Bessie Award winner Diedre Dawkins has been appointed to the full-time BFA Dance faculty of the Peabody Conservatory, where she will teach Horton, Graham, West African, and Afro-Fusion dance, as well as choreographing works for student performances. She has previously served in a part-time capacity during the inaugural year of the BFA Dance program at Peabody.
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 was founded in the fall of 2018. The new program builds on the Peabody Preparatory’s legacy as 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 in the program explore the interconnections between dance, music, science, and medicine, and have opportunities to develop expertise in other areas including composition, citizen artistry, performing arts medicine, movement therapy, and non-traditional approaches to pedagogy.
