Ben Munisteri


I was born a long time ago in Brooklyn, NY, to an educated, upper-middle-class Sicilian/Irish family. My arts-minded Park Slope parents encouraged their children to paint, write, draw, dance, play musical instruments, act, and sing.  

The story is that my mother discovered me dancing before I could walk—holding onto the radiator for support as I bounced to the music on the radio. When I was seven years old, Mom enrolled me in tap lessons, because I wanted to dance like this. But I hated tap, largely because I was conspicuous as the class's only boy. At nine, I began studying classical piano, which I pursued doggedly and with fear of the guilt I might feel about disappointing my parents if I ever quit. They and their friends seemed to especially like when my brother and I played Bach's two-part invention No. 8 (F major) on the banjo and piano, respectively.

In elementary and middle school I was known for my ability to mimic teachers, and sometimes I was suddenly booked at impromptu front-of-class shows or large school assemblies. I was funny and usually got the big laughs. I also worked alone in my room for many hours, making  stop-animation films using my father's 8mm camera and my Star Wars action figures. I vacillated from popular to lonely.

During my high school years, I would spend memorable Saturday nights dancing at infamous NYC clubs, like the Mud Club, Danceteria, Area, and Studio 54 (after its heyday). I was underage, but no one seemed to care. My sister, who studied daily at the American Ballet Theatre school, taught me ballet in our family's backyard and living room. In my late teens I began formal study of ballet and modern dance. I stopped studying classical piano after my first year in college, with neither guilt nor regret, though a deep understanding and appreciation of musical structure and theory remained.

An early member of the Doug Elkins Dance Company, I was interested in choreography that combined disparate movements and styles. I met Lisa Wheeler while apprenticing with master teacher Dan Wagoner's dance company, and we began creating dances and performing them at small venues in downtown Manhattan. My resulting company, Ben Munisteri Dance Projects, toured to many venues around the U.S. and internationally.

I was an artist in residence at some notable places like the Joyce Theater, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Celebrate Brooklyn festival, and the defunct Dance Theater Workshop. I'm the recipient of many grants, commissions, and residencies, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the National Performance Network, and the National Dance Project. I choreographed dance sequences for the play A Beautiful Child, which premiered at the NYC Fringe Festival, and created pieces for several regional dance companies. Though I'm no longer interested in getting my dances reviewed, many writers from estimable publications have said very nice things about my work. (Receiving critics' approbation is less important to me than it used to be—but apparently not so much that I would delete their pullquotes from this website.)

I've been a guest artist/teacher at many colleges and festivals, including Stephens College, Rutgers University, Lafayette College, Juniata College, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, University of California Santa Cruz, Florida Dance Festival, Bates College, Wayne State University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Indiana University.  Some memorable master classes include the ones I taught at the Jacob's Pillow School, the Milwaukee Ballet, Montclair State University, Winona State University, the South Carolina Dance Alliance, and the High School for Creative and Performing Arts (Cincinnati). My work has been performed by college students on many ACDFA programs.  

I've held faculty positions too: Hofstra University (technique), Manhattanville College (repertory), Adelphi University (I was a contract researcher and also taught Dance History & Criticism), and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, where I taught Choreography 2, Performance and Digital Technology, Advanced Repertory, Seeing Performance, and Writing About the Performing Arts (I taught this last course to inmates at the now-closed Arthur Kill Correctional Facility). I was recently a visiting assistant professor of dance at the University of South Florida, where I taught technique and dance history and set my choreography on undergraduate dance majors.

I graduated from New York City's Stuyvesant High School and from Oberlin College with a major in English and a minor in Dance. I have a masters degree from NYU's Steinhardt School of Education, where I choreographed one of the first bicoastal telematic dance performances through multi-channel Internet 2 reciprocal connections (see Lubricious Transfer). And I am currently completing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College—choreographing, painting watercolors, and being mad scholarly.

I enjoy spending time with my nephew, Arlo, and my niece, Calla.