Doug Varone
Award-winning choreographer and director, Doug Varone works in dance, theater, opera, film, and fashion. He is a passionate educator and articulate advocate for dance. By any measure, his work is extraordinary for its emotional range, kinetic breadth and the many arenas in which he works. His New York City-based Doug Varone and Dancers has been commissioned and presented to critical acclaim by leading international venues for close to three decades.
In the concert dance world, Varone has created a body of works globally. Commissions include the Paul Taylor American Modern Dance Company, Limón Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Rambert Dance Company (London), Martha Graham Dance Company, Dancemakers (Canada), Batsheva Dance Company (Israel), Bern Ballet (Switzerland), and An Creative (Japan), among others. In addition, his dances have been staged on more than 100 college and university programs around the country.
In opera, Doug Varone is in demand as both a director and choreographer. Among his four productions at The Metropolitan Opera are Salome with its Dance of the Seven Veils, the world premiere of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, designed by David Hockney, and Hector Berloiz’s Les Troyens. He has staged multiple premieres and new productions for Minnesota Opera, Opera Colorado, Washington Opera, New York City Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera, among others. His numerous theater credits include choreography for Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theaters across the country. His choreography for the musical Murder Ballad at Manhattan Theater Club earned him a Lortel Award nomination. Film credits include choreography for the Patrick Swayze film One Last Dance. In 2008, Varone’s The Bottomland, set in the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky, was the subject of the PBS Dance in America: Wolf Trap’s Face of America. Recent projects include directing and choreographing MASTERVOICES production of Dido and Aeneas at NY’s City Center, starring Tony Award winners Kelli O’Hara and Victoria Clark, and staging Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize winning oratorio Anthracite Fields for the Westminster Choir and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
The Company’s creative output is as varied as Varone’s interests. Recent projects include: everything is fine, a full evening movement play based on the poems of Billy Collins, with a new score by David Van Tieghem; The Scrapbook, a digital journal of 10 films created and directed by Varone, set to iconic songs from the 1940s-50’s, and Somewhere, Varone’s acclaimed non-narrative version of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, and To My Arms/Restore set to the music of G.F Handel.
Laina Reese
Laina Reese is a choreographer, educator and performer of dance. Laina received her MFA in Dance Performance & Pedagogy, as well as her Certificate of Study in Feminist Methodologies & Sexualities from Arizona State University. Her BFA was earned at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Maggie Segale
Maggie is a choreographer, dancer, writer, sculptor, and teacher who makes interdisciplinary performance work about ongoingness, evading form, and countering the sinister effects of technofascism. Maggie earned an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2026, a BFA from The Juilliard School in 2014, and a graduate certificate in Critical Theory and Philosophy from Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon, Portugal in 2022. Most recently, Maggie performed in Jennifer Monson’s Towards the Both and has performed and presented choreography in such venues at Lincoln Center, Centre National de Danse de Paris, Art Institute of Chicago, Ludwig Forum Köln, Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Judson Memorial Church. Maggie is a recent transplant to Vermont and is looking to build community with her art practice.
