Rebecca Allen | artist
Photo by Hunter Armistead Photography courtesy Nashville Arts Magazine
Becky is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana where she began her dance training with the Jefferson Ballet Theatre. She studied both dance and the visual arts at Loyola University and the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. In 2001, she received her B.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of New Orleans. That same year, she moved to Nashville where she has worked as an artist and educator for the past 16 years with organizations such as the Nashville Ballet, Vanderbilt University, and Metro Parks Dance Division. In 2004 she became the assistant director to modern dance company StillPoint Dance Theatre and performed with the company for 7 years. She has been collaborating as a dancer and instructor with Banning Bouldin and New Dialect since the collective's inception in 2012, and more recently as a rehearsal assistant and choreographer. Her most recent works include Kat 5, a commission by Intersection New Music Ensemble in collaboration with New Dialect, which premiered in Nashville in 2016, and Lighthouse, a collaboration with Intermission and New Dialect, which premiered at Monthaven Mansion in Hendersonville, Tennessee in 2017. She maintains a studio (RA | Studio) where she designs and creates her own line of functional ceramics. In her work as a multi-disciplinary artist, Becky loves to explore the intersection of her experience with the visual arts and dance.
Photo by Hunter Armistead courtesy Nashville Arts Magazine
“As a dance artist, I see myself as a moving poet and architect of the space around my body. As a visual artist, the same is true, except that where dance is ephemeral, with clay or pencil, I am left with a tangible object or record of my movement map. It’s all a kind of math in motion. ”