About

Banning is a Nashville native, who received her BFA in dance from The Juilliard School in 2002. She spent the first eight years of her career working internationally with some of her field’s most renowned companies, dancers, and choreographers including The Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek, Johan Inger, Hubbard Street 2, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Alexander Ekman, Buglisi/Foreman Dance, Wen Wei Wang, and others.

She was a soloist, master class teacher, and rehearsal assistant during her tenure with Aszure Barton and Artists from 2003-2010. In 2007 she joined Rumpus Room Dance, based in Portland, Oregon and Goteborg, Sweden, where she had the opportunity to co-create and perform multiple site-specific dance works. She and her Rumpus Room colleagues were nominated one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2010.

That year, Bouldin returned to Nashville and in 2012 founded New Dialect, responding to Nashville’s need for a contemporary dance company that would allow dancers, teaching artists, choreographers, & audiences the opportunity to explore the wide variety of groundbreaking movement vocabularies that exist in the world of 21st Century dance. In 2014, New Dialect was named Nashville’s Best New Dance Company and Bouldin, herself, was honored with the Tennessee Dance Association’s Margaret Martin Award for her outstanding contributions to further the public image and accessibility of dance in Tennessee.

Bouldin was the winner of Northwest Dance Project’s Pretty Creative choreographic competition and was also selected as an e-choreographer for Springboard Danse Montreal in 2015. She has created original works for New Dialect, Nashville Ballet, Visceral Dance Chicago, and Whim W’Him, and her works have been commissioned and presented by OZ Arts Nashville, Intersection New Music Ensemble, Tennessee Performing Arts Center, St Petersburg Arts Festival, Cheekwood Botanical Gardens, and others. She was a nominee for the United States Artist Fellowship and the recipient of the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship for choreography in 2016.

In 2017/2018, she has accepted commissions from Groundworks, SALT Contemporary Dance Company, Booker T Washington High School, the Fine Arts Center (Greenville, SC), and the Juilliard School, and looks forward to leading New Dialect into its fifth season.