Biography

Dominic Moore-Dunson is an award-winning choreographer, director, performer, and storyteller based in Akron, Ohio. A 2025 Lloyd Richards New Futures Fellow with the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation and a Dance Magazine “25 to Watch” artist, Moore-Dunson creates work at the intersection of contemporary dance, theater, live music, text, and immersive performance.

His artistic practice is rooted in what he calls Urban Midwest Storytelling—a way of making shaped by growing up Black in post-industrial America and by the people, histories, landscapes, and contradictions of the Midwest. His work asks questions about memory, identity, safety, belonging, family, and what it means to build a life together. Rather than treating dance as separate from story, Moore-Dunson uses movement as a language for the things people carry but cannot always say.

His body of work includes the inCOPnegro trilogy, The Remember Balloons, Black by Nature, FLOAT, The Black Card Project, and other multidisciplinary works created for theaters, trails, families, and community spaces. The Remember Balloons & The Remember Balloons Live!, created with composer Theron Brown, has toured nationally and expanded from the stage to public television, bringing Moore-Dunson’s work to audiences beyond the traditional theater.

Moore-Dunson’s work has been presented nationally and featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Akron Beacon Journal, and on PBS. His honors include the 2024 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship, the 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Ann and Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship, and recognition as a Cleveland Arts Prize Emerging Artist. He has also been an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Beyond choreography, Moore-Dunson is a producer and creative leader interested in the space where art-making, entrepreneurship, and community-building meet. He is Co-Founder of MooreDunson Co., a family-led creative strategy studio he runs with his wife, Ashley Moore-Dunson. Across his artistic and producing practice, he is building a body of work that is deeply rooted in place while reaching far beyond it.