about us

mission statement

heidi duckler dance creates place-based performances that transform non-traditional spaces, providing learning opportunities and engaging diverse communities, in the belief that the arts can change our vision of the world and of ourselves.

To us, democratic dance means dancing at age 6 or 65. Democratic dance means dancing in your bathroom, in a laundromat, in a bridge underpass. Democratic dance means using movement as a tool for survival, resistance, healing, and growth. We use movement to address intersectional topics affecting our society, especially its vulnerable populations.

Our educational vision is rooted in exploration. We have served thousands of underserved youth and families across Los Angeles. With several unique education programs for schools, after school programs, seniors, veterans, and correctional facilities, we seek to be a vehicle for self-expression, confidence, inclusion, and collaboration.

Our practice of spatial justice involves activating space through dance and increasing accessibility to these spaces. Using the body as a vehicle, we believe dance drives discovery. In an effort to make Los Angeles a more animated and equitable city, HDD’s artistic offerings reveal truths about historic landmarks, reawaken abandoned places, and turn the spaces we seemingly know well on their heads.

Racial Equity Statement

It’s important to remind ourselves of the core beliefs embedded in HDD’s Racial Equity Statement, which has been adopted by the Board and has been a guiding factor to how we program and engage with the community.

Read the full statement here

Heidi Duckler

Heidi Duckler is the Artistic Director and founder of Heidi Duckler Dance in Los Angeles, California and Heidi Duckler Dance/Northwest in Portland, Oregon. Duckler has created more than 300 original dance works at unique sites in Australia, Germany, Russia, Hong Kong, Cuba, Chile, Canada, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Portland, Seattle, and throughout Southern California.

Duckler earned a BS in Dance from the University of Oregon and an MA in Choreography from UCLA. Awards include the Distinguished Dance Alumna award from the University of Oregon School in Music and Dance, the Dance/USA and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Engaging Dance Audiences award, and the National Endowment of the Arts American Masterpiece award for her work touring laundromats, “Laundromatinee”. She has been honored with the Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival’s Maverick Award, and LA Weekly’s Best Site-Specific Dance Company Los Angeles, and was featured as a Tedx UCLA speaker in 2015. She is currently artist in residence with her company at the Martin Luther King Community Hospital Campus funded through NEA Art Works and the California Arts Council and she is in production on several dance films including a commission from the Portland Dance Film Festival.

Heidi Duckler

Heidi Duckler is the founder and artistic director of Heidi Duckler Dance in Los Angeles, California and Heidi Duckler Dance/Northwest in Portland, Oregon. Titled the “reigning queen of site-specific performance” by the LA Times, Duckler is a pioneer of place-based contemporary practice. Her methodology emphasizes how dance, born from individual experience, can be a tool for awareness. She has created over 500 original works.

Duckler’s 2019 short film “Where We’re Going” was recently selected for the 2023 Aphelion Film Festival, and her 2022 film “The Tender Bondy Sings” was selected for the 2023 IndieFEST Film Awards Festival. In September, Duckler will speak at the Creatives in Conversation Conference held by the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles chapter. Currently, Duckler is on faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Film and Media Studies Department.

Duckler earned a BS in dance from the University of Oregon and an MA in choreography from UCLA. She also served as a board member of the University of Oregon’s School of Music and Dance Advancement Council. Her awards include the Distinguished Dance Alumna award from the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance; the Dance/USA and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Engaging Dance Audiences Award; and the National Endowment of the Arts American Masterpiece award.

artistic process

“As a choreographer I’ve imbued non-traditional sites with performances for more than 30 years. The strength and distinctiveness of my work depends on a solid foundation of place, be it geographical, cultural, social, historical, architectural, environmental, political and/or personal. Location, history, and community have inspired my work, yet my choreography has evolved with each place. Sites are catalysts and collaborators within my choreographic process.”

Working with a diverse range of dancers, I negotiate performers’ movement styles around architecture, audience members, and each other. With input from creative partners and collaborators (dancers, musicians, architects and community members, among others), a truly site-specific and environmentally responsive work emerges, capturing the multiple dimensions of each place, performer, and collaborator.” – Heidi Duckler

Artistic Process

Heidi Duckler is a pioneer of site specific place based contemporary practice. Her gestural movement practice transfers across people and places and links the condition of choreography to human action. Her dances invite us to reconsider the space we live in, the space we take up, and this helps us to communicate our personal experience to others, to speak up, to inspire, to incorporate hard truths into the vulnerable body and pursue the search for empathetic connectivity. This understanding of dance applies to far reaching conceptual inquiry and fields of production that include film, photography, architecture and urban living and often involves collaboration. Duckler leads an award winning company seeking civic engagement and recognizing emotional sincerity. Her work is revealed in the landscape and community response in which it is created and both triggers memory and embodies current conditions.

