Career Transition for Dancers Awards Five Recipients $10,000 To Support Their Education To Progress to the Next Steps of Their Careers
New York, NY (October 10, 2024) – The Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors Fund), the national human services organization supporting the needs of those working in performing arts and entertainment, is proud to announce five recipients of the 2024 Alex Dubé Scholarship Program. This year, the Entertainment Community Fund will distribute $10,000 scholarships to J. Bouey, Tenile Pritchard. Sonya Rio-Glick, Carrie Strother and Macy Sullivan.
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“We are pleased to celebrate this year’s Alex Dubé Scholarship recipients. Congratulations to this group on all that they have achieved in their careers so far, as well as to everyone who applied. We wish all the best to J., Tenile, Sonya, Carrie and Macy as they transition into this exciting next chapter,” shared Elena Muslar, Managing Director of The Career Center at the Entertainment Community Fund.
Through The Alex Dubé Scholarship Program, Career Transition For Dancers supports the education of dancers to build their next professional platforms. These one-time awards of up to $10,000 are distributed annually to dancers enrolled in accredited graduate degree programs to assist in tuition payment. For more information on the Alex Dubé Scholarship Program, please visit Alex Dubé Scholarship Program.
Career Transition For Dancers offers career counseling, educational scholarships and panel discussions to assist dancers in navigating life changes and exploring new opportunities.
The Dancers’ Resource, a program of the Entertainment Community Fund, was founded by Bebe Neuwirth to address the unique situation dancers face as a consequence of the physically demanding nature of their work, coupled with the significant financial challenges of earning a living in dance. The Dancers’ Resource provides individual and group support for dancers dealing with injuries; referrals for health care and health insurance; information and advocacy with workers’ compensation and disability insurance; educational seminars on injury prevention, nutrition and wellness, financial planning and more; emergency financial assistance; connection with other dancers to share experiences, resources and advice; and more.
The 2024 Alex Dubé Scholarship Recipients:
J. Bouey As a dance artist and astrologer, J. Bouey (they/them) is finding their way back to joy by imagining the abolition of systemic oppression through their current project, S A T U R N.
J. is a 2023 Bessie Award Outstanding Performer recipient, the founder of The Dance Union Podcast and initiator of theNYC Dancers COVID-19 Relief Fund andThe Dance Union Town Hall For Collective Action to support the dance community through numerous world-changing events.
As a creator, J. is a recent 2021-2022 Jerome Fellow and a 2022-2023 Movement
Research Artist in Residence. J. was also recently a Gibney 2021 Spotlight Artist, Artist-In-Residence at CPR – Center for Performance Research, a 2021 Bogliasco Fellow, a 2018 Movement Research Van Lier Fellow and a 2018 Dancing While Black Fellow.
J. is currently a collaborator with nia love. They were also a former performer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, danced with Germaul Barnes’ Viewsic Dance, Maria Bauman’s MB Dance, Dante Brown, Antonio Brown Dance, Christal Brown’s INspirit Dance and they apprenticed with Emerge 125 (formerly Elisa Monte Dance) under the artistic direction of Tiffany Rea-Fisher.
Determined to manifest the dreams dreamt in their youth, J. is assuming this responsibility because these dreams sustained them when the sun didn’t shine or shined too bright to see.
Tenile Pritchard Born in Boston, Massachusetts, I have lived in New York and Chicago and now Las Vegas, where I have been for the past 16 years. I took my first dance class at three years old and immediately fell in love. After graduating from Manhattanville University with a BA in Management and Dance, I studied at The Ailey School for two years and officially started my professional career in dance. Delving into multiple facets of the craft—acting, modeling, teaching and even being a magician’s assistant—dance awakened my love of travel, taking me places both domestically and internationally, including places such as Paris, Mexico and Korea.
Some years ago, I stumbled upon the documentary The Business of Being Born and found a new passion for birth work. Inspired by the amazing attributes of midwifery, I became a certified doula and enjoy helping families in their birthing journeys. After being hospitalized for a major illness and receiving home health care, I realized the need for more specialty nurses, particularly in ostomy care.
I am currently on a new journey as a graduate student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I’m pursuing my MSN with a concentration in Nursing. My vision is to advance my studies in midwifery and possibly wound care. Having spent the first half of my career enriching lives through entertainment, I aspire to dedicate the second half to enriching lives therapeutically.
Sonya Rio-Glick Originally from Albany, NY, Sonya Rio-Glick is an Atlanta-based multidisciplinary change maker and thinker. Fortunate to have studied and crafted theater and dance across the United States, her approach to art and activism is informed by the principals of Disability Justice (DJ) and her lived experience as a queer and Disabled woman. She has been a company dancer with Full Radius Dance, a Choreographer Fellow with Axis Dance Company and has worked with a variety of individual choreographers. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Arts Management (focusing in dance production) from Purchase College, SUNY, where she was influential in reforming fire evacuation policy for disabled students.
