Dana Tai Soon Burgess

Dana Tai Soon Burgess is a choreographer, dancer, and cultural ambassador whose modern-dance company has spent over three decades exploring identity, migration, and belonging through movement rooted in portraiture and personal memory. Born in California and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a Korean American and European American family of visual artists, Burgess began dancing at sixteen after training in martial arts. He studied dance and Asian history at the University of New Mexico, then moved to Washington, D.C., where he completed an MFA in choreography at George Washington University in 1994.

While still a graduate student, Burgess founded Moving Forward: Contemporary Asian American Dance Company in 1992, launching projects in Washington's Chinatown that would grow into the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company. The company's longevity rests on a repertory built around what Burgess calls cultural "confluence"—the shared emotional experiences that connect personal and collective histories. Works like *Leaving Pusan* (2002), based on his grandmother's 1903 migration to Hawaii, *Hyphen* (2008), which examines Asian American identity through licensed video by Nam June Paik, and *Becoming American* (2011), which follows the experience of Korean adoptee and company dancer Katia Norri, translate family narrative and archival material into live movement.

Education and institutional leadership became a parallel career. Burgess returned to George Washington University as a dance professor in 2000 and chaired its Department of Theatre and Dance from 2009 through 2017. He served as a U.S. State Department cultural ambassador, using performance and teaching to create dialogue across borders. In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution named him its first choreographer-in-residence; from 2016 through 2023 he created exhibition-inspired works, public conversations, and educational programs in partnership with the National Gallery of Art, Noguchi Museum, National Museum of Asian Art, National Building Museum, Kreeger Museum, and Baltimore Museum of Art.

Burgess's movement language blends modern-dance weight and floor work with ballet-derived clarity, martial-arts alertness, and visual composition drawn from his family's artistic heritage. His museum-based works often function as moving portraiture, with dancers arranged as shifting lines and masses while gesture and partnering make interior conflict legible. The emotional architecture typically moves from individual memory toward collective recognition, embodying the company's recurring idea of cultural confluence.

Beyond choreography, Burgess has written a memoir, edited a dance-history volume, and hosted a podcast centered on Asian American arts. The Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company continues to perform and preserve a Washington-based institutional legacy built on collaborative achievement—one shaped by dancers, designers, composers, and rehearsal directors whose contributions are inseparable from the work itself.