Faculty Concert 2026

UW–Madison Dance Department Presents Faculty Concert 2026, Featuring Guest Artist Tiffany Merritt-Brown

The University of Wisconsin–Madison Dance Department will present Faculty Concert 2026, November 19-21, 2026, at the Margaret H’Doubler Performance Space, Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Avenue, Madison, WI. This year’s concert will feature new and restaged works from faculty artists Bradford Chin, Kate Corby, Li Chiao-Ping, Chris Walker, and work from guest artist Tiffany Merritt-Brown.

Merritt-Brown, a Miami, Florida native, and UW–Madison Dance Department alumna, returns to campus for a three-week residency during the department’s centennial year to set a work on seven UW–Madison student dancers and teach master classes. Merritt-Brown is a choreographer, performer, scholar, and educator, whose work explores the socio-political ramifications of identity and its impact on BIPOC communities. She currently serves as an assistant professor of dance at Hunter College. She earned her BFA in Dance from the UW–Madison in 2016 and later earned an MFA in Dance & Social Justice from the University of Texas at Austin. 

In addition to Merritt-Brown’s piece, concertgoers can expect a rich diversity of movement traditions, social inquiry, and collaborative creation across these works.

Assistant Professor Bradford Chin restages “Sunrise: A case study in movement scores and Disability Justice,” with a quartet of performing collaborators. Originally created at the University of California, Irvine in 2022, this ensemble work explores disability-centered holistic access measures and their impact on artistry, sustainability, and agency for both individual dancers and the collective ensemble. The piece was also restaged this fall with eight performing collaborators at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Professor Kate Corby presents a new collaborative work for 11 women that explores the voice as a source of agency, embodiment, creativity, and community, developed in consultation with UW–Madison Professor of Theatre and Drama Ann Shanahan on integrating voice and movement.

Professor Li Chiao-Ping, currently the department’s chair, will present “We hold it all in,” an energizing new work created for 11 student dancers. The work contemplates the current state of world events through strong athleticism and dynamic groupings that issue a call for solidarity and resilience. 

Completing the program is Professor Christopher Walker’s reimagining of “Rough Drafts,” a distillation of his original full-length work. This condensed composition was set on student dancers through choreographic mural-making and bricolage. At its heart, the piece engages dancers with a distinctly Jamaican contemporary movement vocabulary derived from folk, traditional dance, and popular dancehall practices. Drawing on themes of ancestry, partnership, and resilience, Walker recomposes intermediate movements across time and space while preserving the work’s original opening and closing sections.

Acknowledgements


This concert is presented and produced by the Dance Department. Tiffany Merritt-Brown’s residency was made possible with the generous support of the Anonymous Fund. Photo above: Chris Walker’s “to be shawled” by Mats Rudels.

About Tiffany Merritt-Brown

Tiffany Merritt-Brown, a native of Miami, Florida, is a choreographer, performer, scholar, and educator. She is an assistant professor of dance at Hunter College, holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MFA in Dance & Social Justice from the University of Texas at Austin. As a daughter of the Atlantic and the Caribbean Ocean, Tiffany engages in scholarly and choreographic research that critically explores the socio-political ramifications of identity and its impact on BIPOC communities. She uses dance as a conduit to re-imagine and re-envision Black futures from a Millennial perspective. Her work is rooted in utilizing Black Feminist Epistemologies, Black Radical Imagination, and Black culture to create new realities that can be applied in the present moment. Described by the Isthmus as “a coolly elegant performer and choreographer that reveals keen intelligence and maturity,” Tiffany has presented her work internationally and nationally at the Linebreaks Festival, the American College Dance Association Conferences, the Detroit Dance City Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, the Woodshed Dance Platform, Miami Dade College, the Cohen New Works Festival, Dougherty Arts Center, Arts on Site, the KAYE Playhouse Theater, CADD (Collegium for African Diaspora Dance) and internationally at the WDA-A (World Dance Alliance-Americas Conference) in Puebla, Mexico and Tanara Public School in Chepo, Panama. She is an alumna of the Jacob’s Pillow Ann & Weston Hicks Choreographers Fellows Program and a co-founder of the Florida Black Dance Artists Organization. Tiffany is a 2024 Dancing While Black (DWB) Fellow and the Administrative Director for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s AileyCamp Miami. For more information, visit https://www.tiffanymerrittbrown.com/