Her undergraduate thesis, This Body’s Heart, loosely based on this experience, depicted her social-emotional experiences with disability through original contemporary dance and examined the applications of DJ to dance rehearsal processes as a microcosm of larger systems.
Also notable, Sonya was the first disabled Co-Executive Director of Dance for All Bodies and a recipient of Dance/NYC’s 2021-2022 Disability. Dance. Artistry. Residency Program. Many thanks to the disabled movers and shakers who have come before her and specifically to her first disabled dance teacher Anna Gichan, who was the first to encourage Sonya to pursue professional dance.
A community organizer and social justice nerd at her core, Sonya started facilitating trainings on disability etiquette and awareness, organizing gathering spaces and producing an intersectional documentary on disability as a teenager. Since then she has been fortunate to have copious opportunities to advance positive social change, including as a Case Manager in Colorado’s first program connecting intellectually disabled adults experiencing homelessness to state services, supporting Stacey Abram’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign by way of disability engagement and campaign accessibility, and as a Project Manager at New Disabled South, the first organization specifically advocating for disabled people across the US South.
She currently consults on disability justice integration and accessibility for entities across the US and is a graduate student in Harvard University Extension School’s (HES) Global Development Practice Master’s Program, while also maintaining her dance practice. She intends to use the unique interdisciplinary education HES offers to continue and bolster her disability justice practice across the world, with the understanding that all struggles are connected. Happiest when fostering community, Sonya dreams of and strives for a more equitable, accessible, artistically daring world. Find out more about Sonya’s work.
Carrie Strothers is a graduate student in the Doctor of Physical Therapy program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. After graduating magna cum laude from the Honors College at the University of Alabama, with a major in Dance and a minor in Public Relations, Carrie began her performing career at Stone Mountain Park in Atlanta, Georgia. She performed on several ships in the Carnival Cruise Line fleet and at regional theaters in the Southeast before moving to Las Vegas in 2014. Over the next 10 years she performed in many shows on the Las Vegas Strip including Vegas the Show, Tournament of Kings and Legends in Concert, and she was part of the final cast of Donn Arden’s Jubilee! at Bally’s Las Vegas. Carrie continues to have a love for the arts, and as she transitions to this new career she hopes to give back to her community. Carrie plans to specialize in physical therapy for dancers and other artistic athletes, as well as women’s pelvic health.
Macy Sullivan is a New York City-based dancer and teaching artist who recently retired from a twenty-year performance career spanning classical ballet, tap dance, modern dance, vernacular jazz, Lindy Hop and more. She danced primarily with Dance Heginbotham and Caleb Teicher & Company and also enjoyed projects with Merce Cunningham Trust, The Chase Brock Experience, The Bang Group and Pat Catterson.
Her most recent performance engagements included touring with Joyce Theater Productions’ SW!NG OUT, a Lindy Hop program bringing swing dance and music to audiences nationwide and performing annually at The Guggenheim as Peter in Works & Process’ Peter & the Wolf with Isaac Mizrahi.
Alongside her performance career, Sullivan’s teaching practice evolved to reach a wide range of ages, abilities, genres and communities. Currently, she is proud to be on faculty with Together in Dance, facilitating trauma-informed creative movement residencies for lower elementary public school students and older adult populations, in addition to Dance for PD®, teaching dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease. Past teaching engagements with The 92nd Street Y, New York City Center,
Lincoln Center, New York City Department of Education and her alma mater, The Juilliard School, have all supported her development in this field.
Throughout all of this work, eye-opening perspectives on how art and connection can initiate change guided Sullivan’s growing interest in mental health and working as a therapist. She is thrilled to begin graduate studies through Baruch College’s Mental Health Counseling program en route to becoming a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and hopes to serve adults who work in public service, artists and children.
About the Alex Dubé Scholarship Program
The Alex Dubé Scholarship Program is named for former dancer, dance advocate and President of Career Transition For Dancers Alex J. Dubé, whose deep commitment to the well-being of dancers expanded over the course of his 30-year career. Mr. Dubé began his professional experience with dance as a tap dancer before studying modern dance and ballet at the Robert Joffrey School. He later founded the first agency dedicated to representing dancers, before becoming the Administrator of Dance for the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA). Mr. Dubé’s final career move in 2001 was as President of Career Transition For Dancers where he spearheaded fundraising and distribution of scholarships to thousands of dancers nationally.