Department of Dance
MFA and MA Degrees
UNCG graduate programs in dance offer rich experiences in artistry and scholarship that entwine practice, creative expression, and critical investigation. Understanding arises from opportunities to investigate dancing through experiential and analytical lenses such as bodily training, improvisation, performance, choreography, aesthetics, education, somatics, history, and cultural and social critique.
Our students work with faculty members who are active artists and scholars, and who mentor student engagement in the dance professions, as well as guiding their work in the department. We offer an exceptionally strong mentorship program in teaching, including the teaching of dance technique, choreography and performance, dance appreciation and history, and the theories and practices of dance teaching in public education. We prepare students for lifelong learning in dance, to integrate practice and critical investigation, and to engage in dance as a means of understanding and of enacting positive change in themselves and their communities.
Our 60-hour Master of Fine Arts program is in many ways a centerpiece for the department. Students in the program develop and clarify their choreographic voices and deepen their understandings of dance making as a personal, aesthetic, cultural, and social process and product through guided investigations of choreographic methods and practices in coaching and performing movement. The MFA is normally completed over three years and culminates in a project designed and carried out by the student with the support of faculty. While we donīt restrict applications, we prefer students with personal and artistic experiences that extend beyond an undergraduate degree in dance. The MFA is a terminal degree commonly held by studio teaching faculty at the university level.
The MA in Dance is a 36-39 hour degree. Options are available in choreography, design, dance education with licensure for teaching in public schools, or dance theories and practices. The MA in Dance Education is available in a largely-distance format. For more information, on this option, see www.uncg.edu/dce/distanceMA.html. Related area students work closely with faculty in their areas of research and take courses within and outside the department. Current faculty work in aesthetics and criticism, theories of artistic development, pedagogy, dance history and performance studies, and somatics.
At UNCG, graduate students work within a community that includes dance faculty and undergraduate dancers and in a department with its own dance theatre and a growing technology lab. Greensboro, a central-North Carolina town with a long history of diversity and of social justice, is the home of North Carolina Dance Festival and of several modern dance companies. Durham, NC, the home of American Dance Festival, is located nearby.