Jenna Smith LaViolette

Jenna Smith LaViolette is a choreographer, dancer, and arts educator who choreographed *Wahzhazhe: An Osage Ballet* and founded Dance Maker Performing Arts Academy in rural Oklahoma. An Osage citizen, she grew up participating in the annual InLonSchka dances, a lived experience that later shaped her approach to dance-making. Smith pursued formal ballet training at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts during her first college year, then completed a Bachelor of Science degree in dance performance at Oral Roberts University in 2011.

LaViolette's most significant work emerged from a collaboration with her mother, Randy Tinker Smith, who conceived the story for *Wahzhazhe: An Osage Ballet* after extensive consultation with Osage Elders. LaViolette choreographed the ballet, with Roman Jasinski serving as an adviser, while Lou Brock and Joseph Rivers composed and arranged the music. The work premiered in Oklahoma in 2012 and traces Osage history from pre-contact life through removal, the oil era, and contemporary survival. In the ballet's treatment of the violent oil era, LaViolette proposed a masked figure rather than literalizing a single historical perpetrator—a choice that demonstrated the necessity of an Osage choreographer capable of negotiating history, symbolism, and community boundaries.

The ballet's reach expanded significantly in March 2013 when *Wahzhazhe* was presented at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. An excerpt later appeared at the 2015 Festival of Families during Pope Francis's Philadelphia visit, and in 2017, LaViolette brought the production to Osage ancestral homelands in Missouri through performances and educational engagement.

In September 2014, LaViolette and Randy Tinker Smith co-founded Dance Maker Performing Arts Academy in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. The academy was designed to make ballet, tap, and jazz training available in rural Osage County through scholarships, and LaViolette served as director of dance. She linked the program explicitly to the legacies of Osage ballerinas Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. In 2016, LaViolette used a Running Strong Dreamstarter grant to extend ballet education to area elementary students. The academy has since established an annual *Nutcracker* production, which LaViolette has directed and choreographed.

In 2021, the Oklahoma Arts Council named Randy Tinker Smith and Jenna Smith LaViolette recipients of a Governor's Arts Award for Arts in Education. That recognition reflects the two inseparable strands of her work: choreographing an Osage-authored ballet and building sustained access to professional dance training for young people in the Osage Nation and surrounding community. LaViolette also participated that year in the inaugural Five Moons Dance Festival, which honored Oklahoma's Native ballerinas.