Dance Education alumni Dominique M. Fontenot (MA '22) and Anne Marie Robson Smock (MA '20), who is also an adjunct faculty member, will receive mentorship and professional development.
The NYU Production Lab announced seven dance artists who have been selected for its 2025 NYU Artist Development Program for Dance, a five-month program running now through September that provides studio space, mentorship, and business skill development for those facing transitions in their dance careers.
NYU Steinhardt alumni Dominique M. Fontenot (MA '22, Dance Education) and Adjunct Faculty in Dance Education Anne Marie Robson Smock (MA '20, Dance Education) will work on a creative project throughout the summer and will present their works-in-progress in a showcase on September 9 at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, a partner in the program.
The NYU Artist Development Program for Dance is produced and run by the NYU Production Lab with support from the Office of the Provost at NYU and NYU’s Cross-Cutting Initiative on Inequality. In addition to the Center for Ballet and the Arts, the lab partners with the Center for Creative Research in the Tisch School of the Arts, the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the Dance and Collaborative Arts departments at Tisch, the Dance department at Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and the Dance Education department at Steinhardt.
Read the full NYU Production Lab announcement
Dominique M. Fontenot
Dominique M. Fontenot is an educator, choreographer, dance coach, and visual artist from Lawtell, Louisiana. She earned a BFA in Dance from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she choreographed two original works exploring the African American experience within social contexts. Fontenot obtained an MA in Dance Education and Ballet Pedagogy from New York University and American Ballet Theatre (ABT), where she won the Outstanding Community Building and Service in Dance Education award. An ABT® Certified Teacher, she works as a dance teacher and arts coordinator for Achievement First Ujima High School and dance coach for Northwest High School’s Dazzling Dolls. She is also the artistic director of the R.E.A.C.H. Collective, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing opportunities for Black and Brown artists in the performing arts. This year she served as one of the directors for NYU Steinhardt's 2025 Sankofa Celebration for Black History Month.
Anne Marie Robson Smock
Anne Marie Robson Smock is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer, dance educator, and Pilates instructor. Originally from Salt Lake City, she earned a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah; she received her MFA in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts while simultaneously earning her MA in Dance Education from NYU Steinhardt. Smock teaches at NYU Steinhardt, the Steps Academy, and throughout the city. A life-long fan of trying to ask questions that lead to better questions, she's always on the search for untamed joy, connection, and cheap laughs. Smock values idiosyncratic motion over form and humor over rigidity. Using set movement as well as sections of structured improvisation, her works move within a tension of order and surprise. She works with collaborative processes to create dances that are unapologetically human, motional, comical, and visceral. Her work strives to form cathartic communities on stage and in performance that examine personal, ancestral, and social histories with absurdity, wit, and the right amount of anger.
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