Dana Tai Soon Burgess
Assistant Professor of Dance
For more than a decade, the award-winning Burgess has created dances that freshly synthesize Eastern and Western aesthetics. He was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to an Irish-Scottish American father and a Korean American mother. He originally trained with Tim Wengerd and studied the Michio Ito technique. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from George Washington University, where he now teaches as a professor of dance. He has also taught at the Hamburg Ballet School, the National Ballet of Peru, and King Sejong University in Korea, and conducted master classes for the Xiamen Dance Company, Beijing Contemporary Dance Company, and Latvian State School of Dance. He is on the board of directors for the Capital Region Educators of Dance Organization. He was awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowship in 2006 to teach and choreograph in Lima, Peru.
Diverse elements inspire his choreography: culturally specific dance forms, martial arts, the visual arts, and personal journeys to Asia, Latin America, South America, the Middle East, and Europe. Burgess established his contemporary dance company with the goal of originating works from pan-Asian American perspectives.
With work presented internationally and nationally, Burgess's awards include the 2003 Pola Nirenska Award, the Mayor's Arts Award in 1994 and 2005, and four D.C. Metro Dance Awards in 2001, 2002, and 2003. He was an American Cultural Specialist for the State Department in 2000, 2003, and 2004 and has received multiple fellowships for choreography from the D.C. Commission for the Arts and Humanities. His Christian Andersen-inspired The Nightingale (1997) was chosen as the Kennedy Center's 2002 annual holiday show for young people, and subsequently toured the U.S. three times to over 60 cities.