Organization

Established In 1994 by Creative Director and Founder Sherese Campbell, Houston City Dance Studio is a non-profit dance school and performing arts organization that seeks to reflect the ethnic diversity of the Houston Metropolitan area.

Since then, Ms. Campbell has been the driving force in teaching the school's over 200 dance students, many of whom receive scholarships. The school boasts an internationally diverse body of students and alumni, with dancers hailing from Russia, China, Japan, Hungary, India, Nigeria, Mexico, Germany, and Italy, as well as various Houston neighborhoods.

Ms. Campbell's commitment to dance education and instruction is evident in City Dance's comprehensive class schedule, featuring an array of ballet, jazz, modern, tap, break-dancing, and hip-hop offerings that cater to students of all ages and ability levels. The Company maintains an "Artist-in-Residence" status with Rice University and has performed extensively in Houston-area venues and abroad, including Spain, France, Switzerland, and Monaco.

Ms. Campbell's work with the company led the Houston press to describe City Dance as "urban, edgy, explosive, and very sexy”. Houston City Dance is a non-profit educational organization which enjoys the support of grants from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance as well as private companies, foundations and individual donors. City Dance's touring company performs their vibrant mix of jazz, hip-hop, and classical styles in theaters and at cultural events locally and internationally.

The Company's performers are young adults of diverse ethnic, social, and cultural backgrounds, some of whom were at-risk students or high school dropouts from troubled backgrounds. The Company’s students are routinely expected to give their time and talent to the community by promoting the art of dance through community service at venues such as schools, retirement and assisted living facilities, hospitals and homeless shelters.

The company is a flowing tapestry of visual and aural experience, and to watch City Dance perform is to see the pulsing synthesis of cultures, languages, neighborhoods, and lives. The company's practice studio shakes with the beating rhythms of innovation and tradition, the near-primordial screams and echoes of the mind working with and against the body, gathering a verve that spills into the performance halls and out onto the city's streets.

Long established on a foundation of passion, integrity, and technical precision, City Dance works daily to expand and enrich the boundaries of contemporary dance. Utilizing the medium of dance to explode dichotomies to create art which is graceful and volcanic, ethereal and dramatic, City Dance repeatedly invents and reinvents itself artistically on the stage and socially through public service in the community.