Donate to the BIPOC Professional Dancer Mentorship

A Word From Our Director:
We at MIDDAY are excited and inspired by the impactful change we fostered in the first cycle of our BIPOC Professional Dancer Mentorship Program, and we are dedicated to making it a fixture in our ongoing programming. We need your help to make this happen! The BIPOC Professional Dancer Mentorship Program requires about $12,000 to run, with costs including:
• Class-taking stipends ($750 per mentee)
• Personal stipends ($500 per mentee)
• food and program supplies ($1900)
• 62 total mentorship hours (valued at $50/hour)
• space rental for cohort meetings and final events (about $1000)
• professional development workshop facilitators ($800)
This budget does not include our Director's donation of administrative hours (valued at $9600)

 Help us sustain this program! Click the button below to donate via our fiscal sponsor, Studio at 550. Comment in the "Note" field to indicate your donation is for the BIPOC Dancer Mentorship Program.

Apply to the BIPOC Professional Dancer Mentorship Program

Midday Movement Series is thrilled to launch our second cycle of the BIPOC Professional Dancer Mentorship, a mentorship program supporting early-career BIPOC professional contemporary dancers to establish their dance paths in Metro Boston. This program aims to empower and celebrate early-career BIPOC dancers by creating a sense of connection and community, and by providing a space to address the impacts of structural inequities and strategies to help navigate and overcome them.

​This program is a crucial part of MIDDAY's racial justice work. By providing a new generation of BIPOC dance artists with resources and support to create their own sense of purpose and belonging in the Greater Boston dance community, MIDDAY will continue to cultivate a sustainable and vibrant local dance sector that is directly shaped by the voices and self-determination of artists of color.
Program Description:

In this eight month program, four early-career professional contemporary dancers (4 years of experience or less) will receive and commit to the following:
  • class stipends to take a minimum of 60 hours of dance classes over the course of the program (equivalent to 3 hours of class-time over the course of 20 working weeks);
  • $500 personal stipend to use at their discretion;
  • Bi-weekly mentorship consultations with MIDDAY director Marissa Molinar to help guide their individual growth (about 18 hours over the course of the program);
  • Monthly all-mentee gatherings to encourage peer-to-peer networking, support, and learning (about 18 hours over the course of the program);
  • Access to an all-mentee chat group to encourage connection between and beyond group gatherings.​​
The program will run from September 2023 - April 2024, culminating with three final celebration in which mentees will share their top takeaways while also connecting with the wider dance community. Mentees will be invited to show work and works-in-progress at this celebration.
Eligibility Criteria

This program is open to contemporary dancers of color who are:
  • at least 18 years old,
  • self-identify as a professional or pre-professional dancer,
  • are developing a professional career as a dancer,
  • have four (4) years or less of professional experience,
  • identify as belonging to one or more BIPOC identities, including:
    Black or part of the Global African Diaspora; 
    Indigenous or Native American; 
    Latine/x or non-white Hispanic;
    Asian, South Asian, or Asian American;
    Pacific Islander, Samoan, or Hawaiian Native;
    Persian, Arab, Middle Eastern, or North African;
    and all other ethnicities of color.
Applications Are Open!
Applications for this cycle are now open! Deadline to apply is July 10th, 2023. Click below to apply now!  ​Questions? Email us for more information.
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Inaugural BIPOC Professional Dancer Mentees (2022-2023)

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CASSIE WANG
Cassie Wang (she/her) is a Boston-based multidisciplinary artist with
a focus on contemporary dance performance. Originally from Kansas City, she grew up training at the American Dance Center under the direction of Kristopher Estes-Brown
and Jennifer Tierney. She graduated magna cum laude in 2021 from Pomona College with a B.A. in Computer Science and minors in Dance and Media Studies. There, she had the opportunity to originate works with choreographers such as Derion Loman, Becca Lemme, Iyun Ashani Harrison, and Ronit Ziv. She has also trained with the San ​Francisco Conservatory of Dance, BODYTRAFFIC, GagaLab, and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Cassie was the recipient of the DanceJerusalem Scholarship and the Virginia Princehouse Allen Dance Award. Currently, Cassie is a company member with VLA DANCE and KAIROS Dance Theater and freelances with local choreographers— most recently Jessi Stegall, Luminarium Dance, Dara Capley, and Chavi Bansal. Her choreographic works have been presented at the Solstice Dance Project, ACDA Baja, and NACHMO Boston. As a 2022 Emerging Artist Fellow with Dunamis, she recently presented her first multidisciplinary project for her capstone involving choreography, animation, and painting. Working to combine her backgrounds in dance, digital art, animation, and tech, Cassie is intrigued by the creative possibilities that lie at the intersection of art and technology.
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IMANI DEAL
Imani Deal was born and raised in the Greater Boston Area. Deal is a graduate of Montclair State University, where she
received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance and a minor in Business. During her training at MSU, she had the privilege of dancing in works by Camille A. Brown, Earl Mosley, and Charles Weidman. Deal maintained a position on the Dean’s List throughout college and is a member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.

