The University of Iowa Department of Dance provides comprehensive education in dance performance, choreography, and theoretical studies, approaching scholarship, creative research, and studio-based training in the framework of a liberal arts education. Integrating studies in dance and the liberal arts, the Bachelor of Arts (BA), Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), and Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree programs establish foundations for creative and intellectual development and cultivate multiple approaches to dance, career, and citizenship. Elements of our dance curriculum are mutually informing. Students take daily technique classes in Western classical and concert dance, complemented by courses in multicultural movement techniques, improvisation, choreography, dance history and theory, digital arts, kinesiology, pedagogy, and community engagement.
 
The Department of Dance faculty engages in research and teaching to support and deepen the role of dance in higher education and in society. Drawing on canonical and emerging frameworks, our rigorous creative and scholarly research represents diverse aesthetics and viewpoints and investigates a wide range of compelling issues including questions of form, performance, creative process, identity, culture, sustainability, and social justice. We bridge teaching and research, theory and practice, and training and scholarship as often and in as many ways as possible. By actively engaging students through our coursework and our research, we simultaneously extend the field of dance and develop young artists as creative thinkers and problem solvers who may further the arts in society in diverse, urgent, and transformational ways. In all its endeavors, the Department of Dance imparts the values and knowledge necessary to making dance and intelligent moving lifelong practices.

The University of Iowa is accredited by the National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD).