Dance (MFA) Faculty

Image of Elena Demyanenko

Russian-born Elena Demyanenko MFA '22 is a dance artist, choreographer, improviser, dance filmmaker, and educator with over 30 years of national and international touring experience, including performances with the Stephen Petronio Company and the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Her current choreographic work probes 鈥渋mpossible鈥 scores/interferences to un-censor the body while examining the politics of attention, interconnectivity, and the recomposition of desire and its power.

email edemyanenko@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鈥攅ssential, spare, and fleeting鈥攃reate a continually shifting perception of time and space. She performed her recent solo work, current, meant to 鈥渉appen in a mutable light stream, somewhere in a current of time鈥 at Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn, in October 2023.

email dreitz@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

Image of Mart铆n Lanz
MFA Fellow

Mart铆n Lanz is an Interdisciplinary artist and cultural manager with an emphasis on performing arts. He works collaboratively with artists from different disciplines and latitudes, uses tools and information from several territories, and experiments with them to generate pieces, collaborations, artist meetings, and international exchange projects.

email martinlanz@bennington.edu
Image of Londs Reuter
MFA Fellow

Londs Reuter is a dancer and choreographer who makes dances to examine her material鈥攊ts inheritances, its possibilities, and its eventualities.

email londsreuter1@bennington.edu