Since graduation, Deal has danced in local projects by Jenny Oliver and Rachel Linsky. She also has been a member of Roots Uprising Dance Company since 2020 under the direction of Nailah Randall-Bellinger. The pieces that Deal has recently performed amplify topics such as Holocaust remembrance and the Middle Passage. Deal’s goal is to open an Arts Center that gives back to the inner city through the arts while also expanding her dance career through traveling around the world.
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MIRANDA LAWSON
Miranda Lawson (she/her) is originally from Somerville, MA where she trained primarily in contemporary and Hip-hop at The Studio Dance Complex (TSDC). She participated in regional and national level dance competitions with TSDC for ten years and frequently returns there to teach. Miranda recently graduated from Mount
Holyoke College and during her time there, performed in works by Shakia Barron, Barbie Diewald, Katie Martin, Jenna Riegel and in TU Dance’s “One” restaged by Kaitlin Bell. She has also worked professionally with Boston based company Urbanity Dance and has had many ​collaborations with Contemporarily Out of Order. Miranda has attended Bates Dance Festival, was the recipient of the Leadership Scholarship from American Dance Festival, has
been an intern for Boston University’s REACH Summer Dance program, and has had her work selected to be shown at the American College Dance Association Conference. She is currently a choreographic resident through the Urbanity X Residency program for the 2022 season and is working professionally on “Concourse” with Barbie Diewald and Shakia Barron, which was most recently in residence at Jacob’s Pillow and MAGMA.
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PEARL YOUNG
​Pearl Young (she/her) is a Waterbury, CT native, a recent graduate of Tufts University with Magna Cum Laude honors and was the recipient of the Alice E. Trexler Dance Studies award for the Class of 2022. Her choreography and goals as a dancer have consistently revolved around creating space for and demanding attention toward Black American styles. Growing up dancing in predominantly white competitive studios disjointed her identities as a Black woman and as a dancer based on the priorities of the studio. When she began choreographing dances in high school, she dedicated her choreography to representing the journeys through social injustices Black people have taken. Pearl had the honor of receiving the rights to perform Pearl Primus’s “Strange Fruit”, taught by Kim Bears-Bailey of Philadanco, as her culminating senior thesis piece. In college, she became an active
member of the dance community. Pearl's passion for
immersing herself in Black American Dance manifested in her founding of Harlem Grooves, a collegiate dance company dedicated to Black American dance, and her work as the lead choreographer in Tufts’ recent production of “Almanac: The Musical”. Additionally, Pearl became a dance minor and a dance department ambassador—a position that fueled the creation of a dance major as Tufts previously only offered minors. Most recently, Pearl was invited to reset a piece as a freelance choreographer at the Taft School she looks forward to a piece of hers being performed in the Onstage 360 show on July 30th.
This program is supported in part by grants from the following:
The Somerville Arts Council
The Boston Cultural Council, administered by the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture
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Why Is BIPOC Mentorship Necessary in Dance?

Relationship- and community-building pathways for newly arrived dance artists is crucial in our local dance sector in general. Metro Boston's professional dance sector --even among dance professionals-- is often described as "hidden" and "hard to find," as well as "deeply siloed" and difficult to navigate. Mentorship provides an opportunity for more seasoned artists to not only welcome new artists in and orient them within the local landscape, but also allows for resource sharing and "showing them the ropes;" formal and informal goal-setting; networking; encouragement and artistic growth; and more. Mentorship has proven to be a valuable resource across sectors, and the dance sector is no different.

For BIPOC artists, the need is even greater. Due to a lack of visibility across the sector and representation in sector leadership, BIPOC artists are prone to isolation, macro- and micro-aggressions, and a lack of a sense of belonging, dance artists of color have a hard time making Metro Boston their home, especially in predominantly white genres such as contemporary dance. This program seeks to addres some of these needs.

In addition, living as a person of color in Metro Boston is difficult enough on its own, due to issues including gentrification and cultural erasure; housing, food, and medical injustice; the historical and growing wealth gap, and more. Below are a few resources that provide more detail and data about these specific hardships:

The Weathering Hypothesis
As summarized by PubMed: "The weathering hypothesis states that chronic exposure to social and economic disadvantage leads to accelerated decline in physical health outcomes and could partially explain racial disparities in a wide array of health conditions." The weathering hypothesis was originally proposed in 1992 by public health researcher Dr. Arline T Geronimus to explain disparities she observed in health outcomes especially for Black women.  

WEALTH + OPPORTUNITIES ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM
MEDICAL RACISM