Image: Bill Cameron

Bridge Fund for Dance

Bridge Fund for Dance Program

The Bridge Fund for Dance Program supports the local dance community by funding choreographers, dance companies, producers, and performing arts organizations based in Minneapolis and across Minnesota. The funding helps them develop and present dance and choreography projects in downtown Minneapolis. The goal is to strengthen the city’s dance scene and bring more artists, audiences, and creative performances to downtown.

Three categories of support available:

Presentation support ($15k–$30k)
Funding can be used to support new or expanded fully produced dance showcases, presentations, or events in Minneapolis.
Development and Research Residency support ($5k–$15k)
Funding can be used by choreographers, independent dance artists, dance companies, and collectives to host 1–3‑week creative development or research residencies. These residencies help artists explore new dance ideas, try new approaches, and work together.

Production and Tech support ($15k–$30k)
Funding can be used to add or expand final production elements for a confirmed future public performance. Applicants must include proof of real plans and agreements for the performance in their proposal. Minneapolis‑based touring projects can also apply, but they must host at least a one‑week tech residency and present a showcase before going on tour.

2026 Bridge Fund for Dance Presentation Support Awardees

Afrocontigbo

Afrocontigbo’s Origins to Ovation gives six African diasporic choreographers a four‑week residency to explore their cultural roots, including Nigerian, Caribbean, Togolese, and Liberian traditions. New dance pieces will be created, filmed in Loring Park and performed live at the Cedar Cultural Center.

Herbert Johnson III

4Most Emerging Choreographers at the Southern Theater. It will feature ten hip-hop artists who will explore, develop, and strengthen their skills in composition and storytelling as they create a full-length production.

Hollywood Studio of Dance

Hollywood Studio of Dance’s 35th Annual Recital is a community showcase held at Edison High School that celebrates a full season of student growth. It gives young dancers, from early childhood through high school, a chance to perform on a formal stage.

Red Eye Theater

Red Eye Theater presents the world premiere of HIJACK's APARTY — a full-length improvised duet developed over ten months at Hennepin Center for the Arts.

Ruby Josephine Dance Theater

Ruby Josephine Dance Theater’s Ophelia is a contemporary reimagining of the famous character from Hamlet. The work is expanding from a 25-minute piece into a full one-hour production, with a two‑week run in Minneapolis, an expanded score, and free performances for school groups.

Zenon Dance Company and School

Zenon launches Block Z — a new advanced performance track within their Dance Zone program serving pre-professional and college-level dancers and choreographers with compensated participation — culminating in a December 2027 debut showcase of four premiere works at the Cowles Center.

The Arts Nest

Arts Nest will host the Cowles Downtown Dance Showcase, a welcoming, fully produced event that brings artists and audiences back into the Cowles theater, located in downtown Minneapolis.

Ananya Dance Theatre

Ananya Dance Theatre will premiere TOGETHER, In Breath in September 2027 at the Cowles. It is a new dance-theater work that combines movement, spoken text, film, and ritual to explore love as a way people connect and work together.

Minnesota Dance Theatre

Minnesota Dance Theatre's The Nutcracker Suite presents an abridged, one-hour Nutcracker featuring their year-round student dancers ages 4 and up. This performance will be held at the Cowles Center.

Threads Dance Project

Threads marks its 15th anniversary with the premiere of Love Evolving, featuring Tell Me A Story, a community‑sourced collaboration with Karen Charles that turns writing submissions into dance. The project highlights love as a tool for healing, post‑show talkbacks and a display of all submitted writing.

Brazil Arts Twin Cities

Immigrants Dancing Our Stories will be performed at Father Hennepin Bluffs Park. This fully produced dance and film showcase centers immigrant artists' personal and collective narratives.

Ragamala Dance

Ragamala Dance will present the Minnesota premiere of Ananta, The Eternal at the Cowles Center in January 2027. This Bharatanatyam duet, performed by sisters Aparna and Ashwini Ramaswamy, features live Carnatic musicians from India.

