November 2016

Diane Grumet is the Co-Artistic/Managing Director of Steps on Broadway, the world-renowned dance studio that has been training and supporting the professional dance community for almost 40 years.  For over 23 years, Ms. Grumet has been building and developing programs, business plans, and hiring the stellar faculty for this New York institution.  Prior to joining Steps, she was an instructor, company teacher, International Student Advisor, and the business manager for the Ailey School. In 1986, she created the Contemporary Masters Program at Studio 400, the first professional dance program at the Joy of Movement in the East Village.  Hiring artists such as Donald Byrd, David Parsons, Bill T. Jones, and Elisa Monte, all emerging directors and choreographers at the time, the Contemporary Masters Program provided a workshop arena bringing together young artists and aspiring dancers to create and experiment within the art form.  This program continues today at Steps on Broadway.

Her earliest artistic strengths were honed at the Joffrey and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Schools in New York City.  While completing a degree program at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music, she performed as a member of the Cincinnati Ballet Company, Cincinnati Opera Ballet, Contemporary Dance Theater, and at Edgecliff Summer Theater. Upon graduation, Ms. Grumet toured extensively throughout the United States, Mexico and Canada with Walt Disney Entertainment.  Returning to New York City in 1973, she was a founding member of the Joyce Trisler Danscompany and performed with the New York City Opera Ballet.  In 1975, she joined the Bat-Dor Dance Company of Israel as a soloist, appearing in works by choreographers Alvin Ailey, Anthony Tudor, Hans Van Manen, Lar Lubovitch, John Butler and Paul Taylor.  Once again returning to New York she rejoined the Trisler Danscompany and was a guest artist with Jose Limon and Ailey companies.  An artist on New York Foundation for the Arts’ roster, Ms. Grumet went on to create, produce and perform “Time Pieces,” a narrated program honoring the legacy of American dance artists, which included reconstructed works by Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Doris Humphrey and Lester Horton.

Ms. Grumet frequently served as a master teacher, with residencies and master classes across the globe.  She served on the faculties of The New School and Parsons School of Design, The Ailey School, Steps on Broadway, University of the Arts in Philadelphia, The University of South Florida, and Sarah Lawrence.  Overseas teaching included Menagerie du Verre (Paris),  Groupe Emile Dubois (Grenoble), Ballett Akademien (Stockholm), and L’ecole de Dance de Quebec. Ms. Grumet sits on Dance Magazine’s Advisory Board, Buglisi Dance Theater’s Board of Directors, is on the Bessie Awards adjudication committee, and is the Artistic Director for the Steps Beyond Foundation.

MORE ON DIANE GRUMET

• Steps on Broadway

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINKS

University of Cincinnati, Dance

Humphrey-Weidman Technique

James Truitte

Thelma Hill

Alicia Markova

Joyce Trisler

Bat-Dor Dance Company

Maggie Black

Carol Paumgarten

Denise Jefferson

American Dance Machine

Podcast produced by: The Moving Architects
Interviewer: Erin Carlisle Norton
Intro Music: “Singing Distance” by Elijah Aaron

For over four decades, Eva Yaa Asantewaa has worked as a freelance arts writer, specializing in dance and performance. A 1974 graduate of Fordham University (Rose Hill), Ms. Yaa Asantewaa has contributed writing on dance to print and online publications such as Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, Gay City News, The Dance Enthusiast and Time Out New York since 1976. She served as a member of the New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards committee for three years and as a consultant or panelist for numerous arts funding, awards or presenting organizations, including the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2007, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa founded her arts blog InfiniteBody, a resource for news, commentary and criticism especially trusted by the dance community.  With students from the annual Writing on Dance workshop series she taught for several years at Dance Theater Workshop/New York Live Arts, she created Dancer’s Turn, a blog devoted to longform profiles of dance artists. She has also interviewed dance artists and advocates as host of Body and Soul podcast and will launch a new dance interview podcast, Serious Moonlight, this fall.  As a WBAI radio broadcaster (1987-89), Ms. Yaa Asantewaa worked with the Women’s Radio Collective and the Gay and Lesbian Independent Broadcasters Collective (producers of OUTLOOKS) and co-hosted the Tuesday Afternoon Arts Magazine with Jennifer Bernet as well as producing her own specials. She is also a published poet and has read her work at numerous venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, A Different Light Bookstore, Bowery Poetry Club and Cornelia Street Cafe.

Beginning in the 1990s, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa created, produced and facilitated workshops and special events sponsored by over sixty arts, health and social service, spiritual, feminist, people of color, and GLBTQ organizations in the New York metropolitan area. Among these are Gibney Dance Center, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New York University Tisch School of the Arts Dance Program, Hunter College Dance Program, Queensborough Community College, the New York Open Center’s Womanspirit Journey program, New York Theosophical Society, College of New Rochelle, Healing Works, New York State Conference on Women’s Health, Riverside Church Wellness Center, Women’s Health Education Project and the Women’s Rites Center.

A native New Yorker of Afro-Caribbean heritage, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa lives in the East Village.

MORE ON EVA YAA ASANTEWAA