Eight Artists and Eight Perspectives: Duke Dance Program Welcomes 2026 MFA Cohort
The Duke Dance Program welcomes eight dance artists with eight distinct ways of moving, making and seeing the world.
Sage Battle, Elowen Li, Brianna McKelleb, Marisa Melvin, Crystal Najera, Kiana Pilson, Taylor Pryor and Huimin Tang are the newest cohort of multi-faceted artists to join the Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis Program (MFA Dance/EIP). Their practices span performance, choreography, research and collaboration — and their research promises to bring fresh questions and perspectives to the Duke dance community.
The MFA Dance/EIP is a two-year, full-time terminal degree program dedicated to expanding dance and embodied knowledge across cultures, communities and contexts. The program endorses dance as a transformative force in society and engages students whose research centers around interdisciplinary experimentation.
From Director Sarah Wilbur:
The Dance Program is proud to welcome our largest and most diverse MFA Dance/Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis cohort since the program began in 2019 — diverse not only in background but in the ways these artists are imagining and expanding what dance can be. Incoming graduate students are pursuing research across concert dance and dance theater, screendance, healthcare and faith-based settings, and multimedia practice.
That range is central to the mission of MFA Dance/EIP. The program recognizes that today’s dance artists are working across disciplines, communities and contexts, and prepares them to develop rigorous, deeply individual practices that reflect where they want their work to go. Meeting each artist with the mentorship, resources and intellectual rigor to pursue that path is what makes the Dance MFA a Duke hallmark — and what makes this growing community of artists so exciting.
Meet the cohort
Sage Battle
Sage Battle is a multidisciplinary artist, martial artist, kinesthetic epistemologist and photographer whose work explores how African martiality exists as codes of resistance through dance. Born in Durham, North Carolina, she works to synthesize her movement experiences from her global studies in South Africa and England. With over a decade of rigorous martial arts and dance training, Battle has a movement practice anchored in Taekwondo, capoeira, Muay Thai, contemporary dance, ballroom and Afro-Latin dance forms.
MFA/Dance Research
Her MFA practice serves as a critical inquiry, looking to choreograph how the body acts as more than just a vessel for history and how movement within the diaspora can be explored as expression, spirituality and community; she meditates on questions of how diasporic art forms remember.
Battle is interested in tracing movement and meaning-making through African art forms, mysticism, dance multimedia and aesthetics. This exploration takes place while examining her own patterning as a person of African, Central American and European descent, who was raised with deep generational ties to the fertile American South.
Why Duke?
“I’m choosing to pursue my M.F.A. in Dance at Duke because of the university's commitment to embracing theoretical and embodied movement practices. Being exposed to a myriad of interdisciplinary movement traditions through Duke's strategic curriculum means I will leave here better able to contribute to a larger conversation that will bring extra-textual traditions and modes of meaning-making and storytelling into my career practice.”
Elowen (Wenshiyu) Li
Elowen (Wenshiyu) Li is a dance artist and choreographer from China who began her training in ballet and Chinese dance and later studied modern dance as an undergraduate in South Korea. Her artistic research explores the idea of the hybrid body and how different dance practices and cultural experiences can shape the same body.
MFA/Dance Research
Li will continue to examine the idea of the hybrid body, which comes from her own experiences of moving between different dance forms and cultural environments. She wants to explore how the body responds to different spaces, objects, sounds and environments and how these elements can become part of the choreographic process. She also hopes to use dance film and moving image to explore how choreography can change when the camera becomes part of the work.
Why Duke?
“I chose Duke because I wanted a program where I could continue developing as a dancer and choreographer while also giving myself space to ask questions outside of the traditional dance studio. Drawn to the M.F.A.’s interdisciplinary approach and the freedom to develop my own research through practice, I want to be in an environment where I can connect dance with other forms of artistic practice like sound and film. I feel that Duke will give me the space to experiment while still taking my questions about the body and choreography seriously.”
Brianna McKelleb
Brianna McKelleb is originally from Las Vegas, Nevada, and has spent the past decade living in Utah, where she graduated with a B.F.A. from Utah Valley University. As a freelance artist, she has performed with Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and Heartland Collective. She has also participated in works by Daniel Charon, Ohad Naharin and Doris Humphrey. Since 2022, McKelleb has served as adjunct faculty at Utah Valley University, where she is also the artistic co-director of Synergy Dance Company.
MFA/Dance Research
McKelleb’s research explores worldmaking as a lens for investigating the how and why of everyday life and the art of the ordinary. She is particularly interested in the beauty and fragility of the human spirit, examining themes of the body, nostalgia and the roots that connect us all.
Through worldmaking, McKelleb explores the performative process of producing meaning and the ways experiences create interlocking worlds. This practice allows her to question what makes us human in a world of Artificial Intelligence and advancing technology, and how we can recognize and engage with the beauty, complexity and creativity of human experiences.
Why Duke?
