NW MI Arts & Culture Network

Jennifer McQuiston Lott enjoys a varied career as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, director and advocate for the arts. Company credits include Gibney Dance Company, Groundworks Dancetheater, Armitage Gone! Dance, Inlet Dance Theatre, Collective Body Dance Lab, Eglevsky Ballet, and others. Her choreographic works and short dance films have premiered in New York at Baryshnikov Arts Center, National Sawdust, Celebrate Brooklyn!, Chen Dance Center’s Newsteps, the Thang Dao Dance Festival; also at The Dead/Live Festival (Boston), The Cleveland Public Theatre, New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts, The Southern Theater in Minneapolis, and Festival Miden (Germany). She has created works for Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival, Gibney Dance Center, the Laguna Dance Festival, Baldwin Wallace University’s Bach Festival, Rockford Dance Company, and has choreographed music videos for groups Son Lux and My Brightest Diamond. She assisted choreographer Jodie Gates with the creation of new works for Tulsa Ballet and Kansas City Ballet, and staged Ms. Gates’ ballets at Sacramento Ballet and Princeton University.

In 2012, Lott & Brent Whitney launched the Traverse City Dance Project, a seasonal company for professional dance artists in Traverse City, MI. Now celebrating its Eighth season, the TCDP has performed works by Jodie Gates, Gerald Arpino, Karole Armitage, Mauro de Candia and John Utans, and commissioned 10 new ballets, many accompanied by original, live music. Lott’s many collaborators include musicians such as Son Lux, DM Stith, The Accidentals, Jonny Rodgers, and Darren Solomon, chamber groups yMusic, Clocks in Motion, and Tenth Intervention, and filmmakers Murat Eyuboglu, Mike Jones, Qian Li and Brenden Beecey and animator Anthony Ciannamea. She was recently a featured performer in the official Son Lux videos Undone (dir. David Terry Fine, chor. Tyler Gilstrap) and You Don’t Know Me (dir. Nathan Johnson/The Made Shop, featuring Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany).

Lott earned her BFA in Ballet Performance from Indiana University, and her MFA in Dance from the University of California, Irvine, where she was awarded a Graduate Fellowship, the Medici Scholarship, and the Sheila K. & James J. Peterson Community Spirit Scholarship. She is certified in GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® and is an ABT® Certified Teacher in Primary through Level 3 of the ABT® National Training Curriculum. She has served on the faculty of Interlochen Summer Arts Camp, and taught master classes and workshops nationally and internationally, including DOCH (Stockholm, Sweden), Ikapa Dance Theatre (Cape Town, South Africa), the Académie Américaine de Danse (Paris, France) and Muhlenberg College (PA). Since 2018, she has had the honor of being one of only eight North American instructors of Countertechnique, an innovative and athletic contemporary dance technique developed by Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk. www.lottdance.com, www.tcdanceproject.org.