2016 Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategies through National Arts Strategies and Penn University. Hanaah served as the Project Manager of “100 Years of Flamenco in New York,” a multimedia exhibit curated by Flamenco Vivo in conjunction with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She was a 2014 Emerging Leaders of New York Arts Fellow and currently serves on their Board of Directors as a co-chair. She joined on the Arts for All Abilities Consortium’s Values Group from 2015-2016 and was a member of the Steering Committee from 2016-2017.

Mesma Belsaré, Soloist/WID Talk Speaker/Workshop Presenter

Described by The New York Times as “a tour de force” and by The Dance Current Magazine as “as mesmerizing as staring into the heart of a fire“, Mesma Belsaré is a dancer, painter and actor. Belsaré is recipient of the Cambridge Arts Council’s Artist-Grant, the Government of India scholarship for advanced training in Bharatanātyam and Indian classical music, and the New England Foundation for the Arts DANCE grant.

Solo dance venues include The Lincoln Center (NYC), Asia Society (NYC), Alvin Ailey Theater (NYC), The Lincoln Theater (Washington D.C.), Siri Fort (New Delhi) and the Harbourfront Centre (Toronto).

Janis Brenner, Workshop Presenter

Janis Brenner is an award-winning dancer/choreographer/singer/teacher and Artistic Director of Janis Brenner & Dancers in NY. She has toured in 36 countries and is recognized for her multifaceted artistic range. Ms. Brenner received “Best Production” at the 2018 Off-Broadway United Solo Theatre Festival for her one-woman show Inheritance: A Litany. Other honors/grants: 2017 “Best Choreography” from United Solo for Eva Petric’s eden, transplanted, 1997 group “Bessie” in Meredith Monk’s work The Politics of Quiet, “Bessie” nomination for Solo for Janis created by Richard Siegal,

Lester Horton Award in L.A., Copperfoot Award for Lost, Found, Lost at Wayne State, Harkness Foundation for Dance (10), NY Foundation for the Arts, Asian Cultural Council, U.S. State Department, The Fund for US Artists at Int’l Festivals, Trust for Mutual Understanding, US Embassies in Sarajevo, Moscow, Jakarta and Dakar, and a commission for The Memory of All That from the Whitney Museum of American Art. JB&D has been awarded major grants from the O’Donnell-Green Music & Dance Foundation for The Mind-Stuff Variations with composer Jerome Begin, and for Once You Are Not A Stranger with composer Svjetlana Bukvich. Her work has been commissioned/restaged on more than 50 companies/colleges worldwide, and she is a sought-after master teacher conducting workshops in improvisation, composition, repertory and vocal work. Ms. Brenner performed for many years with Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, Michael Moschen, Annabelle Gamson, and the Murray Louis Dance Company. She received her MFA from Hollins University/ADF program. Ms. Brenner is on faculty at The Juilliard School as mentor for Choreographers & Composers collaboration and “Creative Process” instructor.

Jacqulyn Buglisi, Workshop Presenter

In her four-decade career as a choreographer, artistic director, dancer, educator, and advocate, Buglisi has made an indelible impact on the field of dance. Using literature, poetry, and heroic archetypes, Buglisi crafts socially-relevant dances that reveal the visceral strengths, humor and exquisite vulnerabilities of the individual. She co-founded BDT in 1993 following an illustrious career as a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, during which she toured worldwide and was featured in the CBS presentation of the Kennedy Center Honors and the film “An Evening of Dance and Conversation with Martha Graham.”

Her repertoire of more than 100 ballets features such masterworks as Requiem, Frida, Threshold, and Sand, and is archived in the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Highlights of her commissions include Suspended Women, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; Ninfee, Richmond Ballet; The Four Elements, Flamenco Festival presented in Madrid, Sadler’s Wells, London, and New York City Center; and, the awakening environmental revolution exposed in the Moss Anthology ballets, UC, Santa Barbara and Marymount Manhattan College. Her dances have been seen nationwide on the stages of The Joyce Theater, Kennedy Center, David H. Koch Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, Vail International Dance Festival, and abroad at the Melbourne State Theater, Australia, Teatro Nuovo, Milan, Italy, Prague International Festival, and in China, India, Japan, and Israel.

