Dance Educator In Memoriam 2025-2026

Deborah “Miss Dee” Byczkowski was an innovative dance educator, mentor, artist, and founder of VOLTA Performing Arts in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. A lifelong dancer and graduate of Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Dance Pedagogy, Deborah devoted her life to reimagining what dance education could be: inclusive, science-based, and rooted in the belief that every student deserves to feel seen, valued, and empowered. After teaching throughout Chicago, Deborah founded VOLTA Performing Arts in 2017 with a vision that extended beyond creating technically strong dancers. She believed dance should nurture healthy bodies, curious minds, and confident human beings. Integrating movement science into her curriculum, she challenged traditional teaching methods that too often prioritized aesthetics over well-being. Her guiding belief—that everyBODY has a dancer’s body—helped students discover confidence by understanding their own unique bodies. As she often said, “We are not here to teach your child dance; we are here to teach your child how to dance.” Known affectionately as “Miss Dee,” Deborah created more than a dance studio—she cultivated a vibrant community. VOLTA became a welcoming home where children, families, and artists felt supported, inspired, and genuinely seen. Her warmth, generosity, loyalty, and joyful spirit touched everyone who walked through its doors. Those who knew Deborah remember her as someone who greeted others with genuine kindness, celebrated their successes as if they were her own, and made every person who entered VOLTA feel they belonged. Deborah’s commitment to the arts extended beyond her own students. She intentionally made VOLTA an affordable creative home for Chicago artists, opening her space to local artists and community organizations so new artistic work could flourish. Fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and able to teach dance using sign language, she worked to ensure every student and family felt welcome, understood, and included. Deborah Byczkowski will be remembered not only for transforming the way dance education could be taught, but for transforming the lives of those fortunate enough to know her. Her spirit will be profoundly missed, while her vision and the community she so lovingly built will continue to inspire generations of dancers. Photo by Volta Performing Arts/Deborah Byczkowski

Simone Forti was an Italian-American dancer, choreographer, artist, and writer whose experiments with movement, improvisation, and everyday action helped lay the foundations for postmodern dance. A deeply influential figure, Forti spent more than six decades exploring movement as a way of perceiving, thinking, and being in the world. Forti studied with pioneering dance artist Anna Halprin in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose approach to movement, improvisation, and the environment influenced her artistic vision. After moving to New York in 1959, Forti studied composition with Robert Dunn alongside artists including Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton. In 1960, she created her seminal Dance Constructions, bringing together movement, physical tasks, improvisation, and sculptural objects. Works such as Huddle, Slant Board, and See Saw challenged distinctions between dance and visual art and influenced the artists who would establish Judson Dance Theater. Rainer later described Forti as Judson’s “inspiration and fountainhead.” Forti’s investigations continued to evolve throughout her career. Her observations of animals inspired her “Zoo Mantras,” while her improvisational work integrated movement, language, sound, memory, and responses to the natural and political worlds. In her “News Animations,” she brought movement and spoken language together in response to current events to make sense of an everchanging world. Forti performed with simplicity, clarity, and warmth, while maintaining an enduring attention to the intelligence of the moving body. Forti was a prolific writer, teacher, visual artist, and collaborator whose influence extended across generations of dancers. In the later decades of her life, she taught improvisation at UCLA, sharing her exploratory approach with successive generations of performers. Her 1974 book, Handbook in Motion, remains an important account of her artistic thinking and embodied investigations. In 2023, she received the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance. Simone Forti died in Los Angeles on July 29, 2026, at the age of 91. Her legacy lives on not only in the works she created, but in the permission she gave generations of artists to listen more closely—to gravity, sensation, impulse, the environment, and the body itself as a source of intelligence and creativity. Simone Forti performing in That Fish Broke (2012) at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church. Photo: Andrea Mohin. Courtesy Raffaella Cortese, Milan – Albisola and Simone Forti Art Trust.

