About the Dance Thread
The dance thread for FAP offers many opportunities for technique, choreography, and collaboration with other artistic disciplines. Through a program-wide Masterclass led by resident artist Princess Jackson, FAPpers are able to delve into dance and choreography with any level of dance background. Students will also be able to participate in the Info Session about curricular and extracurricular opportunities on campus as well as the Keynote discussion. Workshops, led by a variety of guest artists, offer more intimate and advanced experiences in many different disciplines of dance, such as hip-hop, ballroom, modern strengthening, theater dance, and more.
Resident Artist: La’Toya Princess Jackson
La’Toya Princess Jackson is a writer and producer of ballets, songs and plays. She is also a blacks in ballet historian for Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet. As founder of LaPrincess Entertainment Group, LLC, she aspires to create original works that provide diversity and inclusion in the arts and provide positive representation of African Americans in arts and entertainment. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Media Arts (Radio/TV/Film) at Clark Atlanta University and she began her professional career in the ballet world at the Boston Ballet as teaching faculty for the Boston Ballet School. She has implemented free ballet programming in both the Atlanta and Boston communities with the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Atlanta and the Boys and Girls Club of Boston.
At Harvard, she engaged in performance research under the direction of senior faculty in the Theater, Dance, Media department at Harvard and presented her thesis Black Swans Shattering the Glass Ceiling: A Historical Perspective on the Evolution of Historically Black Ballet Companies. She was a company member in the Harvard-Radcliffe Modern Dance Company and a dancer in the Harvard Dance Project, a faculty-led performance company. She has performed in several Theater, Dance, Media department productions at Harvard and she was the first graduate student to write and produce an original black ballet at Harvard. She wrote, produced and performed Vanity Lane: The Ballet and was one of the lyricists and composers for Black C.A.S.T.’s original musical which premiered on the Loeb Mainstage at the American Repertory Theater. She graduated from Harvard University in 2019 with a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Dramatic Arts in an interdisciplinary study of music, dance, and performance.