Dance Faculty

Image of Elena Demyanenko
Elena Demyanenko is a Russian/American dance artist, choreographer, improviser, maker of dance films, and educator who lives and works between New York City, Vermont, and Moscow, Russia. Demyanenko has extensive professional performance and choreographic experience in a multicultural context from 30 years of touring around the world and is a former member of Stephen Petronio Company and Trisha Brown Dance Company.
email edemyanenko@bennington.edu
Image of Michael Giannitti

Michael Giannitti has extensive professional experience as a lighting designer and educator. He has designed lighting at many of the most prestigious venues around the country and has taught abroad as a two-time Fulbright Specialist Grant recipient.

email mgiannitti@bennington.edu
Image of Levi Gonzalez

Levi Gonzalez is a dance artist whose work highlights the porous boundaries between audience and performer, and employs a queer corporeal logic to resist narrow definitions of knowledge and experience.

email levigonzalez@bennington.edu
Image of Mina Nishimura

Mina Nishimura is a Tokyo-born dance artist whose works focus on ever-changing relationships between internal landscapes and external forms. Buddhism-influenced philosophies and butoh-based principles are reflected across her somatic, performance and choreographic practices. Nishimura is a 2019 recipient of Foundation of Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award.

email mnishimura@bennington.edu
Dana Reitz

Dana Reitz, choreographer, dancer, and visual artist, often uses silence as a means to reveal the musical nuance of movement itself. On her own and in her collaborations with lighting artists, she has pioneered the use of light as a physical partner. Her woven movement and light scores—essential, spare, and fleeting—create a continually shifting perception of time and space. She performed her recent solo work, current, meant to “happen in a mutable light stream, somewhere in a current of time” at Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn, in October 2023.

email dreitz@bennington.edu
Image of Susan Sgorbati
Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action and Interim Director of the MFA in Public Action

Susan Sgorbati is a professional mediator and educator whose creative research has led to collaboration across disciplines and borders as both an artist and a driver of social change.

email sgorbati@bennington.edu

Visiting Faculty

Image of Ros Warby
Visiting Faculty

Ros Warby is an Australian/US dance artist, choreographer, and Alexander Technique Teacher. She is recognized for her unique solo performances, invoking characters that often transcend archetypes by sliding between iconic figures & ideas, allowing the body to embrace the complex experience of a human being at any given moment. Warby has collaborated/danced with Deborah Hay Dance Co. since 1998.

email roswarby@bennington.edu
Image of Kota Yamazaki
Guest Artist

Born in Niigata, Japan, Kota Yamazaki was first introduced to butoh under the teaching of Akira Kasai, then graduated from Bunka Fashion College (Tokyo) with BA in Fashion Design. He is a recipient of Bessie Award 2007, FCA Award 2013, NYFA Fellowship 2016, and Guggenheim Fellowship 2018.

email kyamazaki@bennington.edu

Instructor/Technician

luciana achugar
MFA Fellow

luciana achugar is a dance maker and teacher whose work blurs the lines between theater and healing; and between dancing and ritual. She makes dances as a way of growing an uncivilized, decolonized, utopian body with a practice of being in pleasure.

email lucianaachugar@bennington.edu
Image of Kumi Ishizawa
Technical Instructor in Audio & Video for Dance and Drama

Kumi Ishizawa is a sound engineer/designer. 

email kumiishizawa@bennington.edu
Erin Ellen Kelly
MFA Fellow

Erin Ellen Kelly is a body based artist that creates performances and ephemeral collages for on-site presentation, the stage, installations, photographs and video. Her aim is for the body and its dance to explore nuanced relationships to environments and society.

email erinellenkelly@bennington.edu
Image of Richard MacPike
Technical Instructor in Costume Production

Richard MacPike brings his experience working on Broadway shows such as The Lion King and companies like the Santa Fe Opera and Glimmerglass to his work as costume shop manager at Bennington.

email rmacpike@bennington.edu
Davison Scandrett
Technical Instructor in Lighting and Dance Production

Davison Scandrett is a production manager and lighting designer specializing in experimental performance collaborations across dance, architecture, visual art, poetry, music, information science, criticism, theater, and responsive media.

email davisonscandrett@bennington.edu