Antoinette Crawford-Willis

Antoinette Crawford-Willis is a Registered Dance Educator. Her primary focus is to advocate quality arts education across the curriculum in the K-12 classrooms in the state of Kentucky.  Antoinette is a lecturer at the University of Louisville and also works as a Master Teaching Artist with the Kentucky Center and the Kentucky Arts Council, where she serves as consultant and teaching artist at schools across the state of Kentucky and as a mentor for young emerging artists identified as future master artists by the Kentucky Center.  Her dance education work and philosophy have been featured in an interview with the Inside Arts magazine, which is published by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.  She serves as Chair of the Board of Directors for the Kentucky Alliance for Arts Education, which is an affiliate of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, she sits on the Arts Advisory Committee for the Kentucky Department of Education and she is the Executive Director of Dance! Kentucky, a state-wide dance education organization affiliated with the National Dance Education Organization.

Antoinette has presented and facilitated dance education workshops for the Kentucky Teaching and Learning Conference since her arrival in Louisville in 2000.  She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Theatre and Dance from the University of Memphis and a Master’s Degree in Dance Education from The Ohio State University.

Antoinette’s dance background includes classical ballet at the Memphis Academy of Ballet in Memphis, Tennessee and her performance career includes guest appearances with the Nubian Theatre Company where she studied African Dance.  Her choreography credits include African Tales of Earth and Sky in 2005 for the Kentucky Country Day Middle School Department of Fine Arts, where she served as guest artist teaching stage movement. Antoinette also has an extensive performance and choreography background.  Her most notable works are Helen Tamiris’ Negro Spirituals at the University of Memphis and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf at Circuit Playhouse in Memphis, Tennessee as well as  Fortunes of the Moor at The Ohio State University. 

One of my most popular and requested residencies is called History Onstage.    
 
Residency Length:  One to two weeks which may be adapted to accommodate classroom and teacher schedule.
              
The primary focus is dance but the elements of Theater may also be included in this project. Students and teachers are guided through the creative process by selecting an image from their social studies books. The students are instructed to select an image from different time periods which may be determined by the teacher and the artist.  After selecting their images they will create a one or two page script and with the guidance of the artist create and perform a dance from that time period.  Examples of images might be scenes from the American Revolution or scenes from the civil war or the slave trade.  Students are not only writing for this project but learning dance forms related to that time period. Preparation:  A creative movement session and theater content is conducted if time permits.