Lindsay Guarino

Lindsay Guarino (she/her) is a jazz dance artist, educator and scholar.  Through leadership, teaching, writing and directing, Lindsay prioritizes community at the heart of her practice and seeks to cultivate spaces where individuality is celebrated and recognized as vital to personal and collective growth.

Lindsay is currently associate professor and chair of Music, Theatre and Dance at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI where she has been on the faculty since 2006 and has grown the dance program from a minor to a vibrant B.A. focused in jazz and justice.  Courses she has developed and teaches regularly are deeply informed by her research and include Roots of Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and the American Experience, Rhythm-Generated Jazz Styles and Techniques, Dance in Society: Aesthetics and Cultural Contexts, and Senior Capstone: Jazz & Justice.  Lindsay directs Salve’s dance company and seeks to honor jazz and its creative spirit by presenting works that are rooted and uphold the communal values of the jazz language.

Lindsay’s creative and scholarly research examines the impacts of racism on jazz history, aesthetics and pedagogy.  She strives to be antiracist in the ways she participates in jazz, as a White artist in a language born of Black American people, history and culture.  This commitment to jazz dance led her to co-edit the volumes Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches (2014) with Wendy Oliver and Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century (2022) with Carlos R. A. Jones and Oliver, both published by University Press of Florida.  Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches inspired the documentary Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance (Khadifa Wong, 2020), which Lindsay consulted on and appears in.  She is a research affiliate within the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, a McAuley Scholar on the Critical Concern of Race at Salve Regina, and guest lectures frequently at universities around the country.

Lindsay has worked extensively with the National Dance Education Organization, for which she developed and taught the Online Professional Development Institute’s course titled Jazz Dance Theory and Practice.  In partnership with NDEO, Lindsay planned and hosted two special topics jazz conferences at Salve Regina - Jazz Dance: Roots and Branches in Practice (2016) and Jazz Dance: Hybrids, Fusions, Connections, Community (2019).   She serves on the peer review board for the Journal of Dance Education, was an invited member of NDEO’s Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Workgroup, and presents her jazz-centered research regularly at national conferences.

Lindsay holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Buffalo (SUNY) and an MFA in Dance from the University of Arizona.