Linda Hodes was a luminous modern dancer and a beloved teacher and mentor, known especially for her work with the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Batsheva Dance Company, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Born on June 3, 1931, in New York City, she began taking classes at the age of nine, at the Martha Graham School. In 1953, she joined Graham’s company, touring the world and performing major roles, including Joan in Seraphic Dialogue, Cassandra in Clytemnestra, and both Eve and Lilith in Embattled Garden. When Paul Taylor founded his company in the mid-1950s, Linda was simultaneously a member, performing roles in Three Epitaphs, Junction, and Insects and Heroes, among others. In 1953, Linda married fellow Graham dancer Stuart Hodes; their children, Catherine Hodes and Martha Hodes, were born in 1956 and 1958. In 1964, Linda left the United States for Israel, selected by Martha Graham to help found the Batsheva Dance Company. For the next thirteen years, she served there as dancer, teacher, rehearsal director, and artistic director. Divorced in 1965, Linda married the Batsheva dancer Ehud Ben-David in 1968; their daughter, Tal Ben-David, was born in 1970. Widowed in 1977, Linda returned to New York and the Martha Graham Dance Company, where she served as director of the school, rehearsal director, and eventually associate artistic director and co-artistic director. Soon after Graham’s death in 1991, Linda returned to the Paul Taylor Dance Company, where she served as director of the school and rehearsal director for the company, and founding director and artistic director of the junior company, Taylor 2. At various points in her career, Linda danced in Broadway and off-Broadway shows and in television productions; taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Juilliard School, the American Dance Festival, and the Nederlands Dans Theatre; and served as an associate producer for Dance in America. In later years, Linda worked part-time with Pascal Rioult Dance Theater, as well as continuing her association with the Graham and Taylor companies. She died on August 1, 2025, at the age of 94. Permission to use this photo given from Martha Hodes, daughter of Linda Hodes and from John Tomlinson, executive director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company who gathered these photos for Linda Hodes' memorial celebration.

Brook Manning began her dance career with Los Angeles Ballet, training with John Clifford and Irina Kosmovska and performing with the company in Petipa and Fokine ballets. She performed for many years as a soloist with Palos Verdes Ballet and danced solo roles in the works of Donald Hewitt and Arturo Fernandez, and in feature film and music video work. Brook was awarded a scholarship for excellence in dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned her Master’s Degree in Performance Studies. She taught ballet at Bates College, University of Hawaii and Portland Community College. She found joy in traveling to 25 countries in order to experience dance and theatre in its cultural context. Brook was more recently a beloved member of the Oregon Ballet Theatre community, working in Education & Community Engagement as a Teaching Artist and Historian for the organization. She reached a wide audience with her thoughtful presentations as a speaker/historian, even educating the community with online content during the pandemic. As a Teaching Artist, she deeply enjoyed the opportunity to share her passion with students of all ages during field trips to OBT and Touch Tours at the theatre during every production. Photo provided by family of Brooke.

Ohio State's Department of Dance mourns the loss of Emerita Professor Dr. Sheila Marion, who died on June 22, 2026. Professor Marion served as director of the Dance Notation Bureau Extension for Education and Research at Ohio State until spring 2011. Her research was in the application of computer technology for dance notation. Professor Marion was an elected fellow of the International Council of Kinetography Laban, and was selected by Ann Hutchinson Guest as a consultant for her Advanced Labanotation textbook. She served on the ICKL Research Panel. Professor Marion notated Daniel Nagrin's Jazz Three Ways and Jazz Dance Styles, Marion Scott's Sevenfold, and Tap Dance: A Dictionary of Tap Steps in Labanotation. Her directing credits include works by Ruth Currier, Doris Humphrey, Sophie Maslow, Buzz Miller, Marion Scott, Anna Sokolow, and Helen Tamiris. Photo: Mei-Chen Lu and Dr. Sheila Marion at the Dance Notation Bureau office, 151 W. 30th Street, New York City, 2006.

Toni Pierce-Sands (TU Dance Founding Artistic Director) Prior to co-founding TU Dance, Minnesota native Toni Pierce-Sands performed with Minnesota Dance Theatre, Tanz Forum in Germany, Rick Odums in Paris, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where she was a featured soloist in such signature pieces as Revelations, Cry and Rainbow Round My Shoulder. Her command of the Horton Technique has led to teaching posts throughout the United States and Europe. Toni directed programming at TU Dance Center in Saint Paul. She was a full-time core faculty member at the University of Minnesota for twenty years and also served as Director of University Dance Theatre. Toni has been featured in COSMOPOLITAN Germany and GQ publications, the American Express Alvin Ailey commercial, and the Lester Horton Technique instructional DVD series. She wrote columns for Dance Studio Life magazine on various pedagogical approaches for modern dance. Toni was awarded a 2004 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Dance, named the Sage Awards’ “2011 Leadership Training and was a panelist for the 2018 Dance Miami Choreographers’ Program. She served as a member of the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Advisory Board. Photo by Laura Kane Scher Photography

