Dana Tai Soon Burgess and Jameson Freeman

Arts and Student Success and Access

Dana Tai Soon Burgess came to dance while growing up in Santa Fe and asking questions that did not have simple answers: Where do I belong? What do I carry from my Korean American heritage? How can a body recover a history that words alone cannot hold?

Dance gave those questions movement. Over three decades, the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company in Washington DC has brought that work to audiences across the United States and around the world. As the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s first choreographer-in-residence, Burgess created dances in conversation with museum exhibitions, using the stage as a canvas where identity, memory, and shared humanity could meet.

His career includes two Fulbright dance scholarships, the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize, service as a cultural ambassador for the US Department of State, and the memoir Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly. But a list of achievements cannot show the rehearsal room: the repetition, the mentorship, the moment an artist discovers that a gesture can carry a story.

Burgess and his husband, Jameson Freeman, established an endowed fund for dance at UNM so future artists can enter that room. Their support will help students gain the training, guidance, and creative freedom to test ideas, understand their own histories, and develop voices only they can bring to the stage.

Dance helped Burgess find a language for belonging. Be the reason another artist has the space, mentorship, and courage to find a language of their own.