Leslie MerrilL

Rehearsal Director, Dramaturge, Editor, Dance Educator, Choreographer, Dance Artist, Dance Film Artist

Leslie holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado, with secondary emphases in Interdisciplinary Performance and Dance for the Camera. She has been teaching a variety of dance forms to students of all ages for over 20 years, teaching master classes, serving as an artist in residence, presenting her dance scholarship at conferences, and sharing her choreographic and video work regionally, nationally, and internationally. Leslie works as Faculty and a Dance Major Co-Coordinator at Metro State University, where she and her colleague developed a new dance major in partnership with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance. She has performed with several dance companies in Colorado and has created multiple evening-length performance works.

I am a dancer, choreographer, video artist, and scholar

I am a collector of stories, images, sounds, dreams, movements, lists, and kindness

I am a giver of flowers, games, dances, lectures, and compliments

I am a teacher and a forever student of many dance forms, and of improvisation, theatre, poetry, history, music, art, literature, film, and humanity

I delight in the delicate balance between form and flow, between tradition and experimentation

I honor the historical legacy of creative traditions, while engaging in interdisciplinary exploration in the present

I am challenged and enlivened by collaboration. I play and trust. I guide and allow myself to be led.

I travel and share my creative work here and abroad

I am forever in awe of the body moving exquisitely through space, time being stretched, condensed, suspended, and made real through the majesty of the senses

I love the ritual of dance and the community that it has the power to create

I am a bridge builder