“I was drawn to the M.F.A for its focus on interdisciplinary art studies, rigorous research practices and the many opportunities available through fellowships and assistantships. The program will give me the freedom to embrace many facets of myself, rather than feeling pressured to choose a single path. I can see myself as an artist, educator, administrator and researcher — all at once — and the program will allow me to bring these different identities together rather than feeling as though I have to pick just one.”
Crystal Najera
Crystal Najera is a choreographer, dance scholar and graduate of The University of Texas at El Paso, where she studied Choreography and Dance Studies. She was a research assistant on a National Endowment for the Arts-funded project exploring somatics, dance and healthcare, as well as COURI-funded undergraduate research.
Najera has presented her work at multiple undergraduate research forums, including the National Dance Education Organization and the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association Conference. She is also a recipient of the Aaron and Sylvia Wechter Family Excellence Fund award.
MFA/Dance Research
Najera will explore how bodies experience and navigate systems beyond individual control, with a focus on healthcare. She wants to examine how somatic movement functions as a form of critique within highly complex, vertical institutional systems, as well as what forms of agency emerge when bodily knowledge is centered within socio-political structures. Ultimately, her research will seek to position the body not only as something affected by systems but as a vital source of knowledge, agency and meaningful change.
Why Duke?
“I chose Duke’s M.F.A. in Dance because its emphasis on embodied research and interdisciplinary inquiry aligns closely with the kind of artist and researcher I hope to become. The program will give me the opportunity to bring together movement, somatic practice, research and critical inquiry rather than treating them as separate areas of study. I was especially drawn to the freedom to develop my work across disciplines and explore how research can move beyond the studio to engage with larger social and institutional systems.”
Kiana Pilson
Kiana Pilson is a movement practitioner who works at the intersection of faith, embodiment and community. With a professional background in college ministry, Pilson is passionate about fostering environments where people can experience healing and spiritual formation. Within her dance research, Pilson approaches movement as a means of both identity exploration and devotional practice, particularly for faith communities outside the dance sphere.
MFA/Dance Research
Pilson will explore how embodiment practices influence vulnerability and connection within existing communities and what impact embodiment, or the lack thereof, has on identity formation, relationships and systems of belief.
Why Duke?
“As interdisciplinarity is central to my research and vocational aspirations, I value how Duke's M.F.A. in Dance fosters opportunities for students to engage across different disciplines. The wealth of knowledge available through the Dance faculty and staff, as well as the resources available through the Divinity School, made Duke the only real option for me.”
Taylor Pryor
Taylor Janeen Pryor is an artist-scholar, teacher and performer whose creative work lies at the intersections of Black futurity, narrative and intermedia. She has choreographed several pieces for Cornell University’s Performing and Media Arts program and performed works by the Merce Cunningham Trust, Babatunji Johnson, Olive Prince and Danielle Russo. Her current practice explores embodied movement and memory as tangible sites of generative rupture that offer avenues towards Black liberation.
Pryor is interested in how the process of Black identity formation, when framed as becoming, or as Toni Morrison puts it, “something else to be,” is achieved through alternative movement practices through the use of intermedia.
MFA/Dance Research
Pryor aims to explore how an anticolonial embodied movement practice, the written word, new media and critical thought can provide avenues for imagining “otherwise” ways of being in the world for Black individuals. While much scholarship has thought about, around and through Afrofuturistic approaches to Black futurity and being, the frequent use of “other worlding” to imagine such ways of being carries the potential for settler colonial slippages.
Proposed research will ask questions such as: How can film, writing, spoken word, literature and music influence the process of becoming? And how can movement, created in collaboration with others, challenge assumptions about who belongs where and help us imagine new ways of being in the world?
Why Duke?
“I’m an interdisciplinary artist whose research is rooted in scholarly rigor, the melding of disparate mediums and collaborative movement and play. I’m excited to begin this journey with my peers and look forward to working with such inspiring and thoughtful artists, scholars and practitioners.”
Huimin Tang
Huimin Tang is a dance artist and educator whose practice centers on contemporary dance performance, choreography and street dance education. Born in China, Tang began her dance training at Hanyang University in South Korea before transferring to The Ohio State University, where she studied contemporary dance and composition. Tang has presented and performed work at the OhioDance Festival, the Aisa Pacific Dance Festival and the Cleveland Dance Festival.
MFA/Dance Research
Tang’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary relationship between dance and theatre, with particular interest in how dramaturgy functions through dance movement and embodied performance. Through choreography, she explores how movement reflects multicultural identities and expresses femininity through the dancing body.
Why Duke?
“I chose the M.F.A. in Dance because its interdisciplinary approach closely aligns with my artistic and research interests. Rather than limiting my practice to choreography alone, I want to examine the intersections of dance, theatre, performance and embodied research. Duke's broad research environment and collaborative culture provide the flexibility to expand my creative practice while deepening my investigation into theatre and contemporary performance.”
Marisa Melvin
Marisa Danielle Melvin is a dance artist and educator from Durham, North Carolina. She is interested in investigating dance as a form of joyful resistance through the lens of the Hispanophone Caribbean. Marisa currently directs AYỌ̀ Dance Company where she teaches and creates choreographic works that blend Afro-Latin and contemporary dance styles.
