---

BANNING BOULDIN

Artistic Director, New Dialect

 

Banning Bouldin is a Nashville native and received her BFA in dance from the Juilliard School in 2002. She spent the next eight years working internationally with some of her field’s most renowned companies, dancers, and choreographers: The Cullberg Ballet of Sweden, Mats Ek, Johan Inger, Hubbard Street 2, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Alexander Ekman, Buglisi/Foreman Dance, Wen Wei Wang, and others. She was a soloist, master teacher, and rehearsal assistant during her tenure with Aszure Barton and Artists from 2003-2010. In 2007 she began to develop and teach her own syllabus in Paris at the Theatre de la Danse and Studio Harmonic. That same year she joined Rumpus Room Dance, based both in Portland, Oregon and Goteborg, Sweden, where she had the opportunity to co-create and perform multiple site-specific dance works. She and her Rumpus Room colleagues were nominated one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2010. She has taught master classes in the US, Canada, and Europe, has performed worldwide, and has been featured in four films, as well as in articles in Dance Magazine, The New York Times, and Dance Spirit.

In the Fall of 2010, Bouldin returned to Nashville, where she was engaged as a contemporary dance instructor and guest choreographer for the School of Nashville Ballet and Vanderbilt University. She has since been commissioned to create work for the Nashville Ballet, Visceral Dance Chicago, and Springboard Danse Montreal. 

Bouldin formed New Dialect in 2012 in response to the need in the Nashville community for a rich and relevant contemporary dance company that would allow dancers, teaching artists, and choreographers the opportunity to explore the wide variety of groundbreaking movement vocabularies that exist in the world of 21st Century dance. 

In 2014, New Dialect was named Nashville’s Best New Dance Company and Bouldin, herself, was honored with the Tennessee Dance Association’s Margaret Martin Award for her outstanding contributions to further the public image and accessibility of dance in Tennessee. 

She was selected one of seven choreographers to participate in Springboard Danse Montreal's Emergining Choreographers 2015. She is also the winner of Northwest Dance Project's 2015 Pretty Creative international choreographic competition.