MFAEIP Summer News
Welcoming to our NEW MFAEIP dance cohort
The Dance Program is thrilled to welcome the newest MFAEIP students to our dance community: Celeste Brace, Haiyi Chen, Michela Dwyer and Xinyi Zhang. The 2027 cohort joins us from Chicago, Beijing, Washington, D.C. and Shanghai — bringing a wealth of new perspectives and intriguing research goals.
Celebrating past and present Duke dance graduates at the annual Summer Hothouse
Our new, returning and alumni dance graduate students have already hit the ground dancing at the MFA Dance annual Hothouse 2025, an intensive two-day retreat with morning movement practice classes and afternoon choreographic process workshops. The MFAEIP Summer Hothouse offers reliable physical and social space for current Duke Dance graduate students and esteemed alumni to gather in community for a long weekend of dancemaking.
Established in 2020, the Duke Dance Summer Hothouse provides MFAEIP students and alumni with a lifelong invitation to return each summer to the air condition-less Ark to continue to expand their approaches to movement and creative process without the pressure of a "product" in sight. This summer, attendees took morning classes in contemporary dance and movement fundamentals led by Clarice Young and afternoon creative practice workshops with Marie Lloyd Paspe.
Welcome back to our 2026 cohort
Tristian Griffin, Asili Johnson and Johanna Kepler spent part of the summer traveling to do research for their thesis projects. They are finalizing project proposals in September and will be presenting their original works in February 2026. Stay tuned to hear how their adventures in Guatemala, Benin and the wilds of Florida weave into their deep dive research in dance: embodied interdisciplinary praxis.
