Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Joanie Smith - Season 5, Episode 68

Joanie Smith and Danial Shapiro founded Shapiro & Smith Dance
in 1987 and developed a collaborative method through which they
created their work, taking turns developing material and
directing the choreographic process. Danial Shapiro died in the
Fall of 2006 and now Joanie Smith serves as sole Choreographer
and is honing that process in new ways with the members of
Shapiro & Smith Dance.


Shapiro & Smith’s choreography has been commissioned by
companies as diverse as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater,
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Phoenix Dance Company of Leeds, UK;
and the PACT Dance Company of Pretoria, South Africa. The Company
has toured all over the U.S. and abroad including four times at
The Joyce Theater in New York City. Over 600 dancers in
professional and university dance companies have performed, “To
Have And To Hold,” aka, “Bench,” and S&S’s production of
ANYTOWN, with music by Bruce Springsteen, has had more than 40
performances across the U.S.


Joanie Smith and Shapiro & Smith Dance have received
continued support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The
McKnight Foundation, and The Target Foundation. S&S received
a Sage Award in 2012 for “Outstanding Performance.”


Smith was recognized as an “Artist Of The Year,” in 2011 by City
Pages, Minneapolis, and was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar in
Dance to Helsinki, Finland. Smith holds the Barbara Barker
Endowed Chair in Dance at the University of Minnesota, an MA in
Dance from UCLA, and toured the world in the companies of Murray
Louis and Alwin Nikolais before founding Shapiro & Smith
Dance.