Meet your Amazing Summer Intensive Instructors for 2024!
One of the best ways to learn something well is to learn from an expert.
We are bringing a group of supportive, fun, and talented experts to Billings to work with you.
Scroll down past bios for the sample intensive schedules.
June
Hone your skills in a myriad of styles including ballet, modern, jazz, hop hop, and more throughout the week.
Jane Vorburger completed her dance training at the Academy of the Maryland Youth Ballet. She joined American Ballet Theater at age 16 and spent 5 years with this company performing principal, soloist and corps de ballet roles in the U.S.A. and abroad. She went on to study Contact Improvisation and Choreography at Oberlin College. After completing her BA in Biology at Oberlin College she attended New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts and finished her Master of Fine Arts degree in spring 2006. She teaches ballet, pointe and composition and is on faculty at Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, Marymount Manhattan College, and American Ballet Theater. raised in Mission Viejo, California, where she studied dance.
Grant Chenok began his training in the San Francisco Bay Area and could have never expected to have lived in Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as a result. He holds a Bachelor of Performing Arts degree of Oklahoma City University. Grant worked professionally in Los Angeles for 8 years working on multiple television, movie, commercial and video productions.
He has appeared on NBC’s Days of Our Lives and Scrubs, the Disney Channel’s Drake and Josh, as well as the History Channel’s Come Home Alive. Also appearing in the feature film Zombie Prom starring Ru Paul, VH1’s movie 30 Days Till I’m Famous and short film Mother’s Be Good. Grant’s commercial/industrial credits include: Burger King, Nike, Paramount, Bugaboo Strollers and Pepsi. He has also performed in music videos with the Pussycat Dolls, Busta Rhymes, U.K. artist Jem, Brittany Murphy, Mandi Leigh, Jahzmyne and Paul Oakenfold. Grant has also worked on the Paul McCartney Tour, with the Vietnamese production Kim Loi Cali, and has opened for pop starts, Nina Skye, Tone Loc and Ashlee Simpson. Some of his live stage credits include the Mision America World Tour, the Miss California Pageant and the West Coast Premiere of Footloose. Some of his most memorable moments include the Pussycat Dolls video “Dontcha” and Brittany Murphy video entitled “Faster Kill Pussycat.” Grant has been fortunate to work with studios across 40 of the 50 U.S. states, as well as studios in Belgium, Holland and England. Grant keeps busy spreading the love of dance, as proud co-founder of Epic Dance Competition and Workshop, previously known as, Flow 40 Dance Workshops.
Natalie Desch, a BFA graduate of the Juilliard School and an MFA graduate of the University of Washington, performed for five seasons with the Limón Dance Company and eleven seasons with Doug Varone and Dancers in NYC. She additionally danced in various productions at the Metropolitan Opera and other regional opera companies–Minnesota Opera, Opera Colorado, Palm Beach Opera, Longleaf Opera (NC), Lincoln Center Institute (NYC). From 2005-2012 she taught at Hunter College (City University of New York) and has also been a visiting faculty member at Weber State University (UT), University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and the Beijing Dance Academy. Additionally, she has taught for the following summer festivals: Doug Varone and Dancers, the Limón Dance Company, UNCSA, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, the Bates Dance Festival, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and the Canadian Contemporary Dance Theater, among others. Natalie has restaged the works of José Limón, Doug Varone, Jirí Kylián, and Daniel Charon on performing groups around the world, and her choreography has been presented at venues throughout the US. In 2014 Natalie relocated to Salt Lake City, UT, and began teaching at Ballet West Academy, Westminster College, Utah Valley University, and Salt Lake Community College.
Natalie joined the University of Utah’s School of Dance as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2019.
August
Intensify your ballet and contemporary strength with classes in ballet technique, contemporary techniques, contemporary ballet, pointe, variations, and various conditioning methods
Bethany Mitchell was raised in Mission Viejo, California, where she studied dance from the age of four at the Ballet Conservatory under the direction of Alan McCarter. She began her professional career in 2004 with regional ballet companies in California including Ballet Pacifica, State Street Ballet, and City Ballet of San Diego. After moving to San Francisco in 2007, Bethany performed and toured internationally with Liss Fain Dance while on faculty at ODC/Dance and Blue Bear School of Music. She moved to New York City in 2012 and danced with Battery Dance and Indelible Dance while teaching at the Mark Morris Dance Center and Harlem School of the Arts. She has toured to over forty countries as a professional dancer, and completed a Fulbright Scholar Award creating a new piece of choreography on the B.F.A. students at the Escuela Profesional de Mazatlan in Mexico in May, 2022. She currently dances with Liss Fain Dance and Robert Moses' Kin in San Francisco and produces her art salon, ArtPärdē, at local venues around the city.
Lindsay Viatori spent the bulk of her performing career in New York City dancing with Helen Simoneau Danse (rehearsal director and founding company member), Nathan Trice/RITUALS, Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, Collective Body/ Dance Lab, Ellen Cornfield, Daniel Charon, Camille A. Brown, Ayo Jackson, Steve Rooks, Sidra Bell and VIA Dance Collaborative (founding member). She has also had the pleasure of performing works by Twyla Tharp, Jiri Kylian, Ton Simons, Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Tatiana Baganova, Simoné Ferro and Miguel Gutierrez among others. She has performed in Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera’s West Side Story and North Shore Music Theatre’s Victor/Victoria. Film credits include Lead Arabian in Robert Lindgren’s The Nutcracker (PBS/UNC-TV), feature film Across the Universe (directed by Julie Taymore and choreography by Daniel Ezralow), music video Pieces of You by The Hot Seconds, dance film SILKEN : EDGE, and she recently collaborated with director Cara Hagen on an award winning dance film titled Color Theory.
Her choreography has been presented at the Ailey Citigroup Theater (nyc), St. Mark's Church (nyc) and University Settlement (nyc) as well as commissioned for SUNY Fredonia, VIA Dance Collaborative, Point Park University, and Slippery Rock University. She received her BFA from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2002 where she was the recipient of the prestigious Sarah Graham Kenan Endowed Fellowship of Excellence. She also received her MFA in Choreography from the University of Iowa in 2014 as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and as the first recipient of the Strategic Initiative Fellowship recognizing excellence in her field. She was awarded a Community Supported Artist Grant through the New Hazlett Theater (Pittsburgh, PA) and presented an evening of her work titled OverExposed in April 2017. For this performance, she was also recognized as an “Outstanding Performance” in the Pittsburgh City Paper. In 2017, she began performing for The Blanket (a Pittsburgh based dance company) where she performed the iconic works of Lucinda Childs and was featured in Dance Magazine Online. Additional performances with The Blanket include the works of Christopher Williams and Beth Gill. In 2023, she will join Ballet Ashani for a contemporary ballet project, where she will also serve as the rehearsal director.
She recently co-authored research on ethical jazz dance pedagogy with collaborator Jeremy Blair, is a board member of the American College Dance Association and Helen Simoneau Danse (where she also serves as a rehearsal director and educational outreach coordinator). She is the co-founder and director of the FORGE Summer Dance Intensive, hosted at Slippery Rock University, where she is an associate professor of dance, teaching all levels of Ballet, Modern, and Jazz Techniques, as well as, Composition, Repertory and Lecture Courses.
Example Intensive Schedules for 2024!
