mdw

dance artist, educator, advocate

meet meghan

Meghan Durham Wall is a dance artist, educator, and advocate. She is passionate about the various forms of human expression, combining her experiences as a professional dance artist and a speech-language salutologist. Meghan’s creative research lies in healing-centered and equity-oriented methods of training the body toward performance, whether on the stage or in society at large. She advocates for access to dance across a spectrum of unexpected to professional dancing bodies. Meghan has enjoyed a fulfilling career as a professional dance performer, dancing on stages from New York City to Singapore and having her original choreography produced across the US. Meghan also has experience working in nonprofit early intervention, adult disability arts, creative aging, and mental health sectors. She currently serves as the chair of the dance program at Westminster University, having enjoyed faculty positions at The Ohio State University, Princeton University, Temple University, and the University of Utah.

Meghan lives, works, creates, plays, struggles, and learns on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded lands of the Ute, Goshute, and Shoshone peoples. She acknowledges that she unjustly benefits from the history of unpaid labor of enslaved people from Africa that shaped this country's economy and culture.

choreographer/performer

Meghan’s creative investigations explore the unexpected dancing body and representation of difference and individuality in the movement arts. She embeds interdisciplinary inquiry within dance choreography and performance, however the human body and experience remain at the foreground of her work. Meghan’s creative work as an independent choreographer and performer has been supported by the Philadelphia Foundation, the nEW Festival, Dance Advance’s artists’ exchange in Singapore (administered by the Pew Charitable Trust), the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Painted Bride Art Center, and Salty Creative, dancenow / now NYC, among others. Her past Double/Take Project, performed with artistic partner Karl Rogers, explored legibility of different bodies through the duet form with commissions by renowned choreographers, including Susan Hadley, Stephen Koester, Bebe Miller, Lisa Race, and Mariko Yamada.

educator/advocate/scholar

Meghan's interdisciplinary perspective informs her pedagogical, scholarly, civic, and administrative perspective. She encourages dancers to make deep connections across artistic and academic pursuits, and to dance with purpose. Whether in the studio, classroom, online, or in public, Meghan continues to focus on community engagement and human connection through dance.

Currently serving as the Chair of the Dance Program at Westminster University, Meghan has enjoyed dance faculty positions at numerous colleges and festivals, including The Ohio State University, Princeton University, Temple University, the University of Utah, the Bates Dance Festival, the Now + Next Dance Mentoring Project, and BalletMet’s Summer Dance Intensive. She was a pilot faculty member for Virginia Tanner’s LEADD program (Learning and Engaging through Arts Discipline and Development), providing longer-term immersive arts experiences for adults with disabilities, and also brings experience working in non-profit early intervention and mental health sectors.

Recent creative scholarship includes publication, productions, performances, and presentations on creative aging (Prime Performance with Repertory Dance Theatre, 2022-2024); Decelerating Dance focused on healing centered dance education (ACDA, 2021-2023); DISCOmposition highlighting disco as a generative site of resistance (ACDA, 2022); CARE contemporary technique model which promotes embodiment as a tool for personal wholeness and social progress (ACDA 2021-2022), as well as technical and physical prowess; dancing toward universal design (Westminster, 2020), empathy as an improvisational tool (National Dance Education Organization); communication styles and caregiver interaction (University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute, 2020) dance, different bodies, and the empathetic gaze (book chapter, Disabilities Arts and Culture: Methods and Approaches, 2019), and social emotional learning through movement (American Dance Therapy Association, 2018),

Meghan is excavating issues of belonging and social justice in dance. She is a 200-hour Skill in Action certified yoga teacher through Michelle C. Johnson's program that centers the practice of yoga as a transformational process with practitioners as agents of chance. She completed Nicole Brewer's Anti-Racist Theatre Foundational Course (2021) and completed foundational course in healing-centered education practices with Dr.Angel Acosta. Meghan completed Resmaa Menakem's training in Foundations of Somatic Abolitionism and the Embodied Anti Racist Intensive for White Bodies: Level One through Education for Racial Equity (2022-2023); and In spring 2021, Meghan was appointed, by application, to NDEO's working group on justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. She currently serves as the Faculty Fellow for Universal Design as Westminster and is deeply engaged as a community advisor in making her local school district, a PWI, accountable for educational equity.

Meghan holds a Master of Fine Art in Modern Dance from the University of Utah; a Master of Science in Speech and Hearing Sciences (neurogenic and child language tracks) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and a Bachelor of Art in Language Studies from Wellesley College.