Bessie Award winner Diedre Dawkins will join the BFA Dance faculty of the Peabody Conservatory in 2018-19, teaching West African Dance in the program’s inaugural year.
A performing member of the Ronald K. Brown/Evidence Dance Company for eight years, Dawkins is the founder of “Dance is Healing” mentoring for middle school girls through dance and an adjunct professor in dance at Coppin State University. She also serves as arts director at ConneXions: A Community Based Arts School, where she directs the ConneXions Repertory Company, which performed at the 2016 Opening Ceremony of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dawkins graduated from the NYC High School of the Performing Arts and received her BFA in dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and her MFA in choreography and performance from the University of Maryland. She is the Modern Dance instructor at Alvin Ailey Camp/Towson, and has been an adjunct professor in Dance at Towson University and a visiting artist at Howard University.
Chaired by dancer and choreographer danah bella, the Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance program at the Peabody Conservatory is enrolling its first class for the 2018-19 academic year. The new program builds on the Peabody Preparatory’s foundational work running one of the oldest dance training centers in the United States, and leverages the strengths of the Peabody Conservatory’s status as both a premier conservatory and a division of Johns Hopkins University, a world-class scientific, medical, and research institution. In addition to developing as performing artists, students will explore the interconnections between dance, music, science, and medicine, and will have opportunities to develop expertise in other areas including composition, citizen artistry, performing arts medicine, movement therapy, and non-traditional approaches to pedagogy.
