MFA in Dance Faculty

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 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 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
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