We, the students, staff, and faculty of the UW Department of Dance, aspire to create a community built on respect, equity, collaboration, and belonging. We recognize that diversity is essential to the existence and prolificacy of dance, and critical to the creation of a more just and inclusive dance field. By striving to promote an environment welcoming to people of all cultures, races, sexes, abilities, sexual orientations, gender identities and/or expressions, ages, religions, and economic statuses, we believe creativity, critical thinking, and self-expression can thrive. We humbly acknowledge our fallibility as we work together and strive to make essential changes to our department, university, and larger field of dance.
The desire for increased diversity in our department is the foundation of our continuing and vigorous efforts to examine and alter our departmental culture. To that end, we have been promoting and engaging in conversation about equity and inclusion, addressing our curriculum, class offerings, and concert programming to understand the impact of the privileging of Western concert dance forms, prioritizing new hires that reflect our values of diversity, and building multi-layered forms of transparency and communication.