Meet the 2021 Summer Institute Faculty
We’re less than a month away from our 2021 Organizing with Artists for Change (OAC) Summer Institute! Today, we’re excited to introduce this year’s faculty, which span generations, geographies, and Dance Exchange projects!
This year’s Institute will be led by…
Judith Bauer (Partnering Artist)
After a lifetime of watching dance, Judith Bauer is happy to be participating in making dance happen. Judith began dancing fifteen years ago at age 70 as a way of dealing with health issues. While she has studied other forms, she is mainly interested in improvisational dance for its ability to keep one mentally sharp and focused on responding to others. She is enjoying the challenge of facilitating classes within virtual spaces. In addition to being part of the supportive community that is Dance Exchange, Judith is a member of Quicksilver, the senior dance company of Arts for the Aging. Quicksilver dancers—all over the age of 60— use improvisational forms to engage with frail seniors in day programs and residential facilities.
Shawn Brush (Partnering Artist)
Bio coming soon.
Christina Catanese (Partnering Artist)
Christina Catanese works across the disciplines of dance, education, environmental science, and arts administration to inspire curiosity, empathy, and connection through creative encounters with nature.
As an artist, she has participated in residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Signal Fire, Works on Water, and SciArt Center, and has presented her work throughout Philadelphia and the region. In six years as the Director of Environmental Art at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Christina oversaw all aspects of creating and implementing an environmental art exhibition program in the nature center’s 340 acres of forests, fields, and gallery spaces. Attending University of Pennsylvania, she has a Masters in Applied Geosciences and a BA in Environmental Studies and Political Science. Christina also knits feverishly, gardens novicely, and enjoys photographing ecology in wild places.
Christina is recently based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after living in Philadelphia for 15 years, and growing up in Pittsburgh.
Esther Geiger (Partnering Artist)
Esther Geiger is most interested in how things connect, and in finding connections by looking for essence. She began her training with Early Modern Dance techniques and toured in the 1970’s with a small company performing in schools. In 1980, she began intensive studies of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS) as well as Iyengar Yoga. Her performing and teaching philosophy was transformed through Structured Improvisation (mentored by master Richard Bull), along with LBMS. Esther taught at the Dance Exchange under Liz Lerman in the 1970's-80's. She reconnected with the DX community in the 2000’s, most recently performing in Of Equal Place: Isotopes in Motion, co-directed by Elizabeth Johnson Levine and Keith Thompson. Esther is a Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) and has applied that work to playground design, movement education, unschooling, personnel management and audio description. She is a member of WholeMovement, a coterie of Movement Analysts promoting LBMS globally.
Elizabeth Johnson Levine (Associate Artistic Director and Director of Partnerships at Dance Exchange)
Elizabeth Johnson Levine (EJ, she/her/hers) is a choreographer, dancer, and educator with a focus in socially engaged dance practices. Johnson connects communities through choreography, creating dance that promotes civic dialogue, and designing participatory experiences that apply artistic practices in multiple contexts. She has a particular interest in working with youth and elders, developing embodied structures for science learning, and promoting leadership development through the arts.
Johnson holds a B.A. in Dance with a minor in Theater from Connecticut College and a M.F.A. from Arizona State University. She has studied at London Contemporary Dance School, taught and performed internationally, and was the Associate Artistic Director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Metro D.C. for over a decade. For five years she was at Arizona State University as the Coordinator of Socially Engaged Practice, working with an interdisciplinary team to create new curricula focused on training artists to work in, and engage with, diverse communities. She then spent two years immersed in arts integration while living in Chicago, working with Hubbard Street Dance’s Community Programs and with the Arts Integration Mentorship project at Columbia College Chicago. Elizabeth recently worked with Liz Lerman at Arizona State University as the Co-Director (with Nik Zaleski) of CounterAct a multiyear campus wide Arts Based Initiative for Sexual Violence prevention.
EJ has been connected to Dance Exchange (full or part time) since 1998 and is currently Associate Artistic Director and Director of Partnerships.
Jamē McCray, PhD (Partnering Artist)
Dr. Jamē McCray founded Ecotonic Movement in 2020. She is an ecologist and choreographer whose work explores questions of place through three forms of inquiry: research, movement, and community engagement.
Currently serving as the Managing Director at the Alliance for Watershed Education, Jame’s research focuses on environmental education and management of natural resources. Her scientific interests reflect a lifelong fascination with how people move through and interact with their environments. As a dancer, collaborating artist with the Dance Exchange, and founding board member of the Superhero Clubhouse, Jame works with artists and community members to create engaging performances and workshops firmly grounded in science.
A Brooklyn native, Jame earned a B.S. in Biology from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a M.A. in Marine Policy from the University of Miami, and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in Wildlife Ecology.
Cassie Meador (Executive Artistic Director at Dance Exchange)
Cassie Meador (she/her/hers) is a choreographer, educator, writer and Executive Artistic Director of Dance Exchange. Her creative work builds ways for communities to be together in shared dialogue and critical reflection, and cultivates opportunities to work together across generations. Her performance projects explore questions central to our lives and time, and expand where dance comes to meet our shared world. In 2013 Cassie created the performance How To Lose a Mountain along a 500-mile walk, taking her from Washington, DC, to a mountaintop removal mining site in West Virginia to trace the impacts of the energy that fuel her home; Bricks and Bones, a performance series co-created with Paloma McGregor in 2015, responds to the erasure of Black lives and communities in Dallas, TX; in New Hampshire Avenue: This Is a Place To... , Cassie led a multi-year creative placemaking effort for Dance Exchange’s home community, in partnership with the City of Takoma Park; and currently through her Off-site/Insight: Stories from the Great Smoky Mountains, she is working with the National Park Service, leaders from the Cherokee community, and regional artists to build capacities to contend with the complexities that shape our relationship to the park land. Cassie has taught and created dances in communities throughout the U.S. and internationally in Japan, Canada, England, Ireland, and Guyana. She has worked extensively with the Girl Scouts, National Park Service, and USDA Forest Service to develop and enhance environmental curricula with the arts and encourage environmental stewardship through embodied learning. Her work with educational institutions, such as Wesleyan University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Michigan State University among others, has influenced educators and students to embrace a cross-disciplinary approach to artmaking, education, and social change. She was selected as an artist representative of Initiatives of Change to attend the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban, South Africa. Cassie is a 2017 graduate of Leadership Montgomery.