photo by James Horton
Meggi Sweeney Smith, soloist with the New York Baroque Dance Company since 2010, has trained with Catherine Turocy, Lieven Baert at the Stanford Historical Dance Week and Thomas Baird. In addition to teaching private classes in the Baroque period, Meggi just finished teaching workshops in Basics, Ornamentation, and Improvisation and Notation/Reconstruction at the Mark Morris Dance Center. In 2011 she instructed students in Renaissance dance and acrobatics for the Roving Classical Commedia University Summer Workshop. In addition to teaching private Baroque lessons and advising in historic etiquette, Meggi dances with companies such as CorbinDances, Cohen/Suzeau, Kazuko Hirabayashi Dance Theater, and the Anna Sokolow Dance Company. Meggi is so thankful to be part of this beautiful community of artists.
She studied at the University of Kansas where she received highest honors for her BFA in dance and a minor in music. While there, in addition to modern, ballet and East Indian, she studied Renaissance and Baroque reconstruction and notation, while performing group and solo works for concerts and lecture demonstrations. She received the School of Fine Arts Collaborative Initiative Award and Undergraduate Research Award for her dance research in historic fields. Meggi received Honorable Mention for the Sara and Mary Edwards Paretsky Award for Creativity in her curriculum for teaching music through dance. She began dancing at the age of ten in her hometown of Carrollton, Missouri.
Her interests have also included playing the piano, flute, tumbling, and participating in madrigal and theater works.