2023

Heidi Duckler Dance

Official Selection – Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival
Official Selection – Aphelion Film Festival
Official Selection – TheIndieFEst Film Awards
Official Selection – Short Stop International Film Festival

Heidi Duckler

Guest Professor – University of Southern California
Professor of Screen Dance – University of California Santa Barbara
Speaker – American Institute of Architects LA Creatives in Conversation Conference

Panelist – The Political Mandate of the Arts series from the Wende Museum

2022

Heidi Duckler Dance

Heidi Duckler

Panelist – Department of Cultural Affairs, Public Art, Los Angeles,
Panelist – National Arts and Disability Center
Panelist – New Music/USA

2019

Heidi Duckler Dance/Northwest

Best Choreography for the Lens – Verve Dance Film Festival
2nd Place Winner – Verve Dance Film Festival
Audience Award – Portland Dance Film Festival
Official Selection – Canby Film Festival
Official Selection – IMARP – Mostra Internacional de Dança – Imagens em Movimento – Video Dança

Heidi Duckler

Panelist – LACMA, New Engagement with Historic Places
Choreographer and Director – Oregon Dance Film Commission

2018

Heidi Duckler Dance

Certificate of Congressional Recognition – Judy Chu, PhD, Member of Congress, 27th District
Certificate of Congressional Recognition – Ted W. Lieu, Member of Congress, 33rd District
State of California Senate Certificate of Recognition – Senator Holly J. Mitchell

2017

Heidi Duckler Dance

LA Department of Cultural Affairs, Prequalified List of Festival Producers/Programmers

2016

Heidi Duckler Dance/Northwest

Oregon Art in Public Places Roster

Heidi Duckler

Winner – Lester Horton Award, Artist Appreciation
Panelist – Santa Monica Artists Fellowship

1999

Heidi Duckler

Peer Panelist – Cultural Affairs Department, City of Los Angeles
Member – Cultural Planning/Arts for L.A.
Member – Dance/USA

1998

Heidi Duckler Dance

Winner – Lester Horton Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography, Outstanding Achievement in Performance, Outstanding Achievement in Production, Outstanding Achievement in Music for the production of Most Wanted
Nominee – Lester Horton Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Set Design, Lighting Design, and Sustained Achievement for the production of Most Wanted

Heidi Duckler

Peer Panelist – Los Angeles County Music and Performing Arts Commission
Selected participant – On Site Performance Network, Dancing in the Streets
Editor – Dance Zine
Vice President – Board of Directors of the Dance Resource Center of Los Angeles, CA

1997

Heidi Duckler

Member – California Plaza Task Force, Los Angeles, CA
Speaker – Interdisciplinary Performance at California Institute of the Arts

Ken Bernstein
Mary Ann Braubach
Heidi Duckler
Raymond Ejiofor
Nefer Fernandez, President
Jamarah Hayner, Treasurer
Anthony Holland
Victor Jones
Fiammetta Piazza, Secretary
Patti Rhee
Julie Stephens
Deborah Weintraub

Heidi Duckler – Founder/Artistic Director
Raphaelle Ziemba – Managing Director
Raven Richard – Director of Development and Communications
Jessica Emmanuel – Engagement Director
Sharice Bryant – Marketing Coordinator
Raymond Ejiofor – Associate Artistic Director
Letxia Cordova – Education Manager
Fernando Mau – Media and Production Assistant

Andrea Burr
Letxia Cordova
Rebekah Denegal
Darrel ‘Friidom’ Dunn
Raymond Ejiofor
Lenin Fernandez
Joan H.P. Fricke
Nicole Flores
Knicole Haggins
Samantha Mohr
Alyse Rockett
Beatriz Vasquez
Vanessa ‘Neva’ Verdoodt
Himerria Wortham
William Jay Ylvisaker
Anthea Young

Raymond Ejiofor
Lenin Fernandez
Nicole Flores
Israel Heller
Roberto C. Lambaren
Myles Lavallee
Jobel Medina
Lily Ontiveros
Sarah Belle Reid
Alyse Rockett
William Roper
Isaac Takeuchi
Justin Scheid
Santiago Villarreal
Keva Walker
Himerria Wortham
William Jay Ylvisaker
Anthea Young

Christine Ferriter
Dr. Theresa Gregor
Traci Larson
Kamyi Lee
Carla Lucero
Omar Madkour
Snezana Petrovic
Sarah Belle Reid
Himerria Wortham

History

The company is rooted in Democratic Dance, Arts Education, Spatial Justice and has been creating site-specific work since 1985.

Heidi Duckler Dance (HDD) creates site-specific performances that transform non-traditional spaces, providing learning opportunities and engaging diverse communities, in the belief that the arts can change our vision of the world and of ourselves. HDD makes access, diversity and inclusion core components of its mission and its work often explores spatial justice. By utilizing its surrounding environment as a creative source, it promotes civic engagement across generations, inviting residents to examine their communities through a new lens. HDD’s work strives to democratize dance, provide innovative arts education, and promote spatial justice.

The company has produced over 400 original works locally, nationally and internationally, in many iconic locations, including: the Ambassador Hotel, LA City Hall, San Gabriel Mission, Los Encinos State Historic Park, Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, The Dunbar Hotel and on the Tall Ships at the Port of LA and in many Southern California areas including: Boyle Heights, Koreatown, North Hollywood, Hollywood, San Pedro, South LA, the Antelope Valley, Culver City, and Santa Monica, amongst others.

HDD’s programs reach more than 7,500 individuals each year. Its youth arts education programs, established in 2013, have served over 10,000 youth and families at over 25 schools and community centers throughout Los Angeles county, with an emphasis on low-income communities. All rehearsals and engagement activities take place onsite and culminate in landmark performances tailored to foster community bonds.