Dana Tai Soon Burgess

Dana Tai Soon Burgess is a leading American choreographer, arts administrator, and cultural figure known worldwide as the “Diplomat of Dance.” In 1992 he founded the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company, the preeminent modern dance company in Washington, DC. Burgess has been the Smithsonian Institution’s first-ever Choreographer-in- Residence. He has served as a Cultural Ambassador for the US State Department for over two decades, has received two Senior Fulbright scholarships for dance and was awarded the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award in 2021. He lives in Washington, DC with his husband Jameson Freeman and their rescue dogs Bana and Dali. For more information about Dana go to: www.dtsbdc.org “Burgess makes art with movement. His memoir illuminates how he has navigated his hyphenated world as a gay Asian American man and his metamorphosis as an artist. Finding strength in diversity, his artmaking brings multiculturalism, social justice, and equity to the forefront in the universal language of dance. His voice is honest, open, and important.” George Takei “Dana Tai Soon Burgess is a spellbinding storyteller in words no less than movement. With this memoir, he entrances readers as he has so long entranced audiences, with scene after scene of an extraordinary and transformative life.” Susan Choi author of Trust Exercise: A Novel