WWU Dance Faculty & Staff Directory
Mike Bajuk Senior Instructor |
Michael Bajuk has accompanied dance for ACDFs, ADF, AXIS Dance, Bill Evans Dance Intensives, the National Ballet of Zimbabwe, and Western’s dance faculty. Composition projects have included music for dance, film, and concert pieces. Mike has served as an audio engineer at Binary Recording Studios and Media For Development Trust (MFDI) Studios in Harare, Zimbabwe. He has performed aboard Majestic American and Carnival cruise lines, and with jazz and rock groups throughout the Northwest. Mentors include composer Roger Briggs, jazz artist Chuck Israels, and percussionist Patrick Roulet. Mike is active in K-12 music education and has composed for Western’s Dance Makers program for the past seven years. B.M. in Music Composition Western Washington University |
Cher Carnell Associate Chair of Theatre & Dance |
Cher Carnell danced professionally for eleven years with numerous ballet companies both in the United States and Europe, including Milwaukee Ballet, San Diego Ballet, Ballet Metropolitan, Theater an der Wien and Scottish-American Ballet. She was featured in principal roles, such as Odette in Swan Lake, Giselle in full-length Giselle, Titania in Midsummer’s Night Dream, and Sugar Plum Fairy in Nutcracker. Ms. Carnell has an extensive teaching background as a master teacher in pre-professional schools, Universities, as well as professional ballet and modern companies. She chaired the University of Louisville Dance Department and served as the Artistic Director of the University of Louisville Ballet Civic Company from 1982-1991. She has taught ballet at Western Washington University since 1997, specializing in the intermediate and advanced levels of ballet, and assumed leadership of WWU Dance in Fall 2008. BA (with Honors) in Psychology, UW Madison, 1972 |
Vanessa Daines Instructor
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Vanessa Daines has been an artistic member of Bellingham Repertory Dance since 2007. She performs work by local/regional choreographers and co-organizes/operates the company with eleven other members. Vanessa has also participated in other community theatre and collaborative dance projects in the area, such as WWU’s Dance Academy for Youth, META Performing Arts, and performed in two of Pam Kuntz’s dance/theatre pieces, Conversations, 2009 and In the Context of Life, 2010. An excerpt from Conversations was also performed at 12 Minute Max in Seattle’s On the Boards. Vanessa has taught a variety of dance throughout the Pacific Northwest since 1999. She has worked in private studios, independently and for the last year at WWU, teaching Open Ballet. She has taught dancers of all ages, both experienced and non-experienced. Her training in contemporary dance, work as a performer and study of dance at WWU has influenced her approach to teaching and shaped her classes, which emphasize a balance of technique, conditioning and artistry. BFA Western Washington University |
Nolan Dennett Professor
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Nolan Dennett is the architect of the dance program at Western and as such single-handedly designed and implemented the BA and the BFA dance majors. With the BFA it has been Mr. Dennett’s vision to provide a bridge from the world of academic dance training into the professional world of time-based art. Toward that end over the years Mr. Dennett has assembled a roster of internationally acclaimed dance artists to teach, perform, choreograph and be in residence at Western. Those artists have included Sylvain Lafortune from the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Kathy Casey, artistic director of Montreal Danse, Susan Marshall, Alan Good from the Merc Cunningham company and Kraig Patterson and Penny Hutchinson from the Mark Morris Dance Group to name only a few. Mr. Dennett has been teaching at Western since 1989, first as a movement specialist in the Theater Department and then as Director of the Dance Program. During this time he has directed and collaborated on a number of theatrical works as well as choreographing over 30 major ballets. In addition to being an award-winning choreographer in the academic setting, Mr. Dennett has created new works for the National Ballet of Peru, Ririe/Woodbury Dance Company, and the Idaho Theater for Youth-all of which tour internationally. Mr. Dennett has been a Fulbright Scholar and has appeared as a dancer, in the works of Louis Falco, Jennifer Muller, Lucas Hoving, Bill Evans, Alice Condodina (Limon) Della Davidson, and Anna Sokolow. He is also the author of numerous short stories and articles as well as the critically acclaimed novel, “Place of Shelter.” Mr. Dennett has served 3 terms on the National Board of Directors of the American College Dance Festival Association. BA Brigham Young University |
Erin Emry Administrative Services Manager |
Erin Emry is the Theatre and Dance Department’s Administrative Services Manager. She earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. Erin worked professionally in the public relations and hospitality industries before her employment at WWU began in 2005. |
Susan Haines Senior Instructor
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Susan Haines has danced with ballet and modern companies from Colorado, New York, North Carolina and Virginia, independent choreographers John Walker, Gerri Houlihan, B.J. Sullivan, as well as collaborative performance and choreography with Brad Parquette, and study at The Place; London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and Dock 11 in Berlin. Susan recently worked with Seattle artist KT Niehoff to perform "Embracing the Inevitable". Her choreography has been presented at ACDF, the NC Dance Project and NC Dance Festival, Highlands Arts Council, and the Black Mountain Center for the Arts, and by Labor Force Dances, the Power Company in residence at Columbia College (SC), and Bellingham Repertory Dance. Susan has performed and choreographed for the North American Victorian Studies Association, and her dance film, Syntax of Things was selected by jury for the 2009 Dance for the Camera Festival in Salt Lake City as part of the "Next Generation of Filmmakers" screening and shown at the American College Dance Festival. Susan co-directs It Must Have Been Violet Dance Productions with dance and filmmakers in New York and Raleigh. Through grants from the NEFA, NEA and DANCE/USA, she worked with Katrina Warren to restage Trisha Brown's "Glacial Decoy Redux" on WWU Dance majors. Her most recent NEA grant will support the restaging of two works by the Martha Graham Dance Company in 2011. BA Radford University |
