Named one of DANCE Magazine’s 25 to Watch, Kaleena Miller has received a McKnight Fellowship for Dance and a Sage Award for People’s Choice, was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Fellowship, and has received funding from the Jerome Foundation and Minnesota State Arts Board. Her work has been presented in Minneapolis, New York and Chicago, and she has held residencies at Air le Parc (France), American Tap Dance Foundation (New York), Everwood Farmstead Foundation (Wisconsin) and Southern Theater (Minneapolis).

In 2008, Miller created The Cutting Board tap dance and live music jam, which originated as a semi-annual, standalone event at the 331 Club in Minneapolis. Eventually the event found a home in the acclaimed Twin Cities Tap Festival (TCTF) that she co-founded and co-directed with Brenna Brelie from 2015-2021. Twin Cities Tap, the organization that houses TCTF, produced an additional project in partnership with the McKnight International Choreographer Fellowship in 2023. Miller also directed Music/Motion, a series of week-long residencies in Twin Cities area high schools where jazz band members learned tap dance and created sonic dance compositions from 2018-2020, and KMD2, a making-driven pre-professional ensemble for high school and college-aged dancers from 2018-2024.

She has had the honor of performing in works by Roxane Butterfly, Joe Chvala, Heather Cornell, Michelle Dorrance, Jon Ferguson/Theatre Forever, Derick Grant, Lisa La Touche, Michael J. Love, April Sellers, Sandy Silva, Jumaane Taylor and Laurie Van Wieren. She was a founding member and performer with Rhythmic Circus (including performances at the Edinburgh Fringe, Kennedy Center, New Victory Theater and on America’s Got Talent), and was also a touring performer with Buckets and Tap Shoes.

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

She is thankful for and deeply indebted to her first tap dance teachers: Karla Grotting and Char Weiss.

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ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m a sound-focused dance artist based in New York and Minneapolis. Rooted in tap dance, deep listening, sound studies, and concerns around the built environment, my work explores the acts and intentions of listening and sounding and finds form in live performance, video, sound installation and wood works.

I investigate paradoxes such as softness and elongation in a sonically staccato genre and curved wood structures, and am currently engaged in long-term research that connects my father’s not-yet-buried ashes and unresolved wishes to the continual resurrection of classic dance repertoire, asking what it means to engage with the unalive via movement and sound, contending with grief, capitalization of legacy and stoic Midwestern American repression. 

Frequently site-specific, my performed works listen deeply to place and self and utilize improvisational scores and composed phrase work to examine embodied knowledge and histories, sounding out and moving through an investigation of the materiality of a tap dance practice in an effort to understand what we know, do and desire. Both companions to the performed pieces as well as standalone works, my structures made of wood and sound installations of transformed footwork offer another view/listen of this materiality - inviting a reconsideration of the form’s capabilities and presentation, and, hopefully, permission to future generations of tap dance makers.
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