Ibimina Thompson

Bad Africans: a guide to being oshey and bardest in a f’d up world will be performed at the Red Eye Theater. This solo performance that blends voguing, film, DJing, and projection into one interdisciplinary work. It honors the lives and histories of transgender African women.

zAmya Theater Project

zAmya and choreographer Lelis Brito’s This Home Called My Body features eight site‑specific movement pieces across downtown Minneapolis created with unhoused community members. The pieces are filmed on location, projected outside the Cowles Center in November, and presented indoors spring of 2027.

Devised Arts

Stark Dance will present a concert of six works at the Cowles Center’s Goodale Theater. The program includes pieces by Daniel Stark, new works by Carl Flink and a rising local choreographer. Together, the dances explore themes of grief, confused memories, and worries passed from one generation to the next.

Vie Boheme

PAM will be presented at the Southern Theatre. The piece follows the first Black woman artistic director of the Walker Art Center as she navigates tensions between her personal and professional life. This solo work blends monologue, movement, projection mapping, and original SoulNB music.

2026 Bridge Fund for Dance Residency Support Awardees

Asociación Cultural Kuyayki Perú – Minnesota

Kuyayki’s Raíces Vivas is a three‑week Afro‑Peruvian residency that develops new choreography, strengthens cultural accuracy through work with a master teaching artist, and builds long‑term capacity for the ensemble to carry these traditions forward in Mpls.

Barak ade Soleil

side by side by side by is a collaborative performance project focused on creating movement phrases that blend choreography with poetic language. In collaboration with Red Eye Theater and Threads Dance Project.

Destiny Anderson

GoGoVERSE is a three‑week research residency that explores Black queer nightlife as a sacred space. It blends House dance, Voguing, live DJ and MC elements, and projection art to create a collaborative dialogue about identity, ritual, and resilience rooted in underground performance.

Doma Dance Theater

This residency develops Moonlit Mountain (premiering in 2027), a dance‑theater work that turns poet Yurko Kharytun’s newly translated verses about seven Carpatho‑Rusyn villages—lost when the Starina Reservoir was built—into movement for a cast of five dancers.

Gabrielle Abram

This residency advances Juke Jams: Stories of Love, a dance‑theater work exploring different experiences of love. Over three weeks, the team will develop new movement, build the Black Love section, and collaborate with a writer/dramaturg toward a 2027 premiere.

Joan A Smith

Women’s Work is a new dance piece for five experienced Minneapolis dancers, each with more than 20 years in the field. The work celebrates their strength, skill, and the physical and emotional stories carried in their bodies.

Valerie Oliveiro

CMESS/MASS is a multi‑year dance series (2027–2029) that explores how diasporic people carry—and push back against—assimilation through embodied, ancestral, and ecological knowledge.

Eligible locations

Eligible Boundaries Map for the Bridge Fund for Dance

The map shows which neighborhoods in Minneapolis are eligible, marked with a red outline. In the center of the map, you can see the downtown area where the Downtown Taxing Area is located.

Priority will be given to dance projects that are presented in the Minneapolis Downtown Taxing Area

Projects must take place within the following Minneapolis neighborhoods:

Cedar Riverside, Downtown East, Downtown West, East Isles, East Phillips, Elliot Park, Logan Park, Loring Heights, Loring Park, Lowry Hill, Lowry Hill East, Marcy Holmes, Midtown Phillips, Nicollet Island – East Bank, Near North, North Loop, Phillips West, Seward, St. Anthony East, St. Anthony West, Stevens Square, Sumner-Glenwood, University of Minnesota, Ventura Village, Whittier, Willard Hay.

Project spaces can include:

Theaters, venues, and dance studios, restaurants, bars, galleries, museums, public parks, plazas, storefronts, skyways, festivals, pop-ups, schools, churches, senior homes, parking structures, community gatherings, and parades.

Eligible applicants

Projects must primarily feature Minneapolis artists and collaborators and may include performers of all ages. Anyone from Minnesota can apply for this grant. The location of the proposed work must meet the eligibility rules.

All projects must meet the following requirements:

Residency Time: Projects must include at least 1–3 weeks of residency time. One week equals 40 hours, which can happen in back‑to‑back days or spread out over scheduled rehearsals.

Each awarded project must host at least one free and open to public show at an eligible location, during the grant year. This can be a full presentation or a dress rehearsal or a work in progress showing.