Stone's Biography

I was raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by two nature loving parents, and at six years old I got to be a dancing skeleton with glow in the dark sequence.  Later, dressed as a cricket, I won first prize at a national jazz competition. I then entered the North Carolina School of the Arts for two years of high school and two years of college. There I studied Graham and Nikolais/Louis techniques and began creating choreography and performance arts activist pieces which I performed on campus and at peace marches in Washington DC. 

I moved to New York City and studied with the Limon Dance Company, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the Joe Goode Performance Group. I rehearsed and performed with David Dorfman, Joy Kelman, Amy Pivar and the Phfft Dance Theatre Company, now Cyrus Khambatta Dance.  I created my own solos at PS 122 and with the community of Williamsburg on the East River.  Two and half years later I attended the Virginia Commonwealth University to finish my BFA and pursue choreography.  There I studied with Doug Varone, Kazuo Ohno and Ron Brown and created one of my favorite works, Mit Flugel; a duet where I played piano on stage and showed the torment of practicing through the piano music as well as in my dancing.  During one summer I studied intensively with Steve Paxton and fell in love with contact improvisation, a partnering improvisation movement form. In Richmond I began teaching dance to children and have been bringing my love of dance to preschoolers through adults for the past 20 years. I then joined the Zen Monkey Project in Charlottesville, VA where I was one of four artists taking turns making evening length works over a course of two and a half years.  There I spent hours and hours improvising.  I explored with the other Zen Monkey's the Alexander technique and Body Mind Centering work. In Charlottesville I studied yoga and later in Northern Virginia got my yoga teacher certification. I’ve been teaching yoga for the past 13 years.

In Northern Virginia after working with the ballet inspired Tony Powell Music and Movement I began my own dance company, This Body This Earth.  I created evening length concerts at Joy of Motion and Joe's Movement Emporium in Washington DC, and in Charlottesville, VA, New Dance Space.  After the birth of my first child, River, I began feeling overwhelmed with the managerial and producing side of running a company, so I let go of the company and joined the PlayGround, an improvisation performance company which I performed with for five years. I still created my own smaller works and performed them at Kennedy’s Millennium Stage, DC’s Dance Place and at the Unitarian Church in Durham, NC. Wishing for one more technical dance company experience before the birth of my second child, I joined Maida Withers Dance Construction Company and toured to Russia to create a dance piece with eight Russian dancers. This was a wonderful occasion in my career as an artist because I finally was able to merge my curiosities of distance places and cultures with my love and understanding of dance. 

Returning I taught contemporary dance technique at George Washington University for two and a half years before my second child Skylar was born. After a break from dance to deepen my focus on my growing family and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I began teaching contemporary dance technique and contact improvisation as guest artist residencies at Winona College in Minnesota and at Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. My dance colleague Megan Thompson and I are now creating improvisational scores and choreographed works which we have toured and taught in Guatemala and Mexico under the name 5th Adventure Dance Project, now Jen Stone and Megan Thompson Dance Project.  I am currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts in Dance at George Washington University and just completed my final project Earth Dances where I directed a collaborative, multi- media evening length work with over 42 participants.  Earth Dances' performance and walking excursion included sculptures, singing, and dancing with my Bluemont community.