ALISON D'AMATO Haverford, Pennsylvania
When Alison D'Amato took her first ballet lessons with three other preschool girls, she says, "Our mothers got a much-needed break and we got to wear pink tutus." Her parents were "hugely encouraging," and by high school, Alison was accepted into the highly competitive Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. Upon graduation, she chose to attend Haverford College, where she could study philosophy while participating in the challenging contemporary dance program at Bryn Mawr College. "I could successfully train as a dancer while I trained as a thinker," she observes.
Soon after her graduation, Alison co-founded a performance group called Dead Genius Productions that has repeatedly been invited to perform at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. She was soon taking on numerous leadership roles in the Philadelphia dance community, where as Bryn Mawr Dance Program Director Linda Caruso Haviland says, "There is a significant amount of creative and performance activity on minimal budgets, and Alison is right in the middle of it all."
David Brick with Headlong Dance Theatre calls Alison "an unusually lucid thinker, passionate artist and natural leader...a bright light among the up-and-coming generation of dance artists and thinkers." Alison's dance experiments, he says, "Bring in highly inventive explorations of movement and physical interactions that were often playful, witty, and idiosyncratic."
Alison believes dance "belongs to all of us and should be in all of our lives." Following her graduate school experience, she plans to return to Philadelphia to continue giving to the community with a "richer palette of skills to employ and share."