Growing up in Barre, Vermont, movement was always a part of life....skiing in the winters, swimming in the summers. My second-grade teacher once threatened to tie me to my chair because I was constantly getting up to get a drink, go to the bathroom, or sharpen my pencil. In high school, I competed in high jump and hurdles on the track team and was a competitive diver in the summers. I learned later that I was a kinetic learner. I had to move to learn and experience things.

 

It wasn't until I discovered movement in college (the thing that got me in trouble in elementary school) that it became a source of intelligence as I became a movement expert of sorts.

​

New York opened the door to an extraordinary range of experiences. I danced with pioneering postmodern artists including Bill T. Jones, Stephen Petronio, and Pooh Kaye, and became deeply involved in contact improvisation. During the summers, I traveled to the White Mountains Summer Dance Festival, where I studied with teachers including Laura Glenn and Martha Eddy (both of whom profoundly influenced my understanding of movement and the body).

​

And then there was yoga.

​

At the festival, I met a yoga teacher named Ketul. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what yoga was. My thinking was essentially, “I came here to DANCE!” Then Ketul knocked my socks off. I began practicing yoga in 1988 and have been teaching and practicing ever since. It became another language for understanding movement, attention, balance, and the body.

​

After nearly a decade in New York, I returned to Vermont, married and divorced and in between that became a mother to two daughters, Stacey (1991) and Talia (1993). I continued to explore the possibilities of dance, particularly with people whose bodies and abilities were rarely represented in traditional dance spaces. In Vermont and later Colorado, I developed a ten-year body of work with mixed-ability dancers, founding Arts Ability for children and Forces of Ability for adults. Grounded in creative movement and contact improvisation, these projects challenged assumptions about who gets to dance, what dance can look like, and whose bodies belong onstage.

​

In 1995, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, where I was introduced to aerial dance pioneer Nancy Smith. After taking one of her aerial dance class series, she invited me to join her company, Frequent Flyers Productions. That invitation changed the trajectory of my work once again. For the next five years, I danced through the air with Frequent Flyers while continuing to develop wheelchair-inclusive performances through Forces of Ability.

In 1999, Nancy founded the Aerial Dance Festival in Boulder, bringing together many of the artists who were defining this emerging form. I became a regular participant and, in 2003, was invited to teach and perform at the festival. That year, I introduced my work in aerial yoga and mixed-ability aerial dance.

​

In the meantime, life had brought me to Baltimore. I joined the Dance Department at Towson University in 2000, as an adjunct professor, and began developing aerial dance classes at Gerstung, a gymnastics center in Baltimore. In 2000, I also founded Air Dance Bernasconi, a company devoted to bringing aerial dance to the Baltimore/Washington region.

​

Air Dance Bernasconi became known for its distinctive blend of dance, aerial movement, athleticism, and theatricality, performing throughout the metropolitan area and appearing in television, newspaper, and magazine features. At times, people have called us “Baltimore’s Cirque du Soleil,” which is flattering although we like to think we had our own particular style of beautiful weirdness.

​

Today, after more than 26 years at Towson University, I continue to teach, choreograph, perform, practice yoga, and explore all different possibilities of movement, including my latest class teaching Dance For Parkinson's. My work has always lived somewhere between disciplines: dance and athletics, movement and mindfulness, able-bodied and disabled, ground and air, technique and improvisation. I’m interested in what happens at those intersections and especially in what becomes possible when we stop assuming there is only one way to move, dance, teach, or create.