William Carey X Mississippi School of the Arts – Dance Teacher Exchange

Mississippi School of the Arts’ Dance Department is excited to join William Carey University Dance in a two-way teacher exchange. MSA’s dance instructor, Tammy Stanford, will teach classes at William Carey, while WCU’s dance instructor, Katie Ginn, teaches classes at Mississippi School of the Arts

Exchange Dates: February 28, March 21, April 4, April 19.

Katie Ginn is the founder and director of dance at William Carey University. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance: Creative Practice with a special certificate in lighting design from Saint Mary’s College of California and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dance Performance and Choreography from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her career in education spans both the public and private sectors and includes instruction at the professional, university, highs school, and elementary levels. She has produced dance and other creative work across south Mississippi, San Francisco, the California Bay Area, and New Orleans, and she has developed original programming, curriculum, and creative work for both private and non-profit dance and arts initiatives. She is an accomplished performer whose credits include work on stage and in dance film. Her areas of focus for creative work include collaboration between multi-arts disciplines, somatic body-work in dance, movement and choreographic theory, and Christian spirituality and liturgical dance. She is the founder and President of Mississippi Dance Leader Alliance, served on the Advisory Board for the 2017 Revision of MS State Standards in Dance for K-12 Education, and is an active member of Westminster Presbyterian Church of Hattiesburg. In addition to providing instruction in dance technique, choreography, production, and theory, she also provides lighting design, choreography, and direction for Dance, Music Theatre, and Opera productions at WCU.

Tammy Stanford is founder and instructor of dance at the Mississippi School of the Arts and movement specialist for theatre. She is a Golden Key honor graduate with an MFA in dance from Montclair State University. She received her BFA in dance performance and choreography from the University of Southern Mississippi, awarded the AIM Award for outstanding achievement in dance arts and dance education by the University of Southern Mississippi, MSA Teacher of the Year, and awarded Thad Cochran Distinguished Arts Educator in dance by the Mississippi Alliance for Arts Education.

She is chair and writer for Mississippi College and Career Readiness Arts Learning Standards for Dance of the Mississippi Department of Education. Her career as dance advocate, consultant, educator and choreographic artist has spanned over twenty-five years. For two decades she has served as teaching artist for Mississippi Arts Commission, designed, taught, and provided dance educational programing for over twenty arts and educational organizations. She holds Mississippi K-12 teacher licensure in dance and theatre, University of Southern Mississippi clinical teacher certification and graduate training in Process Pedagogy (the acclaimed teaching methodology by the late Jacque d’Amboise of New York’s National Dance Institute), and most recently selected as a mentor teacher for the National Dance Education Organization. Her choreographic work Footfalls was selected for Charlotte Dance Festival Gala concert 2021. Her subsequent work Footfalls Echo has been selected for Fini International Summer Gala in Italy for summer 2022. Stanford’s dance compositional research involves capturing and cataloguing poetic imagery and its effect on kinesthetic sensory responses. These responses are then formed into non-linear narratives and used to generate choreographic works. Her Footfalls series is based on the phenomenological effect of TS Eliot’s poetic imagery from the Four Quartets.