Crystal Davis, WID Talk Speaker

Crystal U. Davis is a dance artist and scholar whose work has been renowned by an eclectic community of adjudicators and audiences from Donald McKayle to the royal family of Jodhpur, India. As a performer her work spans an array of genres from modern dance companies including Notes in Motion to East Indian dance companies including Nayikas Dance Theater Company to her own post-modern choreography at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Dance New Amsterdam. She has conducted ethnographic research in Rajasthan, India on the relationship between religious beliefs and both creative and pedestrian movement.

She served as grant panelist for the South Carolina Arts Council and as board member for the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. Ms. Davis also founded a movement consulting company called Movement Artistry Project. (M.A.P.) Her awards include Emory University’s Pioneer Award and the Texas Woman’s University’s Kitty McGhee Honor for Outstanding Achievement. Ms. Davis earned her B.A. in Religious Studies with a minor in Dance from Emory University, her M.F.A. in Dance from Texas Woman’s University, her Masters in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and her Laban-Bartenieff Movement Analysis certification from Integrated Movement Studies.

Maura Keefe, WID Talk Speaker

Maura Keefe is a contemporary dance historian. She is a scholar in residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, where she writes about, lectures on, and interviews artists from around the world. Keefe has also given lectures and led audience programs nationally at places such Princeton University, UCLA, the Goethe Institut (Los Angeles), New York Live Arts, the Joyce Theatre, and New York’s City Center, and internationally for the Festival Internacional Danza Extremadura in Monterrey, Mexico. Keefe has served on the board for the Congress on Research on Dance (CORD), as a dance panelist for the New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), and as chair for the Department of Dance at the College at Brockport.

While she was chair at Brockport, the College selected dance as one of four “programs of distinction.” She has an MFA in choreography and performance from Smith College and a PhD in dance history and theory from University of California, Riverside. She is the Associate Director of the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park where she teaches dance history and theory and choreography.

Shaness Kemp, Soloist/Workshop Presenter

Shaness Kemp

Kemp is a native of Nassau, Bahamas and holds both a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master’s of Fine Arts degree from Temple University. She is a freelance dancer, choreographer and dance educator and is currently on faculty at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is a certified Umfundalai teacher and has taught at various institutions, festivals and intensives. Kemp has trained with several notable artists and professional dance companies, including Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, Kariamu &Company: Traditions, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, Eleone Dance Theatre, Philadanco! The Philadelphia Dance Company, Urban Bush Women, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Rennie Harris Puremovement, The Katherine Dunham Seminar and The American Dance Festival.

She was the 2015-2016 recipient of the Ellen Forman Memorial Award and her work has been presented nationally and internationally; most recently presenting at the 2019 International Association of Blacks in Dance Conference. Shaness was an original member of the Clothesline Muse Theatre production which premiered at the Painted Bride in Philadelphia in 2014, and she is honored to be back in Philadelphia as a performer for the 2019 Women in Dance Leadership Conference.

Sirui Liu, Soloist

Born in Shanghai, China, Sirui Liu started her dance training with the Shanghai Dance School in the year 2000. After 7 years of training, Ms. Liu continued her studies at the Shanghai Theater Academy for four years. In 2011 Sirui started her professional career in the United States with the Cincinnati Ballet as a Corp de Ballet member. In 2016 she got promoted to Principal with the company. In 2009 Sirui won the gold medal in the senior division at the Ninth Taolibei National Dance Competition in China. She also won the gold medal in the senior division at the Beijing International Ballet Competition in China in 2010. Sirui was included in Dance Magazine’s Top 25 Dancers to Watch in 2017.

