Kaleena Miller is a sound-focused dance artist (tap dancer, choreographer, improviser, educator and deep listener) whose work has found form as live performance, video, sound installation, written scores, and wood works. Named one of DANCE Magazine’s 25 to Watch, a McKnight Dancer Fellow, and a MacDowell Fellow, her work has been presented in Minneapolis, New York and Chicago, including commissions from the American Tap Dance Foundation, Cowles Center for Dance, and Walker Art Center.

Originally from Minneapolis, Miller toured internationally with Rhythmic Circus’ Feet Don’t Fail Me Now! for 10 years, including stops at the Edinburgh Fringe, New Victory Theater, the John F. Kennedy Center, and on America’s Got Talent. She also co-founded and co-directed the acclaimed Twin Cities Tap Festival from 2015-2021, and established Kaleena Miller Dance and KMD2 - a professional company and pre-professional youth ensemble that produced tap dance work for 10 years. 

Now living in New York, Miller has founded LOUNDOVING projects (a portmanteau of listening + sounding + moving), to support the study, creative development and presentation of sonic dance forms, advocate for a community of expansive artists, encourage experimentation, and highlight the variation in and incredible possibilities of intentionally sounding-dance work.

Miller has a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, a Deep Listening Certification from the Center for Deep Listening, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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ARTIST STATEMENT
My sound-focused dance work aims to expand the sonic language of tap dance, create works that listen, and find methods of engaging that center presentness and possibility. This research views the spaces we find ourselves in as co-architects of our sonic/spatial output, and utilizes improvisation, scores and constructed choreography to listen to/through bodies, archives, and material. Considering tap dance as a pursuit that hovers between quotidian and virtuosic, and therefore holding a remarkable place of possibility at all times, my work deconstructs the language of tap dance towards re-knowing, and holds lineage diffusedly to navigate our contemporaneity. This results in projects that tend towards a patient sonic, and demonstrate a different mode of existence within a historical form.