Jennifer Kayle is Full Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and serves as graduate academic advisor for students in the MFA Dance Program. She holds a BA from Middlebury College and MFA from Smith College. In 2024, Kayle was appointed as a Fulbright Specialist for a 3-year term (2024 -2027) where she may be selected for international projects initiated across 150 countries with support of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Kayle has conducted artist residencies at Columbia College, Chicago, at University of Utah, at Mesa State, Ohio, and Purdue Universities, and has been on faculty at Bates Young Dancers workshop. She is a 2024/2025 resident artist with the collaborative company The Architects, at The Workroom Cooperative, a hybrid residency and curation program at the A.P.E. arts organization in Northampton, MA. In 2023, she received a Book Ends award from the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies toward the mentorship and publication of her first book, “Always in the Making; A Practical Philosophy of Ensemble Improvisation,” which builds and expands on the co-authored “Unplanned Coordination; Ensemble Improvisation as Collective Action,”(with philosopher Dr. Ali Hasan) published in the Journal of Social Ontology.

With over 70 works shown nationally and internationally, Kayle’s dancing has been referred to as having “muscular presence” (Dance Source Houston), while her choreography has been reviewed as “stunning and inspiring,” (KRUI) “provocative, tight, with wit and stage craft… serious chops” (Vox Fringe), “memorable…shockingly poignant,” (City Revealed). Kayle’s work has been chosen for festivals, for Regional & National GALA concerts, and for grants including an NEA/CBE project to investigate improvisational methods for choreography. Her choreographic process is deeply informed by collaboration and intersects with her work as a director and performer of Ensemble Improvisation; Kayle traces her dance heritage to Judith Dunn/Bill Dixon who together developed a unique improvisology for dancers and musicians at Bennington College. Together with The Architects, she is co-director of MICI: Movement Intensive in Compositional Improvisation, an annual professional laboratory, and she is Director and member of Turns at the Intersection, a multi-gendered, multi-racial improvisation ensemble founded in 2020.

Kayle’s work has been curated by numerous venues, including The American Dance Guild Festival hosted at the Ailey Center, NYC, Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles, Triskelion Arts and the Dumbo Dance Festival, Brooklyn, NY, at  El Museo Centro Leon (Santiago, Dominican Republic), the Dostoevsky Museum Theatre and Osobniak Theatre-Body/Word International Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia), Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, Links Hall (Chicago, IL), New Territory/Cuerpo de Danza (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Performatica (Cholula, Mexico), Joyce Soho (New York, NY), Symphony Space-International New Music Festival (New York, NY), Jacob’s Pillow’s Inside Out (Becket, MA), and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, A Call to Action (Syracuse, NY). She has also been invited to stage work with companies such as 37 por las Tablas, a Movement/Theatre Company in Santiago, Dominican Republic, Dance COLEctive in Chicago, and New ARTiculations in Tucson. 

In her service to the University, she is a review committee member for the UI Arts and Humanities Initiative grant (2022-2025) administered by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, has served the Faculty Senate, Departmental review, CLAS ad hoc, and Dean’s search committees, and for 3 years co-directed the Graduate Institute for Public Engagement in the Academy. 

You can learn more at JenniferKayle.com 

Research areas

• Choreography (creative process and production, collaboration, directorial methods)
• Ensemble Dance Improvisation (practice and performance)
• The Feldenkrais Method (graduate, Feldenkrais Professional Training Program, New York, NY)
• Philosophy of Dance: ontology of improvisation, ensemble improvisation and collective action theory, improvisation and social aesthetics.