Ali McKeon Pineo is a former dancer with Menlowe Ballet and an independent choreographer currently residing in Maui, HI. She is the founding director and choreographer for CRAFT Dance Series (est. 2015). Over the course of her professional career, Ali has performed work by Donald McKayle, Robert Moses, Gregory Dawson, Alex Ketley, Amy Seiwert, Jodie Gates, and others. 

 

Before moving to Maui, Ali was an active member of the larger Bay Area community participating in various independent projects with filmmakers, fashion designers, and other choreographers. She served on the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee and was invited as a guest lecturer and senior mentor at Stanford University and West Valley College, where she set original works on the students at both institutions. Every summer, she would return back to Maui to perform with and choreograph for Adaptations Dance Theater.

 

Her formal education includes a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Dance from Stanford University (2011) and a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of California, Irvine (2014). She has studied with master teachers such as Kristine Elliott, Diane Frank, Muriel Maffre, Tong Wang, Diane Diefenderfer, Jodie Gates, and Loretta Livingston. She has received awards in the academic and dance field including the Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts, the UC Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, Stanford Award of Excellence, and the UC Irvine Graduate Fellowship.     

 

In 2015, she founded the Ali McKeon Dance Project and its annual project CRAFT Dance Series. The project's mission is to cultivate a collaborative, high-stakes, time-sensitive environment in order to produce works that are instinctive and raw; and at the same time cohesive, imaginative, grand. For more information about this project, please visit www.craftseries.org.