Bio

Ben Munisteri was born in 1965 in Brooklyn, NY, to a Sicilian/Irish family. Ben was reared in Brooklyn and encouraged by his arts-minded parents to paint, write, draw, dance, play musical instruments, act, and sing.

His mother discovered Ben dancing before he could walk—holding onto the radiator for support as he bounced to the music on the radio. When he was seven years old, she enrolled him in tap class, which he hated. At nine, he began studying classical piano, which he pursued through his teens. He also made several stop-animation films using his father's 8mm camera and his Star Wars action figures. On the weekends he went dancing at infamous NYC clubs, including the Mud Club, Danceteria, Area, and Studio 54 (after its heyday). He was underage, but no one seemed to care. His sister, who studied daily at the American Ballet Theatre school, taught him ballet in the family's backyard and living room. In his late teens he began formal study of ballet and modern dance.

By 1988, Ben was a founding member of the Doug Elkins Dance Company, where his fascination with combining disparate movements and styles was nurtured by Elkins, David Neumann, Lisa Nicks, and Jane Weiner. In December 1988 he met Lisa Wheeler while studying with master teacher Dan Wagoner. He began creating and performing solos in 1992 in tiny venues in downtown Manhattan. Today, he has had the great pleasure of touring his company to many venues around the U.S.

He has created dances for the Pennsylvania Dance Theater, Danceworks Performance Company (Milwaukee), Circle of Dance (NY), and other regional dance companies. He has been an artist in residence at the Joyce Theater Foundation, the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, the Celebrate Brooklyn festival, and Dance Theater Workshop. He is 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. In 2007 he choreographed dance sequences for the play A Beautiful Child, which premiered at the NYC Fringe Festival.

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

Ben graduated from New York City's Stuyvesant High School and from Oberlin College with a major in English and a minor in Dance. He has a masters degree in Teaching Dance in Higher Education from NYU's Steinhardt School of Education. Ben taught Modern II and III at Hofstra University; was on faculty at Florida Dance Festival and Jacob's Pillow; taught Dance History and Criticism at Adelphi University; and was part-time lecturer at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, where he taught Choreography 2, Performance and Digital Technology, Writing About the Performing Arts, Advanced Repertory, and Seeing Performance. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College.