Alison Manning ’08
Allison Manning
About
Dance Advisory Board Vice President
Alison Manning is the Executive Director and Co-Producer of The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard, and has worked with the organization for 12 years to provide meaningful residency opportunities for national and international performing artists, bringing the arts to the Vineyard community. She is the founding Co-Artistic Director and Choreographer of DanceTheYard, The Yard’s year-round professional dance company with creative/choreographic partner and company Co-Artistic Director Jesse Keller.
In addition to her administrative and choreographic roles, Alison teaches the Horton Technique on faculty at The Yard each summer since 2011. She is also a guest teaching artist in the Master’s division of NYU’s Steinhardt School, as part of the ‘Dance Master’s’ program for the past two years, and is a visiting Master teacher and Artist Adjunct professor at Wesleyan University. In addition, she is a substitute on a regular basis at Peridance Capezio Center and STEPS on Broadway for the great Master Horton teacher Milton Meyers as well as Karen Gayle, Kristina Berger, and Jolee Maffe. Milton Meyers was her mentor beginning during her summer of 2007 scholarship participation in the School at Jacob’s Pillow and continuing to this day.
Alison also works as a professional freelance artist, currently dancing with Guggenheim awardee David Parker and The Bang Group and with actress Amy Brenneman & director Sabrina Peck in their new show ‘Threshold’; she has danced in the past with The Peggy Spina Tap Company, Xodus Dance Collective, the Next Stage Project, Naomi Goldberg Haas’ Dances for a Variable Population, and Boston-based Kinodance Company.
She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Marymount Manhattan College with a BFA in Modern Dance under the Direction of Katie Langan and a Minor in Art History.
Biography
Alison Manning ’08 is the Executive Director and Co-Producer of The Yard, a 46 year old dance and performing arts organization on Martha’s Vineyard. She has been leading, in partnership with Yard Artistic Director and Executive Producer David R. White, to a reimagining of the Yard legacy for a new century and new generations of artistic and educational practice.
Manning joined The Yard in 2008, after receiving her BFA in Dance from Marymount Manhattan College. After bedbug accepted to the School at Jacob’s Pillow and working with the great Milton Myers she went on to teach the Horton technique at The Yard, Peridance Capezio Center, STEPS on Broadway, New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, Ohio University and Wesleyan University. She dances professionally with The Bang Group and is Co-Artistic Director of DanceTheYard with Jesse Keller, The Yard’s resident staff-directed dance company. Manning has performed and toured in the past with The Peggy Spina Tap Company, Kinodance Company, Xodus Dance Collective, among others. Her own choreographic work, with collaborator Jesse Keller, continues to be presented each year as part of The Yard’s presentation series as well as at Jacob’s Pillow’s Inside/Out Stage, Gibney Dance Center, West End Theater, Triskelion Arts, ACDFA and NY Theater Lab. Mrs. Manning is a proud wife and mom of three children and is humbled to serve on the Advisory Board of the Marymount Manhattan College Dance Department.