Leslie Parker is a dance artist, director, improviser, and performer born in the traditional homeland of Indigenous people, mostly the Dakhóta and Ojibwe people, also known as the Twin Cities, Minnesota.

Parker's earlier beginnings of informal training began with community activists who founded the Lou Wiley High Steppers (Rhythm & Drill team); and founders of the Rainbow Children's Theatre Company in St. Paul, Minnesota. Growing up in the St. Paul Rondo community rooted her in socially engaged art and motivated her research of dance forms of the Sene-Gambian region, Guinea, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire. She has multiple home art bases, including Brooklyn, NY (traditional homeland of the Lenape people). Parker holds a BFA from Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance, a MFA in Dance from Hollins University in partnership with Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and the Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany. She studied Senegalese dance forms at the Centre Culturel Blaise Senghor de Dakar in Senegal, West Africa.

As a dance creative, she highlights unique individual contributions, digs into cultural memory to engage with the world more imaginatively and embodies an aesthetic that encompasses an organic physical/movement influenced by the Black and African Diasporas including: Traditional W. African, Black/African American vernacular/social dance, Improvisation, and Contemporary/Modern technique derived from and exchanged across multiple continents. She is a 2024-2026 Jerome@Camargo artist-in-resident, a 2017 Bessie award recipient for Outstanding performer as part of Skeleton Architecture, a  2022 McKnight Fellowship for Choreographers, and is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow 2019-2021.

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Parker initiated Leslie Parker Dance Project, LLC as a means to experience dance art more intuitively. As an educator, she led and facilitated classes as guest Assistant Professor at Carleton College, a Lecturer at University of Minnesota and as a guest artist at various institutions nationally. Her recent multi-year work, Call to Remember (2020-2023) is rooted, researched, and experienced through residencies, stage performances and workshops across the US, including, Minneapolis, MN, at Walker Art Center, Pillsbury House Theatre, and Pangea World Theatre; San Francisco, CA, at CounterPulse; New York, New York at Danspace Project; and at Tallahassee, FL, at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. Call to Remember has evolved into CtR Methodology as an approach to improvisation for choreography, cultivating relationships with partner organizations and artistic collaborators, and when making dance works.

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Currently, Leslie Parker Dance Project is developing a new solo and ensemble work, LOVERROOT - a dive into somatic explorations inspired by protest, revolution and poetry. For more details goto  

https://www.leslieparkerdance.com/loverroot.

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