Professor To Receive National Dance Educator Award

Assistant Professor of Dance Marissa Nesbit has been named a 2024 Outstanding Dance Educator in Higher Education in the “established” category by the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO). Nesbit will receive the award in a ceremony on September 5.

The NDEO advances the field of dance education and represents more than 4,200 members from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and more than 25 other countries. Each year, the NDEO honors two “emerging” (five years or less experience) and two “established” (six years or more experience) educators in the higher education setting. “The recipient of this award should inspire and motivate their students and have a significant impact in their school community,” the NDEO states. Nesbit shares the 2024 award with T. Lang, an associate professor of dance at Spelman College.

Nesbit is the dance education coordinator in the Department of Dance. She teaches dance education methods courses, supervises student teachers, and engages in qualitative research projects that investigate aspects of dance curriculum and pedagogy in K12 contexts.

Nesbit is influenced by a widely varied academic background that contributes to her understanding of dance as deeply intertwined with other academic, artistic, and life pursuits. After completing her undergraduate degree in psychobiology at Pitzer College in Claremont California, she worked as a special education teacher before returning to school to complete her MFA in Dance at Texas Woman’s University. Through work with several arts education programs, she found her calling as a dance educator and further developed her interest in teacher professional development as Director of Dance Education at the Southeast Center for Education in the Arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. A desire to deeply investigate dance curriculum led to her Ph.D. in Art Education, where she was awarded the Manuel Barkan Dissertation Fellowship at The Ohio State University.

Nesbit was a founding board member of the North Carolina Dance Education Organization (2014-2018), the state chapter of the NDEO. Learn more about her path as a dance educator and her teaching philosophy in this faculty spotlight.