Authors

Chief Editor and Primary Author: Beth Megill

Beth Megill (BFA, MFA in Dance, Language of Dance® Master Practitioner and Teacher Trainer) is a full time dance faculty at Moorpark College where she teaches a variety of dance styles including Jazz, Modern, Tap and Ballet.  She write regularly about dance and in support of dance as an art and community glue. She presents frequently for the National Dance Educators Organization on topics of dance analysis, dance pedagogy, dance notation, and artistic practice. She has been an active member of various dance organization boards including a term as the Southern California President of the California Dance Educator’s Association (CDEA). She is Artistic Director of a dance troupe, Megill & Company in Ventura County which celebrates the joy of dance through dynamic, playful and quirky choreography based in modern, jazz and tap aesthetics.  She is an active dance critic for the LA area and writes about life and dance at http://www.dancingpoetess.blogspot.com.

Additional Contributors:

Teresa Heiland, PhD, is a certified Laban Bartenieff Movement Analyst who teaches courses in dance wellness and conditioning; dance pedagogy; choreography; dance notation; senior thesis writing, and freshmen First Year Seminar at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. Heiland’s teaching and research aims to inform disciplinary practices, provoke personal development, and deepen dancers’ understanding of their potential as artists, educators, researchers, writers, and healers. Her analysis of Los Angeles as a dance city was published in the monograph Geographies of Dance: Body, Movement, and Corporeal Negotiations. Her dance research has been published in Dance: Current Selected Research: A Twenty-Year Retrospective/Focus on Movement Analysis; Journal of Imagery Research in Sport and Physical Activity; Journal of Dance Education, and Research in Dance Education. She is Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed Journal of Movement Arts Literacy, http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/jmal/ and Associate Editor of the Newsletter for the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science. Heiland studied writing dance criticism with Ernestine Stodelle, long-time dance critic for the New Haven Register. She is a Franklin Method III Practitioner, a Language of Dance Specialist, and a Pilates instructor, who has staged Nijinsky’s L’apres Midi d’un Faune from Labanotation with live orchestra. While her formative training was in Wigman/Holm, Limon, Hawkins, and improvisational dance techniques, she also studied Javanese dance intensively at Institute Seni Indonesia and at nDalem Pujokusuman in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. Her performing career was with Moving Target, a German-modern dance company rooted in Germany, the New York New Music and Dance Ensemble, and Sai, a pick up modern company based in NYC.

Jillian Lindsey is a dancer, performer, choreographer and freelance writer originally from Houston, Texas. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, Long Beach where she was twice awarded the Department of Dance Scholarship. While at CSULB, Jillian has performed with Jessica Kondrath | The Movement and attended the Ririe-Woodbury Professional Workshop and Holly Johnston’s SummerLAB on scholarship. Jillian’s work entitled Sprinting in Stilettos was premiered in the Contemporary Dance Concert for undergraduate choreographers at CSULB and two of her screendance films Texture and The Age of Ads were selected to be shown in For the Camera Film Festival. Jillian has been featured in works created by Alex Ketley, Susan McClain, Andrew Vaca, Lorin Johnson, Rebecca Bryant, Rebecca Lemme, and more. She currently teaches ballet and pointe classes at MMSD in Long Beach, California and writes for her own blog: https://vanguarddance.wordpress.com/

Former Contributors:

Jeff Slayton
Jeff Slayton performed in New York with the Merce Cunningham and the Viola Farber Dance Companies. After moving to the Los Angeles area he was the Founding Artistic Director and sole choreographer for his LA based company Jeff Slayton and Dancers from 1978 to 1983. His has choreographed for dance companies and university students throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and in Seoul, Korea. Jeff was a faculty member in the Department of Dance at California State University, Long Beach for 21 years (1978-1999), and on the dance faculty at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC from 1988 to 1996. He is the recipient of three NEA Choreography Fellowships, the 1991 Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching at CSULB and Jeff is the author of two books, The Prickly Rose: A Biography of Viola Farber (2006, AuthorHouse) and Dancing Toward Sanity (2014, Dorrance Publishing Co.). He is also on the Review Staff at SeeDance.com. To learn more about Jeff Slayton, please visit his website at http://www.jeffslayton.org.

Christina Abbatiello is a certified personal trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) and a certified Cardio Barre instructor. She manages the Cardio Barre studio in Thousand Oaks, California and continues to dance whenever and wherever she can, especially with the Moorpark College dance department.