Funsch Dance Experience is under the artistic direction of Christy Funsch, an East Coast native currently based in San Francisco. The mission of the company is to celebrate the vulnerable yet indefatigable spirit through choreographic experiments with gaze, distinctive movement invention, and unpredictable phrasing.
Funsch has received funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s ODC Theater Opportunity Fund, Theatre Bay Area, Dancers’ Group, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the New Stages for Dance Award, ODC’s Sandbox Series, and Chime Across Borders, a mentorship program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company with Mentor Tere O’Connor. She has received four nominations from the Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee for Performance, and has been awarded residencies at ODC Theater, the Djerassi Ranch, CounterPULSE Theater, the U Cross Foundation, and Yaddo. She was named one of “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine in 2014. In 2015, Christy became the first woman granted permission to learn and perform Daniel Nagrin’s seminal solo from 1965, Path.
FDE has been presented in Amsterdam, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Toronto, and throughout California. She is currently a collaborative partner of Nol Simonse. She has also worked with Susan Rethorst, Stephen Pelton, Sue Roginski, Katie Faulkner, Julie Mayo, Leslie Seiters, Mary Armentrout, Maxine Moerman Dancetheatre, Dandelion Dancetheater, and countless others. She is a certified Pilates instructor and certified Laban Movement Analyst through New York’s Laban Institute for Integrated Movement Studies. She has been commissioned and granted teaching and choreogrphaic residencies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, James Madison University, Santa Clara University, Hamilton College, and the University of San Francisco. In the fall of 2019 Christy will be a Fulbright Scholar at the Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa, School of Dance (ESD) in Portugal.
Funsch received her BA in Dance and English from Hamilton College, New York, in 1989 where she was the recipient of the Theater and Dance Award, and the first student in Hamilton College history to be awarded a Senior Fellowship in Dance. The resulting full-length work Waves (based on Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves) premiered at Hamilton’s Minor Theater in April 1989. Christy later earned an MFA in Performance and Choreography from Arizona State University in 1994 where she received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award and studied with Daniel Nagrin. While in Arizona, she co-founded, choreographed, and performed for the ESTRUS WORKS performance group in Phoenix, Arizona, producing four full-length concerts between 1992-94.
Read dance scholar Jill Randall’s profile of Christy from 2016 here.
Full CV here.