CBA Fellow Deborah Damast to Study Dance and Leadership

Damast will study how movement can be employed to enhance leadership skills in young women.

Three female dancers on a stage reach up in unison

NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts (CBA) selected Deborah Damast, clinical associate professor and director of the dance education program at NYU Steinhardt, as a 2024–2025 CBA Resident Fellow.

Resident Fellowships represent the CBA’s core program and offer scholars and artists across all disciplines support to develop projects that expand the way the world thinks about the history, practice, and performance of dance.

Damast’s project—“What Can Dance Teach Us About Leadership?”—aims to identify movement skills and concepts that can be employed to enhance leadership by developing an embodied practice, informed by the fields of dance education, leadership, and women's studies.

“There is a preponderance of men in leadership roles in dance, but most of the dancers themselves are women,” says Damast. “Sometimes dancers are silenced in class, and it can take a long time for them to find their voice. I want to help young women to see themselves as leaders through dance.”

In the spring, Damast plans to gather female-identifying leaders from different sectors of dance education—public schools, professional training organizations, and higher education. Bringing these leaders into the CBA studio, they'll brainstorm through their bodies and words what they are doing as dancers that informs their efficacy as leaders.

I want to help young women to see themselves as leaders through dance.

Deborah Damast, Clinical Associate Professor, Director of the Dance Dducation Program

“What do we know already through dance that we can use in leadership training for women in dance, and how do we build that into dance education?” says Damast. “I’m thinking of balance, fall and recovery, shift of weight, breath support, equilibrium—these are all these things we do with our bodies in leadership and in daily life, but they aren’t in the textbooks or classes on leadership.”

Damast hopes to extrapolate these leaders’ movements and conversations in the dance space, linking their explorations back to why and how dance helps them succeed. In addition to writing up her research findings and working toward building a curriculum that can be used for training young dancers and other leaders, she also sees the possibility of developing an artistic piece out of this work.

“I am very grateful to the CBA for allowing me the mental space and capacity to focus on this exciting and interesting area of study,” says Damast. “It’s beautiful that these fellowships are so open-ended, giving us the time, space, and support to work on something that is at the nexus of research and artistry.”

Learn more about Damast’s work and the other 2024–2025 CBA Fellows.

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