Sarah Crowell, Dance Mission’s new Artistic Director!

Sarah Crowell is announced as Dance Mission’s new Artistic Director!

We are thrilled to announce Sarah Crowell as Dance Brigade’s Dance Mission Theater’s new Artistic Director as of August 2025. Sarah has been in the Dance Brigade / Dance Mission family for years, first as a dancer with Dance Brigade, and then as Dance Mission’s Director of Special Programs, leading the Liberation Academy,  as well as co-directing TELL and co-curating Harriets Gun, among other projects.

We are in extraordinarily troubling times. So now is when we double down and reinvest in our community: Sarah is a visionary, and her leadership and artistry are inspirational. We are thrilled to have her join the team.

Please help us welcome Sarah into this new position and check out her letter to the Dance Mission community below.

With so much excitement,
Krissy, Stella, Karen, Bianca, Fredrika, Harry, and Jabari

Coming Home

I was 25 years old, performing with dance companies in Boston, when I took my first workshop with Krissy Keefer, director of the Dance Brigade. I had never experienced anything like it. Krissy brought a fresh, fierce, unapologetically feminist approach to dance and theater that was absolutely unique and exactly what I had been longing for as a performer. I was hooked. A few months after taking her workshop, I loaded up everything I owned into a tiny Honda Civic and drove across the country with hopes of performing with the Dance Brigade.

Two weeks after arriving in San Francisco I auditioned for Dance Brigade at a small, broken down dance studio at the old Bay Guardian building. The space had a cracked mirror and the cassette player was broken, so I sang the song to the solo I was performing. I was over the moon when Krissy said I got a spot in the company and would start touring within the month!

I danced and toured with the Dance Brigade for eight glorious years. I performed work that spoke truth to power and inspired audiences in unimaginable ways. I made lifetime friendships. I learned how to create powerful performance work through authentic collaboration, without skipping the hard parts, and I got motivated to co-create my own work with young people.

While I was still dancing with Dance Brigade, I started the performing arts programs at an amazing organization that would be called Destiny Arts Center, a youth arts organization in Oakland whose mission is to inspire and ignite social change through the arts. I absolutely shaped my work at Destiny after what I had learned from my years in Dance Brigade. I was a leader at Destiny for 30 years, and at the end of 2020 I felt a call to leave Destiny, not knowing what I would do next. Since then, I’ve consulted and collaborated with amazing organizations including the Othering and Belonging Institute, Movement Liberation and Next River.

I was also invited to direct Special Projects for Dance Mission Theater, one of which became the Liberation Academy, a free intensive experience for dance makers of Afro-descent that was conceived to restore the intellectual scholarship, spiritual wisdom, and creative richness which resides historically in the collective oral and underground traditions of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.

Now, 35 years after I walked into that broken down studio to audition for Dance Brigade, my dream dance company, I’ve been invited to join the brilliant artistic team at Dance Mission Theater. I now have the great honor of working alongside my mentor and my muse, Krissy Keefer, and the other incredible folks that make Dance Mission one of the most exciting arts organizations in the Bay Area. It’s exciting to me because it continues to be unapologetic about marrying performing arts with social justice, uplifting and supporting artists from the margins, especially artists of color, and doing it in a way that is accessible, relational, provocative and real.

I look forward to collaborating with the Dance Mission team and all of you.

With great respect and love,
Sarah Crowell