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Our coMmunIty

Dancemakers is supported by two Co-Artistic Producers and is governed by a Board of Directors composed of artists and arts workers.

Our Co-Artistic Producer Model includes switching roles each year.

One Producer works directly with Curators to focus their time and energy on supporting people while the other Producer supports with the (often invisible) labour required to run a company. At the end of the year, we switch roles for the next year. 

If we share labour, offer transparency, address gate-keeping and expand who can practice different kinds of skills, our dance company will be able to meet the urgent needs of the moment and the needs of the future.

We hope that this malleable structure also provides a porousness for others to be folded into contributing to Dancemakers.

aDminIstrators

Christina de la Cruz is a dancer and dance scholar. She received a graduate degree in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University.

Her concerns and curiosities include Black performance and building community.
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Cara Spooner is a choreographer, caregiver and caretaker who makes performances, maps and gardens in relation to moving bodies and site.

Her concerns and commitments include disability justice and youth mentorship.
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stAff TraiNing

To date, our staff has completed:

Board OF diRectors

To get in touch with the Board, contact: board@dancemakers.org

Simon Rossiter is a lighting designer who occasionally designs scenery.

Designing primarily for dance, he has collaborated on more than 275 works, which have garnered three Dora Mavor Moore awards from nine nominations.

Simon is also the Business Agent for the Associated Designers of Canada, IATSE Local ADC659.
Sky Fairchild-Waller is an American-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. His work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Die Schweizerische Post, and exhibited in Assisi, Beijing, Boston, Brooklyn, Cairo, Calgary, Cologne, Montréal, New Delhi, São Paulo, Toronto, Turin, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Zürich.
Victoria Mata is a Toronto-based Canadian-Venezuelan dance artist, choreographer, director, and activist. In each of these, she combines an evolving feminism with her passion for expressive arts therapy.
Nivi Samudrala is an early-career Bharatanatyam dancer, educator, and innovator whose work bridges classical Indian dance, science and technology, and improvisational theater.

With a PhD in physical sciences from Yale, Nivi has designed and taught courses such as Physics of Music and Materials Science of Art, uncovering rich connections between science and art.
Dedra McDermott (BFA, MA, MFA) has charted a robust cross-disciplinary path encompassing live performance and visual culture.

She is a Jamaican, first-generation Canadian contemporary dancer (Film/TV/Stage), researcher, emerging curator, producer, and movement dramaturg. In all facets of her evolving creative practice, Dedra is dedicated to supporting artists exploring Latin American and Caribbean stories.

Recent work: Cartographies of Presence: Live at Mercer Union: a centre for contemporary art (2024) and her previous role as Co-Executive Artistic Producer of DanceWorks (2023 – 2025).
Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban is a dance/movement artist, educator, and a PhD candidate in social justice education at the University of Toronto. Miggy’s research and teaching explores critical and creative pedagogies oriented through disability/mad arts and culture, black radical traditions, and dance/performance. Miggy’s current choreographic work explores improvisational practices of navigating mad and queer routes to embody Filipinx (un)rest.

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