Delia Neil

Delia Neil, Associate Professor, holds a B.A. degree in Dance from Butler University and an MFA in Dance from UNC Greensboro. Neil is a Professional Choreographer and Master Teacher of Ballet and a certified Pilates Mat Instructor. She was a finalist for the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence at UNC Charlotte in 2003. Her choreography includes works for the concert stage, musical theatre and dramatic theatre productions, collaborative works with visual artists as well as settings of classical ballet repertoire. Neil’s choreography has been supported through project grants by The Arts and Science Council of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, The North Carolina Arts Council, and by the Faculty Research Grant Program of UNC Charlotte. In 1996, Neil was awarded a Choreographic Fellowship by the North Carolina Arts Council. In the Fall of 2006, she was awarded a Reassignment of Duties Grant from UNC Charlotte’s College of Arts and Sciences to serve as the Resident Choreographer for The Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, the nationally acclaimed and third-largest Children’s Theatre in the country. Her collaboration with The Children’s Theatre of Charlotte spans over 16 years. She has collaborated on the acclaimed productions of The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, Go, Dog, Go! and The Shakespeare Stealer, to name just a few.

Neil’s work on “movement for the dramatic text” has been presented at national theatre conferences as well as conferences on Shakespeare. At Randolph College in Lynchburg Virginia, Neil is a faculty member of the Visiting Artist program. Each year she choreographs work for the Annual Dance Concert and teaches ballet classes. In New York City, she studied with the acclaimed ballet teacher, Gabriella Taub-Darvash, and taught at Ballet Hispanico and Hunter College. As a professional dancer, she danced with the Baltimore Ballet and Cincinnati Ballet and toured nationally as a freelance artist.

Neil has choreographed four works for presentation at the North Carolina Museum of Art.  In 2019, she took students to Raleigh to perform her piece, Frida’s Faces, in conjunction with the NCMA’s exhibition of works by Frida Kahlo. In April 2021, six UNC Charlotte dance students performed Neil’s, An Homage to Ancient Egypt, choreographed to accompany the museum’s exhibition, Golden Mummies of Egypt.  More recent are a project in response to NCMA’s exhibition of the work of Art Nouveau visionary, Alphonse Mucha, in December 2021 and a work in conjunction with the NCMA’s exhibition of works from the Phillips Collection, performed in October 2022 with a repeated set of performances in Charlotte at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in November.