UR Program of Dance and Movement

The inaugural ARTs + Change (Activate, Reimagine, Transform) Conference was celebrated on June 3-6, 2021 with 50 artists from across the world (including a doze...n UR faculty, alumni and one student!) who shared meaningful and insightful presentations of their work and pedagogies in the arts that aim to be inclusive, focus on equity and foster positive social change. If you missed it, or missed a session you wanted to see, select artists have allowed us to share the sessions via video for a period of one month! To ensure accessibility, we are offering this free of charge, as we did the conference, and presenters were paid an honorarium to share their work. To support this conference, and a future iteration, please consider making a tax-deductible donation here: https://tinyurl.com/tayjduvn Sessions available online until July 21, and we are excited to share the ARTs + Change full Video Playlist! https://youtube.com/playlist Thank you and please enjoy these wonderful and thoughtful sessions! Best, Missy Pfohl Smith Director, Institute for the Performing Arts

Class of 2021 graduate Yaa Adenike Cunningham comes from the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, and was born and raised within a close-knit Pan-African community. Here at UR, she witnessed the power of using the arts as a form of cultural upliftment and spiritual healing. From the age of 4 she learned traditional West African dance and music; in middle and high school she also studied the visual arts. Yaa joined our Sansifanyi West African Dance and Drum Ensemble, a group that... celebrates the power and freedom that West African Dance gifts us! She has always been a creative spirit as a student, and early on starting creating choreography for herself and her peers that intertwined West African Dance with contemporary dance and design. In her sophomore year, we were in the early stages of planning the new Sloan Performing Arts Center, slated to open this month. Yaa was invited her to share her choreography in NYC at a charette for a group of alumni and supporters who spent a day brainstorming ways to support and forward the arts and the Sloan PAC at UR. Yaa is a Posse Scholar, which is awarded to seniors in high school based on merit and leadership skills. Yaa also was chosen for the prestigious Ronald E McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, aimed to support students to move forward in their education through graduate school. At the University of Rochester, Yaa majored in Dance Studies and African & African-American Studies. In the future she will be moving to the West Coast where she will attend Claremont Graduate University, obtaining a M.A. from the Cultural Studies Department studying the arts as a non-colonized terrain and a mode of collective healing. She was awarded the Hook-Taylor Dance Award, otherwise known as the Pooka Prize, for her amazing imagination and her talents in dance design and choreography. Congrats Yaa Adenike! See more