Nancy Smith

Nancy E. Smith is an American aerial dance choreographer, teacher, and founder of Frequent Flyers Productions, the Boulder, Colorado company that helped establish aerial dance as a distinct dance discipline in the United States. Based in Boulder since 1985, Smith founded Frequent Flyers Productions in 1988 and served as its artistic director. She grounded the company in a dance-based approach to aerial work, emphasizing breath, release, economy of movement, expressive line, and the translation of grounded dance phrasing into suspended space.

Smith built Frequent Flyers into an educational and presenting institution. The organization incorporated as a nonprofit in 1990 and expanded to include community classes, pre-professional training, and the Kids Who Fly outreach program serving youth through schools and community partners. In 1999 Smith founded the international Aerial Dance Festival in Boulder, creating a recurring gathering where practitioners could teach, perform, compare methods, and develop a shared field. By 2019 the festival had grown into a two-week international program.

In 2008 Smith and Jayne C. Bernasconi published *Aerial Dance* through Human Kinetics, a volume that integrated modern and postmodern dance history with aesthetics, pedagogy, anatomy, injury prevention, and rigging safety. The book established aerial dance as a coherent field with both artistic and technical foundations. Smith's own choreography entered major presenting contexts: in March 2017 Frequent Flyers collaborated with the Boulder Philharmonic on Aaron Copland's *Appalachian Spring* at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She continued to direct company work, including the 2022 production *Transformation in the Calling*, while teaching aerial release approaches, low-flying trapeze, invented apparatus, and Skinner Releasing Technique.