New York, NY—Mark DeGarmo Dance (AKA Dynamic Forms, Inc.) is pleased to announce it has been approved by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for a Grants for Arts Projects award of $25,000. This grant will support Partnerships in  Literacy through Dance and Creativity©. In total, the NEA will award 1,135 Grants for Arts Projects awards totaling more than $37 million as part of its second round of fiscal year 2024 grants. 

“Projects like Partnerships in  Literacy through Dance and Creativity© exemplify the creativity and care with which communities are telling their stories, creating connection, and responding to challenges and opportunities in their communities—all through the arts,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, Ph.D. “So many aspects of our communities such as cultural vitality, health and wellbeing, infrastructure, and the economy are advanced and improved through investments in art and design, and the National Endowment for the Arts is committed to ensuring people across the country benefit.”

“This grant from the National Endowment for the Arts will provide much needed support for  some of New York City’s and the USA’s most historically vulnerable, disenfranchised, and marginalized  communities, public schools, teachers, families, and elementary students,” Mark DeGarmo Dance  Founder, Executive, & Artistic Director Mark DeGarmo, Ph.D. observed. “Dance education is an accessible and equitable low-cost path for New York City’s youth to learn, participate, contribute, and achieve their full multidimensional potential. Over 300 New York City public schools currently have zero arts education and no certified arts teachers on their faculties despite the publication of the NYC Blueprints for Teaching and Learning in the Arts published in 2005 to which I and other members of the city’s professional arts and education community contributed as volunteer consultants. Soon afterwards, the city eliminated its short-lived per capita funding to all of its schools designated for arts education. 

For nearly 20 years, arts organizations have been expected to shore up this gap in NYC public funding for NYC public education. The City of New York needs to immediately shift gears and prioritize arts education at the level of arts education already mandated for decades by the New York State Education Department before another generation of historically under-resourced marginalized disenfranchised AAPI, BIPOC, Latinx, and other students, families, communities, and public schools are left behind.”  

Partnerships in Literacy through Dance and Creativity© is MDD’s evidence-based complex layered multi-year  interdisciplinary embodied cognition education program that empowers under-resourced, disenfranchised, and often  overlooked New York City Asian American, Pacific Islander, Black, Indigenous, People of Color,  Latinx, and other elementary students from pre-kindergarten to grade five to use dance,  movement and creative writing as lifelong tools to fulfill their highest potential. A 2018 published  study is the first research in the scientific literature of an embodied cognition program sustained  over many years with New York City public school students. Conducted by Johns Hopkins  University, it indicated “promising evidence” that MDD’s fourth-grade students’ state reading  scores increased by “a statistically significant amount.”  

To access the study by Dr. Roisin P. Corcoran see: An embodied cognition approach to enhancing reading achievement  in New York City public schools: Promising evidence (https://markdegarmodance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Corcoran-RP-Mark-DeGarmo-Dance-research-article_Dec-2017-1.pdf). For more information on Mark DeGarmo  Dance’s dance and literacy education program, visit https://markdegarmodance.org/education.  Follow Mark DeGarmo Dance on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

For more information on other projects included in the NEA’s grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

Our programs are supported, in part, by private and public funds from American Online Giving Foundation; Jody and John Arnhold; Benevity; Frances and Benjamin Benenson Foundation; Bernheim Foundation; Blackbaud Giving Fund; Lisa and Dick Cashin; PJ and Dawn Dearden; Rev. Dr. Lindley DeGarmo and Sarah Finlayson; Friends of Mark DeGarmo Dance; Jill Ganey; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; JPMorgan Chase Foundation; Lara and Darius Mehraban; The Kyle J. Mulrooney Foundation; Mental Insight Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; Network for Good; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; New York City Department of Education; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; Lindsay O'Reilly; PwC Charitable Foundation; Religious Society of Friends; The Rothfeld Family Foundation; Ruth and Seymour Klein Foundation, and Barbara Sherman.