Penny Hutchinson Assistant Professor
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Penny Hutchinson, a native of Seattle, attended the Juilliard School. She was a founding member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, 1980-1992 and was in Brussels from 1988-1991, when MMDG was in residence at Theatre de la Monnaie. In 1990 she received a New York Dance and Performance Award, BESSIE. In addition to teaching at the University of Washington, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and other MMDG workshops, Hutchinson has taught at Ulm Theatre Ballet (Joachim Schlomer-dir.), NYU Tisch School of the Arts, South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore), University of Montana, Academy of Modern Dance (Chennai, India),and Sports Hojskole, (Denmark). She was assistant director for Peter Sellars’ The Rake’s Progress at the Chatelet Theater, Paris. She assisted director Stephen Wadsworth for the opera Ashoka’s Dream at the Santa Fe Opera. After receiving a BA through Vermont College, in 2001 she choreographed and made her acting debut in The Oresteia, three Greek tragedies, for the opening of the Berkeley Repertory’s Roda Theater with directors Stephen Wadsworth and Tony Taccone. While attending Mills College, Penny staged Marble Halls by Mark Morris for the Mills Repertory Dance Company. She graduated with an MFA in Dance from Mills. She has had two successful collaborations with composer Fei Wu of Beijing, China, also a Mills alumna, the second being under a “Meet the Composer” grant for University of Wyoming dance students and the Chandra Wyoga Gamelan. BA Vermont College |
Pam Kuntz Senior Instructor
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Pam Kuntz danced in NY, Boston, and Montana before moving to Bellingham, WA in 1999 to teach at WWU. Pam strives to guide her students to explore their own creative voice, discover habits and make choices. Pam’s teaching is most strongly informed by her training in the Alexander technique. Along with teaching at Western, Pam also teaches a class in the community for people living with Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis. She is dedicated to arts education for children and worked closely with OSPI by helping the state create assessments for both children (CBPAs) and educators (WEST-E). Along with choreographing on the students in the dance program her other choreographic interests lie in collaborating with the community to tell their stories in dance/theatre productions. She recently formed "Kuntz and Company" a professional non-profit dance company for this purpose. (kuntzandcompany.org) Her choreography has been recognized by the American College Dance Festival, she is a 2007 Bellingham Mayor’s Arts Award recipient, and her film "two dogs, a cat, and a baby" was invited to the POW film festival in Oregon. She has both performed at and presented her choreography at On The Boards in Seattle and her work has been funded by the City of Bellingham, The Bossak Heilbron Charitable Foundation, PeaceHealth, and Western Washington University. She continues to perform with Bellingham Repertory Dance, a professional dance company of which she is a co-founder. |
Hannah Lindberg Instructor
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Hannah Lindberg has always been an avid mover. Growing up, she was involved in several styles of dance including ballet, jazz, hip- hop, and competitive Irish-step dancing. This training evolved into a B.F.A in Dance Performance and Choreography from Western Washington University. She has performed in original work by Wade Madsen, Kraig Patterson/bopi, Alan Good, Rick Merrill, Nolan Dennett and Susan Haines. Hannah attended Bates Dance Festival Summer 2009 in Lewiston, Maine where she had the privilege to study intensively under Victoria Marks and Michael Foley, as well as perform in a repertory hip-hop/modern fusion piece under choreographer Jennifer Archibald of Arch Dance Company, N.Y. B.F.A in Dance Performance and Choreography |
Rick Merrill Instructor |
Rick Merrill began dancing at Dartmouth College and studied at Naropa Institute with Barbara Dilley, Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and with senior students of Tai Chi Chuan master Cheng Man `ching. In New York City he studied with Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Alfredo Corvino, Marjorie Mussman, Trisha Brown, and members of the Jose Limon Dance Company. He has collaborated and performed with Martha Clarke and Pilobolus Dance Theater among many others. In NYC, Rick began choreographing and performing his own work. Now based in Barcelona, Spain, he continues to choreograph, perform and teach throughout Europe and North America. In his personal work Rick aspires to create a theater of the senses in which movement, text, sound and image emerge and mingle in open space, where we can be touched directly and genuinely before concepts and opinions intervene. |
Cyndie Shepard
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Cyndie Shepard, wife of Western Washington University President Bruce Shepard, former chancellor of UW-Green Bay, is currently the director of the Compass 2 Campus mentoring initiative, established by SB 1986, which involves WWU students and faculty in collaboration with 11 local school districts and 4 area community/technical colleges. This initiative is similar to the Phuture Phoenix program she co-founded and created in Wisconsin. Cyndie served as director of the award-winning program at UW-Green Bay from its inception in 2003 until 2008 when she moved with her husband to Washington State. In addition to her teaching and work with Compass 2 Campus, Cyndie teaches in the Education Program and Dance Program at WWU, she was an instructor in the Education and Theatre/Dance programs at UW-Green Bay, was a special education teacher for over 20 years, an administrator for P-12 for 6 years, and danced with the Cleveland Ballet Theatre as a teenager and young adult. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from California State University, Fullerton, a master’s degree in psychology from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, and extensive teaching certification in P-12 education, special education, and administration from UC Irvine. Masters in Psychology |
