Shayla-Vie Jenkins

Shayla-Vie Jenkins (rehearsal director) was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from 2015 – 2016, during which the company received Bessie Awards for Chapel/Chapter (2007) and D-Man in the Waters (2013). She has taught for the company and restaged its repertory at universities and dance festivals across the country.

Jenkins has performed in works by Bebe Miller, Moriah Evans, Faye Driscoll, Okwui Okpokwasili, Susan Marshall, and Yara Travieso among others. She appeared in the Merce Cunningham Trust’s Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and has danced in reconstructions of works by José Limón, Yvonne Rainer, and David Gordon.

She received the 2025 Viola Farber Award for performance from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2023, she was awarded a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Project Grant for her site-specific work On Buried Ground, which honors the lives of freed and enslaved congregants at the historic Christ Church of Philadelphia. The work premiered at the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Jenkins holds an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Smith College and a BFA from the Ailey/Fordham program. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and currently serves as Co-Artistic & Associate Director for the BFA Dance Lab at Bennington College. She has been a Trustee of the Merce Cunningham Trust since 2020 and writes with thINKingDance, a Philadelphia-based writing collective.