Sara Nash, Workshop Presenter

Sara C. Nash was appointed director of dance at the National Endowment for the Arts in August 2018. In this position, she manages the Arts Endowment’s grantmaking for dance. Nash previously served as the program director for dance at the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), where she led programs, including the National Dance Project, for seven years. Prior to working at NEFA, she managed the USArtists International grant program at Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and worked as senior producer at Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts), where she oversaw the international program The Suitcase Fund and developed residency programs for commissioned artists.

Nash’s international experience includes working at Tanec Praha, an international contemporary dance festival in Prague and at the British Council in London. She frequently serves as a moderator, guest speaker, and panelist for a variety of organizations including the Alliance of Artists Communities, Dance/USA, The Japan Foundation, and MANCC, among many others. She earned her B.A. in Theatre and Dance from Mary Washington College and grew up dancing in her home state of Virginia.

Helen Pickett, Workshop Presenter/WID Talk Speaker

Helen Pickett is a choreographer with a rich diversity of experience. She performed with William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt for more than a decade, and she worked with the avant-garde Wooster Group theater company for five non-consecutive years. She has presented longer form work at the likes of the Scottish Ballet and Atlanta Ballet, where she served as Resident Choreographer. She has set more than 40 works on companies across the U.S. and Europe during the past 14 years.

Estefania Ramirez, Soloist/Workshop Presenter

Estefania Ramirez– Soloist, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana is presently the Co-Director of Entre Flamenco Company with Antonio Granjero in Santa Fe New Mexico where they were awarded the City of Santa Fe, NM Mayor’s Arts Award in Excellence 2017. Upon completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre and Dance at the University of New Mexico, she toured nationally with Pablo Rodarte’s Dance España and then was contracted by MARIA BENITEZ TEATRO FLAMENCO with whom toured extensively in the U.S. and Canada including Jacob’s Pillow.

Estefania relocated to Spain in 1997 working with artists such as pianist Juan Cortes, guitarist Rafael Rodriguez and Maestro Jose Galvan and his Cuadro Flamenco. In Spain she worked as a dance professor at the Centro Valenciano de Danza and movement theory teacher for the Ministry of Culture and Education. She founded and directed the JORNADAS FLAMENCAS, an annual music and dance festival supported by the city of Castellón de la Plana. In May of 2018, Ms. Ramirez was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY debuting “Mujeres Valientes” Dance Drama choreographed by flamenco icon Belen Maya. Mrs. Ramirez resides in Santa Fe, NM and is the co-director of the newly founded SANTA FE SCHOOL OF FLAMENCO.

Carlota Santana, WID Talk Speaker

Carlota Santana is Founder and Artistic Director of Flamenco Vivo. Hailed as “The Keeper of Flamenco” by Dance Magazine and honored by the King and Government of Spain with La Cruz de la Orden al Mérito Civil for “all the years of passion, excellence and dedication to the flamenco art,” she is a well-known Spanish/Flamenco dance artist and educator. In 1983, Ms. Santana co-founded Flamenco Vivo with Roberto Lorca; following his death from AIDS in 1987, she was determined to continue their work. In the decades since, she has led the Company to become one of this country’s most successful flamenco companies, with a mission to promote flamenco as a living art form and a vital part of Hispanic heritage.

Stoner Winslett, WID Talk Speaker

Stoner Winslett is the founding Artistic Director of Richmond Ballet, the first major company of professional dancers in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As the longest-tenured artistic director of a major ballet company and one of the few female artistic directors in the U.S., Ms. Winslett has received numerous awards and recognitions at local, state, and national levels, and remains an active leader in the country’s performing arts community including service as former Vice Chair of Dance/USA, as current President of the John Butler Foundation, and as a U.S. delegate to the 2014 U.S.-China Consultation on People-to-People Exchange in Beijing.

Under Ms. Winslett’s leadership, Richmond Ballet was proclaimed The State Ballet of Virginia in 1990, and the Company has performed in major cities around the United States including New York and Chicago, while making its international debut in London in 2012. In May 2015, the Company conducted its first tour to China with performances at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.