The Bard College Dance Program/Gibney Partnership provides unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney Company and Company Curated Teaching Artists. The program launched in September 2020 and is the fourth professional partnership launched by the Bard Dance Program, which began in 2009 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and has included the American Dance Festival and the Trisha Brown Dance Company.
The partnership is spearheaded by Company Directors Amy Miller and Nigel Campbell, Bard faculty member and Partnership Coordinator Tara Lorenzen, and Bard Director of Dance Maria Simpson, with support from Senior Company Advisor Alexandra Wells and Senior Company Manager Trina Mannino.
This partnership represents a wide-ranging vision of what dance can be in a liberal arts curriculum at a time when artist engagement in both local and global communities is essential.

Program Components
Curriculum
Each semester, Company Curated Teaching Artists selected by Gibney’s leadership teach courses embedded in Bard’s dance curriculum, including studio courses for all levels of dancers as well as seminar courses that address discipline-specific topics. Extracurricular workshops and master classes will further enhance the educational field of study.
During the inaugural semester, Maleek Washington, 2019 Company Curated Artist and former Gibney Community Actionist, teaches two modern dance technique courses on Bard’s Campus, following a strict COVID-19 safety plan. “It’s amazing how much we can push our boundaries inside of boundaries. It’s been super gratifying to work with Bard students in this unprecedented time,” says Washington.
Company Director Amy Miller is also facilitating Dance Writing as Activism course via Zoom with sessions guest moderated by Artistic Director and CEO Gina Gibney, Gibney’s Senior Director of Artist Development & Curation Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Company Director Nigel Campbell, and Senior Company Manager Trina Mannino. Modeled after Gibney Company’s Advocacy Fellowship program, this course is for students who want to combine an intense exploration of the written word as a tool to speak more powerfully about the relevancy of body-based performance, and/or to pinpoint a pressing issue that ignites a personal passion.
Gibney Company Residency
Once a year, Gibney Company will be in residence at Bard College. Gibney artists will take advantage of unencumbered work time outside of New York City at the beautiful facilities of the Fisher Center for Performing Arts. Each technical residency will include open rehearsals and a final public showing for the community at Bard. Details of the 2021 residency period will be released this spring.
Community Action
This partnership will also involve connections between the Bard community and Gibney’s Community Action team. Gibney will share two Community Action programs with Bard students: our Hands are for Holding assembly program, which uses movement to start conversations with young people about healthy relationships, and our Move to Move Beyond movement workshop series, which addresses individual choice-making as a way to cultivate collective agency.
Teaching Artists
Alanna Morris-Van Tassel
Dancer/Choreographer/Educator/Artist Organizer. Brooklyn native and Saint Paul-based artist excavating cultural retention and fragmentation within Caribbean diasporic identity. TU Dance performer (2007-2017). Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch! TU Dance’s former Artistic Associate (2020) and current Advisor to Springboard Danse Montreal. Minneapolis City Pages’ Artist of the Year and Best Choreographer for her solo, “Yam, Potatoe an Fish!” Artistic Director of AMVTP, founded in 2017 to produce dance, education and community-building initiatives. 2015 McKnight Dance Fellow. Graduate of The Juilliard School and LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts. Currently developing performance art project, Black Light, which explores the nobility of black-ness, divine feminine expression and primordial creativity. Live and virtual presentations in 2021 and 2022. www.alannamvt.com
Cameron McKinney, the Artistic Director of Kizuna Dance, is a New York City-based choreographer and educator. With over 15 years of Japanese language study, he created Kizuna Dance with the mission of using contemporary floorwork to create works that celebrate the Japanese culture. He was recently selected as a 2019-20 U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellow to collaborate with renowned Japanese choreographer Toru Shimazaki and present work in showcases in Japan alongside the 2020/2021 Tokyo Olympic Games’ events. He is a 2020 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow at The School at Jacob’s Pillow (under the direction of Dianne McIntyre and Risa Steinbeirg), a 2017-18 Alvin Ailey Foundation New Directions Choreography Lab Fellow, and a 2018 Asian Cultural Council Individual Grantee. Through Kizuna Dance, Cameron has presented work and taught in fifteen states and in Japan, Mexico, France, and the UK. His commissions include Princeton University, twice from the Joffrey Ballet School, twice from the Let’s Dance International Frontiers Festival, The Dance Gallery Festival, Manhattanville College, CREATE:ART, Western Washington University, and SUNY Brockport, among numerous others. His teaching credits include Adjunct Lecturer positions at Princeton University and Queensborough Community College, and he has taught on faculty at Gibney Dance since 2016. He has also taught on faculty at the Joffrey Dance School, the Charlotte Dance Festival, the Tennessee Dance Festival, the Southern Vermont Dance Festival, and Williamsburg Movement and Arts Center. He is currently building Nagare Technique, a training module that blends streetdance styles and contemporary floorwork. Through Kizuna Dance’s new Culture Commissions program, he also directly supports emerging artists through commissions for new works created through research-oriented explorations into the Japanese culture.