Our Board
PRESIDENT Vernon Scott obtained a BFA from Juilliard in 1985, the same year as Martha Hill's last year as director. He went on to dance with many companies, among them Elisa Monte, Steven Petronio, Pilobolus, Lar Lubovitch, Mark Morris and culminating with 8 wonderful years with Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, where he also served as Rehearsal Coordinator. Beyond his days on the stage he has worked as Director of Showrooms for Grange Furniture, National Public Relations Manager for Aga Ranges and Northland/Marvel Refrigeration and Special Events Manager and Executive Assistant to To the Artistic Director of Baryshnikov Arts Center. He is currently Chair of the National Selection Panel for The YoungArts Foundation and Assistant Director of Special Events at The Joyce Theater in New York City. Mr. Scott volunteers and lends support to Dancers Responding to Aids and the Fire Island Dance Festival.
VICE-PRESIDENT Ani Udovicki is a founding faculty member of Frank Sinatra School of the Arts (2001) and a long time member of The New York Baroque Dance Company. She has performed with several ballet and modern dance companies among them Belgrade National Theatre, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Ballet Hispanico and Ohad Naharin and Dancers. She is a founding member of Neta Pulvermacher and Dancers. She has taught baroque dance, modern and ballet in NYC and abroad and has choreographed for theater productions for Ulysses Theater, Croatia, and CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia. She is a graduate of the Belgrade Ballet School and The Juilliard School, where she studied under Martha Hill. She received an MA in dance education in 2000 from Teachers College, CU. She is the happy mother of Lazar. Frank Sinatra School of the Arts
CHAIRMAN David K. Manion has been on the MHDF Board since its inception. He is the Executive Director of the International Committee for the Dance Library of Israel. For ten years, he was Artistic Director of the Riverside Dance Festival, the largest of its kind in the world. In addition to RDF he produced original plays, operas and musicals at the Theater of the Riverside Church. He has been associated with such colleges as Clarke and Viterbo, where he has taught and staged many musical productions. He is also on the Board of The Louis Falco Dance Project. Mr. Manion was instrumental in the creation of The Martha Hill Dance Fund.
CORRESPONDENCE SECRETARY Andra Corvino served on the dance faculty of The Juilliard School since 1995 to 2014, and directed the Juilliard Summer Dance Intensive from 1998 to 2006. She has taught ballet at Sarah Lawrence College and Steps in New York City, The Martha Graham School, The Jose Limón Dance Company, Montclair State College, The New Jersey Dance Theater Guild, Randolph-Macon Womans College in Virginia, York University in Toronto, Canada and Mills College and Dancespace in Oakland, California.She co-directed the Dance Circle in New York City with her father Alfredo and sister Ernesta from 1968 to 1993.Her performing credits include the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company under the direction of Dame Alicia Markova, principal dancer with the Baltimore City Ballet (later to become the Maryland Ballet) and many guest appearances with ballet companies throughout the United States, Canada and the Far East. She has also appeared with the companies of Roberto Cartagena, Ruby Shang and Matteo and the New York Baroque Dance Company.Ms. Corvino has staged productions ranging from concert pieces to full-length ballets for companies and universities around the world.In addition to her experience in dance, Ms. Corvino has had dramatic roles on television as well as off-Broadway and musical theater. She is a charter member as well as Associate Artistic Director of Ernesta Corvino's Dance Circle Company, with whom she still performs and often guest teaches open classes in
New York City.
