Kick-Off Event of our 20th Anniversary Celebration of
the UVA Dance Minor Program
The evening will include a brief dance performance, a sneak peek at our soon-to-launch podcast, and a Dance Program Alumni panel. Reception to follow!
Panelist Bios:
Sage Tanguay (moderator) is a creative of many disciplines, a local arts advocate, and an independent podcast producer. After graduating from UVA's Drama major and Dance minor programs in 2016, she became an on-air personality and station coordinator for Allegheny Mountain Radio, eventually returning to UVA to produce podcasts for WTJU FM and Brown Residential College.
Now, Sage lives in her rural hometown and serves as the Executive Director for the BEAR (Bath Education & Arts Resource) through the Bath County Arts Association. In her "free time" she also works with local arts initiatives such as the Living Arts Gathering, and owns and operates Endless Holler Farm with her husband.
Sara Burtner is a proud alumna of the University of Virginia’s Dance Minor Program, graduating summa cum laude in 2023 with a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology and a minor in Dance. Her time in the dance program shaped her appreciation for movement, artistry, discipline, and collaboration, influencing both her professional and personal pursuits. After UVA, Sara earned her Doctor of Physical Therapy degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. While completing PT school in Richmond, she continued to pursue dance professionally, performing with local dance organizations and maintaining an active connection to the performing arts. Balancing professional dance with the demands of a doctoral program deepened her understanding of the physical and mental demands placed on dancers and further inspired her interest in performing arts physical therapy.
Sara now practices as an outpatient orthopedic physical therapist in Richmond while pursuing an orthopedic physical therapy residency through the Virginia Orthopedic Manual Therapy Institute. Her clinical experiences, including training in sports and orthopedic settings, allowed her to combine her passion for movement with her interest in helping athletes and performers return to the activities they love. Sara is passionate about bridging her backgrounds in dance and physical therapy and contributing to the growing field of dance medicine. She hopes to use her experiences as both a dancer and healthcare professional to support the next generation of dancers and performing artists, and help them build long, healthy, and sustainable careers in movement.
Stéphane Glynn is the Chief Operating Officer at Vavani Productions, an Emmy®-winning prosocial film production company, where he also produces, directs, and edits documentaries. Stéphane first fell in love with screendance as a Dance Minor at the University of Virginia, earning his BA in Media Studies & Psychology in 2013. That fascination with the dance film space carried him to the University of Utah, where he completed an MFA in Film & Media Arts and a Screendance Certificate. While there, he co-founded the Screendance Collective (2013–2019), a group dedicated to the curation and discussion of screendance, and he has continued to make dance films ever since.
Dance continues to inform much of Stéphane's work. He recently completed Barefoot Boy, a feature documentary about modern dance legend Bill Evans, now on its festival run. This November, Reservation Redemption—another documentary he produced—premieres on PBS, and he is currently developing a documentary series about an innovative tiny home community for the chronically unsheltered. Beyond his filmmaking, Stéphane serves as Executive Vice President of Impact Guild, a nonprofit professional network supporting people who work in media, arts, and entertainment. Stéphane lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and pets, where he enjoys the arts and the outdoors.
Kiana Pilson is a movement practitioner, working at the intersection of faith, embodiment, and community. She holds a BA in Sociology, with a minor in Dance, from the University of Virginia. During her time at UVA, Kiana was a Miller Arts Scholar, received the UVA Arts Council Distinguished Artist Award in Dance, and was a panelist on Inside UVA Arts. She had the privilege of performing in pieces by guest artists Shandoah Goldman and Helen Simoneau, as well as choreographing for staged student works including The Black Monologues and Shakespeare on the Lawn’s Romeo and Juliet: A Story of Interracial Love.
Kiana has focused her career post-grad in college ministry, developing student leadership and spiritual formation on campus. She is currently pursuing the Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis at Duke University, where she explores embodiment as a means of healing, and relationship building. Kiana is also a graduate fellow with Duke’s Bass Connections project, Movement is the Method, where she co-creates a movement-based curriculum to support culturally-responsive care for individuals living with dementia and cognitive change. Bridging her ministry experience with her graduate research, Kiana aims to facilitate opportunities for faith communities to incorporate embodiment into their liturgical practices.
Mei Yu returns to her artistic home with a heart full of gratitude. Growing up as an open-style dancer, she developed a personal relationship with dance through the Dance Minor at UVA. Not only did she build a strong connection with her body through somatics, but she also found her voice as a choreographer through dance studies, improvisation, and composition. She grew more confident in the welcoming and supportive environment. The dance program provided a thorough education that inspired Mei to continue exploring her curiosity. Since graduation, she has been pursuing ways to put her unique kinesthetic artistry into video and media creation for theatrical performances. As a graduating MFA student at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, Mei has gained an ample amount of experience translating her physical sensibility into engaging visual designs on stage with moving lights and images. The more she does, the more she finds herself in awe of the art that makes meaning through non-verbal communication.
Recently, Mei choreographed and performed a solo in the Dance/Light Festival at the university. Her reunion with dance refreshed her artistic practice and reminded her of the significance of thinking through movement. This experience motivated her to take her curiosity a step further by exploring the shared language between dance and theater through her thesis. She hopes to give structure to her intuitive understanding of performance and develop a referable media design approach that gives form to the meaning carried through motion.
Zoe Ziff (she/her) graduated from UVA in 2022 with a BSc in Biochemistry and a Minor in Dance. At UVA, she performed and choreographed in the dance program, performed and submitted work for ACDA regional conferences, and received funding for dance workshops and projects as a Miller Arts Scholar. She also received the Arts Council Distinguished Artist Award and Ruth Caplin Award in Dance. Outside of the classroom and studio, she served various roles in the Dance Committee and was Co-Chair of the Drama Arts Board.
After graduating, she worked for two years in healthcare and medical research while dancing with Cumulus, a modern dance collective in Charlottesville. She is currently a medical student and Hook Scholar at the UVA School of Medicine. As a Hook Scholar, she is able to pursue health humanities and arts research throughout her medical education. Her current research focuses on applying embodied awareness to clinical work through dance pedagogy.