Dancer, choreographer, educator Don Redlich died in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Tuesday, April 28th. He was 96 years old. Don’s story is too big to fit into a small box. Born in 1929 in Winona, Minnesota, he fell in love with theater and dance and landed in New York at just the right time. His life story bridges Broadway, the roots of modern dance and the post-modern avant-garde. He was a performer, choreographer, company director and influential educator. He studied with Marge H’Doubler, Louise Kloepper and Shirley Genther at the University of Wisconsin and with German émigré and early modern dance pioneer, Hanya Holm, in New York and at Colorado College. Holm choreographed her final dances for the Don Redlich Dance Company. He taught at Juilliard, Sarah Lawrence, Adelphi and many other institutions nationally and internationally. He was a tenured professor at Rutgers, Mason Gross School. Don was a mainstay at the American Dance Festival and with the Don Redlich Dance Company, was fundamental to the dissemination of dance across the United States through the Artists Touring Program and the Artists-in-the-Schools which were funded, in the 1970s, by the National Endowment for the Arts. Through his teaching, he had a great influence on many, many students and company members who went on to make lives in dance and other fields. 

Judy Fielman Rice (February 28, 1961–May 12, 2026) was a ballet teacher and performer born in Indianapolis, Indiana. She studied at the National Ballet School of Canada and performed with the Joffrey Ballet, the National Tap Dance Company of Canada, and American Ballet Comedy. In 1990, she joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where she taught ballet for the departments of dance and musical theater for more than three decades. She also taught at Broadway Dance Center, Peridance, Pace University, Steps on Broadway, The Joffrey Ballet School, and Joffrey Midwest. Rice developed ballet class CDs with accompanist Paul Lewis and producer Rob Martens, and she co-founded the educational project Behind Barres in May 2000.

Shirley Russon Ririe was a powerful, creative force and a leader in dance education. She co-founded the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in 1964, a still thriving professional contemporary dance company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Ririe-Woodbury has toured extensively throughout the US and abroad. When the "Artists in the Schools" and the "Dance Touring Program" began nationally, the company was fortunate to be chosen for both programs. Shirley emerged as the leader in AIS and helped design the program for the next 13 years. She studied and performed with most of the originators of modern dance and became an expert of the subject of dance for children. She created over 100 choreographic works. She was a full professor of dance and taught full or part time for 42 years at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. Some of the many awards she received were: Merit of Honor from the U of U, the Plaudit Award in 1981 and Presidents Award in 1993 from the National Dance Association. East High's Distinguished alumnae award in 1986 and the Governor's Award in 1990. She lobbied with the Utah legislature for 12 years, securing funding for the arts including the ZAP (zoo arts and parks) tax. She was married to Rhees Ririe for 59 years, and together they had 4 daughters. Photo is property of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company

Claire Sheridan established and directed the dance program at Saint Mary’s College of California (1977-1997) and was the founder of LEAP, a national Bachelor of Arts degree program specifically designed for professional dancers. Ms. Sheridan also has extensive international experience as a teacher and choreographer at The Saint Petersburg Conservatory (Russia), Cambridge University (England), Charles University (Prague), the National Institute of Advanced Studies (India), and at academies and colleges in Germany, Switzerland, Palestine, Bosnia, Bangladesh, and Japan. She was a longtime education consultant and guest lecturer for San Francisco Ballet. Ms. Sheridan founded the Liberal Education for Arts Professionals (LEAP) Program in 1999, at a time when a college degree and a dance career were treated as mutually exclusive. LEAP provided professional dancers and other performing artists a unique path to access higher education—a community for whom access to college had been traditionally rare or impractical. LEAP is specifically designed to deliver a comprehensive liberal arts education to professional dancers and performing artists from around the country, with the goal of completing a Bachelor’s Degree in Performing Arts from Saint Mary's College through part-time study. LEAP has grown into a program spanning San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, having graduated hundreds of professional dancers. In Ms. Sheridan’s own words, “LEAP is now 26 years old; with an online program that serves dancers all over world. Its alumni have been accepted into top graduate schools and are enjoying new careers in a variety of different fields such as Art History, Business, Law, Psychology, Physical Therapy, Medicine, and Education. Some stay in the dance world as artistic directors or teachers. Other graduates are still dancing professionally, but with a secure sense of the future and the knowledge that with the degree they will experience a much easier career transition upon retirement from the stage. The dancers’ success has proven that it indeed benefits society to honor the dignity of dancers and recognize their capacity for work, their commitment to excellence, and their love of learning.” Claire Sheridan passed away on July 15, 2026, after a battle with cancer.