SECRETARY Elizabeth McPherson, professor and Director of the Dance Division at Montclair State University, is the editor of The Bennington School of the Dance: A History in Writings and Interviews, author of The Contributions of Martha Hill to American Dance and Dance Education, and co-author of Broadway, Balanchine, and Beyond: A Memoir. She has staged numerous works from Labanotation, such as Doris Humphrey's Partita V. Executive Editor for the journal Dance Education in Practice, she has written articles for various other publications including Ballet Review, the Journal of Dance Education, and the Journal of Movement Arts Literacy. She was a member of Avodah Dance Ensemble and Ernesta Corvino's Dance Circle Company with whom she performed throughout the 1990s. She holds a BFA from Juilliard, an MA from The City College of NY and a PhD from New York University. Montclair State University
TREASURER Ernesta Corvino studied ballet with Margaret Craske, Antony Tudor, Alfredo Corvino and Andra Corvino. At the age of 14 she joined the Maryland Ballet as soloist then went on to dance with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company. She toured the U.S. with the American Chamber Ballet and went to Asia with the Opera Theatre of New York. She has also performed with Ruby Shang, Bill Badolato, Roberto Cartagena and ethnic dance specialist, Matteo. In 1991 she became a member of the New York Baroque Dance Company appearing in New York City, the Carmel Bach Festival , The Kennedy Center and in Europe. Ms. Corvino has also performed as a baroque soloist with Apollo's Banquet.More recently she has appeared at the Kaye Playhouse in New York City and The Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival in From The Horse's Mouth, a live dance documentary and has performed in the U.S. and Denmark with BALLET MINK COLBERT. In 1981 she formed her own company, ERNESTA CORVINO'S DANCE CIRCLE COMPANY, which appeared annually at the Riverside Dance Festival in New York City from 1982-87. The company has also performed at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, the Downtown Dance Festival, the Meet-the-Artist Series at Lincoln Center, USDAN Center, Randolph-Macon Womans College, the Nikolais/Louis ChoreoSpace and Marymount Manhattan Theatre. Ms. Corvino has choreographed over twenty pieces for the company ranging from a Charlie Chaplin two-reeler to a ballet about the Kentucky Derby. Well-known for her wry treatment of popular culture in ballets such as the critically acclaimed Holmes, Sweet Holmes, Ms. Corvino is equally adept at crafting works of pathos and tragedy. Her ballet The Early Morning Hours of the Hard Moon is a tender and heroic treatment of one man's struggle with AIDS and of Somnus,Jennie Schulman of Backstage wrote, "This is one of the most novel utilizations of the Ravel score ever conceived."From 1968 to 1993 she was teacher and co-director of her own school, DANCE CIRCLE in New York City. Her teaching credits also include the Juilliard School, the Inner-City Ensemble, the Governor's School of New Jersey, Randolph-Macon Womans College, the Tappan Zee Dance Group, SUNY/ Purchase, Stephens College, Danspace of Oakland, CA, White Mountain Summer Dance Festival and Perry-Mansfield in Colorado (all for whom she has choreographed), as well as Sarah Lawrence College, SUNY/Brockport, Long Island University, Hofstra University, and STEPS ON BROADWAY. From 1995 to 2010 Ms. Corvino frequently taught, choreographed and performed as Artist-in-Residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and in 2005 she served as Guest Artist at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign. From 2006 to 2016 she was ballet master for the José Limón Dance Company. She currently teaches open classes in New York City, conducts workshops throughout the world, and is ballet master for Tanztheater Wuppertal/Pina Bausch. www.corvinoballet.org
BOARD MEMBER Rebecca Lazier, originally from Nova Scotia, is a choreographer and dance educator based in Brooklyn. Her most recent work, There Might be Others, created in collaboration with Dan Trueman, Sō and Mobius Percussion, was commissioned by New York Live Arts and won a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for Outstanding Score. Her previous work Coming Together/Attica was named one of 2013's most memorable experiences by critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa and subsequently toured to Canada, Turkey and Greece, and was featured in the 2014 Venice Biennale. Lazier has been an artist-in-residence at The Joyce Theater Foundation, Movement Research, The Yard, Djerassi, Chulitna Lodge and has received grants from Harkness Foundation for Dance, American Turkish Society, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Polish Cultural Institute, Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, New Music USA, Puffin Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Currently a Senior Lecturer and Acting Director of the Dance Program at Princeton University, Lazier has previously been on faculty at UCLA, Wesleyan University, Trinity College, Hartford Ballet, University of Hartford, and at the Mimar Sinan Conservatory in Istanbul, Turkey.
