Dawn Stoppiello

Dawn Marie Stoppiello is a choreographer and co-founder of Troika Ranch, a company that pioneered interactive performance systems where dancers' movement actively shapes sound, light, and video in real time. She began her formal training at Jefferson High School for the Performing Arts in Portland, Oregon, and earned a BFA in dance from California Institute of the Arts. At CalArts in 1987, choreographer Cristyne Lawson paired Stoppiello with composer and media artist Mark Coniglio for a class assignment—a pairing that launched a decades-long creative partnership. Their early experiments centered on Coniglio's MidiDancer, a sensor system that transmitted information from a performer's body to computers controlling live media. Stoppiello also performed with the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company during this period.

Stoppiello and Coniglio formalized Troika Ranch in New York in 1994, developing performances in which bodies and digital systems were mutually responsive rather than treating technology as decoration. *In Plane* (1994) demonstrated this approach: Stoppiello's performance drove media through the MidiDancer in real time. A 1996 residency at STEIM in Amsterdam advanced their research into interactive systems. Later works expanded both scale and dramaturgical complexity. *16 [R]evolutions* (2006) embedded responsive technology within an ensemble structure, while *loopdiver*, which began in 2007, applied digital-looping logic to dancers' physical process, asking bodies to repeat, interrupt, and re-enter movement material across time. *SWARM* (2015), developed during a residency at Holy Cross, tracked audience movement and translated it into a score affecting the performers.

Alongside making work, Stoppiello developed a pedagogical practice grounded in composition, somatic inquiry, and critical use of technology. She earned an MFA in dance from George Washington University and joined the USC Kaufman faculty in dance and new media in 2017. In her teaching, she has emphasized that a digital tool should serve a compositional question rather than become an end in itself—a philosophy that shapes how she guides students toward integrating technology with embodied practice.