BOARD MEMBER Allen H. Maniker, MD, is the retired Chief of the Department of
Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. He was a Professor of Neurosurgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. A diplomate of the American Board of Neurological Surgeons, Dr. Maniker has served as President of the Peripheral Nerve Task Force of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He is the author of Operative Exposures in Peripheral Nerve Surgery and has written numerous articles for many professional journals. He has been an invited visiting Professor at several Universities and has made presentations both in the United States and abroad on neurosurgery and peripheral nerve surgery. After graduating from the Juilliard School Department of Dance under Martha Hill he performed with the Sophie Maslow Dance Company, the Bat Dor Dance Company of Israel, and the Joyce Trisler Danscompany. Dr. Maniker then went on to receive his medical degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. He completed an Internship in general surgery and a Residency in Neurological Surgery at The New Jersey Medical School. He is a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an Adjunct Professor of Theater and Dance at Montclair State University.
BOARD MEMBER Elizabeth Gerring Radke was born in San Francisco in 1965. She grew up in the Los Angeles area and began studying dance at age 13. In high school she studied dance at The Cornish Institute in Seattle. In 1987 she received a B.F.A. from The Juilliard School where she studied with Kazuko Hirabayashi and Doris Rudko. She has been working as a choreographer in New York since 1993. In March 1998, she presented her first piece, a four hour movement installation. Since then, The Liz Gerring Dance Company has presented work at The Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob's Pillow, Danspace Project, The Connelly Theater, The Kitchen, Engine 27 and other venues. www.lizgerringdance.org
BOARD MEMBER Barrie Raffel received her BFA in dance at The Juilliard School and performed for many years with a variety of modern/contemporary companies such as Stephanie Skura and Hilary Easton, as well as work in the commercial realm. Throughout those years she taught dance and movement in a variety of forms and currently teaches Yoga throughout the NYC area. Barrie also works as a dance college advisor for dancers who are looking to continue their dance education, in some capacity, during the college years. She is the dance consultant for COPA, Inc. (College Options in the Performing Arts) and holds the UCLA Certificate in College Admissions, is a member of HECA and NYSACAC;
BOARD MEMBER Megan Williams is an independent dance artist, choreographer, teacher and repetiteur, with a BFA from the Juilliard School, and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. In 2020-21 she guest taught in a variety of settings, choreographed two films for the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and made two commissioned dance films for the Katonah Museum of Art, NY where she recently premiered a new site-adaptive work, ‘Beauty Persists’. Her choreography has been produced by 92nd St Y, DanceNOW NYC at Joe’s Pub and Dance Theater Workshop, 10Hairy Legs, and by the Rivertown Artist’s Workshop, Barnspace, MIXT Co., Purchase College, Marymount Manhattan College, Connecticut College , Interlochen Arts Academy and the Kinder HSPVA in Houston. In addition to performing her own work, she has recently been dancing with choreographer Rebecca Stenn and in Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities project. In the early 80’s she performed and toured internationally with the companies of Laura Glenn, Ohad Naharin, and Mark Haim, and in 1988, she joined the Mark Morris Dance Group, dancing for 10 years, touring worldwide, teaching, and appearing in several films, including Falling Down Stairs (with YoYo Ma), The Hidden Soul of Harmony, The Hard Nut and Dido and Aeneas. Ms. Williams continues her affiliation with Morris as a guest performer (creating the role of Lady Capulet in Morris' 2009 Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare), guest rehearsal director, and content specialist in the MMDG archives. She has staged Morris' work on the Purchase Dance Company, Vassar Repertory Company, Fieldston Dance Company, the Boston Ballet, and the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and on students at the Juilliard School, George Mason University, Les Etes de la Danse (Paris), among many others. Ms. Williams has been Morris’ assistant in a variety of settings including ballet, Broadway and television. From 2000-2013 she served on the modern dance faculty of the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, SUNY and was a guest lecturer at Connecticut College from 2016-2018, and at Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College in 2018-2019. She has taught Dance for Parkinson’s Disease in Rye, NY since 2011 and is on the renowned Dance for PD flagship teaching team. She taught Professional Level Ballet at the Gibney Dance Center from 2016-2020 and currently teaches ballet at Sarah Lawrence College and a yoga based somatic practice at Purchase College. Williams founded Megan Williams Dance Projects in the summer of 2016. MWDP was a DANCE NOW Commissioned Artist in 2018 , premiering Williams’ first full evening work, ‘One Woman Show’ to great acclaim at Joe’s Pub at the Public in NYC. In September 2018, MWDP performed a work-in-progress at the 92nd St Y Fridays at Noon series in a shared bill with Molissa Fenley and Claire Porter. MWDP performed an encore of ‘One Woman Show’ in January 2019 at Joe’s Pub and took it on the road in April 2019. MWDP was part of the Dance Off the Grid series at the Emelin Theater in Mamaroneck, NY in May 2019. She was an Artistic Partnership Initiative (API) Fellow at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University in August/September 2019. Megan Williams Dance Projects’ evening length work , ‘can I have it without begging’, in collaboration with composer Eve Beglarian (with support by the O’Donnell-Green Dance and Music Foundation) was scheduled for a March 2020 debut at Danspace Project, NYC, but is being rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Williams has served on the Martha Hill Dance Fund Board since 2011. www.mwdanceprojects.com
BOARD MEMBER Rebecca Stenn, Acclaimed as a “rising choreographer” by the New Yorker and as embodying “wit, concision and gutsy passion” by the New York Times, Rebecca Stenn, dancer, choreographer, educator, author and painter, founded Rebecca Stenn Company in 1996. The company has since worked in opera, film and new media, and has collaborated with composers, musicians, visual artists and new media performance artists. Widely presented at theaters and festivals nationally and internationally, RSC has toured to over 50 cities in the U.S. and abroad, created over 30 commissioned works, held numerous residencies, and received awards and honors, including grants and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Joyce Theater Foundation. Recent performances include a return to the Edinburgh Festival, solo performances at the Rubin Museum, BAM Fisher and the premiere of a new duet at Gibney Dance. As a principal dancer with MOMIX from 1989 to 1996, Stenn performed in over 30 countries and throughout the U.S. and appeared as a featured performer in films for Italian, Spanish and French television. Stenn is a founding member of Pilobolus Too with whom she toured throughout the world from 1996 to 2002. Stenn has been a contributing editor at Dance Magazine and recently co-authored the book, A Life in Dance: A Practical Guide. She has been the choreographic mentor for the National Young Arts Foundation, and the Dance mentor for the Open Stages program in NYC. Stenn is currently on faculty at The New School and Princeton University and is Choreographer-in-Residence at Dartmouth College. Stenn most recently choreographed the new multi-media opera Cracked Orlando at the Juilliard School and The Elusive Bird Trilogy, an evening length work for Rebecca Stenn Company. As a visual artist, Stenn is a represented artist at Agora Gallery in Chelsea and has recently exhibited in galleries in Milan, Venice, London, Miami, Scottsdale, and Mill Valley, CA. Stenn holds a BFA from The Juilliard School and MFA from The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Founding Members in Memoriam
FOUNDING PRESIDENT, Irwin Denis (1920-2004) with Martha Hill
FOUNDING MEMBER, Carl Walz (1920-2002)
with Ann Hutchinson Guest
FOUNDING VICE-PRESIDENT, Hortense Zera (1916-2014)
FOUNDING MEMBER, Ethel Winter
(1924-2012)
FOUNDING VICE-PRESIDENT, Hudas Liff
(1926-2018)
Advisory Board
Linda Kent
Daniel Lewis
Phyllis Miriam
Madeleine Nichols
Henning Rübsam
Janet Mansfield Soares*
Yasuko Tokunaga
Stephanie Tooman
Michael Uthoff
Carol Walker
Ethel Winter (1924-2012)*
*Founding Members
Carolyn Adams*
Miriam Roskin Berger
H.T. Chen (1947-2022)
Duane A. Cyrus
Dian Dong
Mercedes Ellington
Joan Finkelstein
Laura Glenn
Doris Hering (1920-2014)
Francie Huber