DCD Hall of Fame celebration: With Rhodnie Désir and Alejandro Ronceria

Alejandro Ronceria is a choreographer, artistic director, and educator with a career that spans over 30 years. He has led the artistic direction of significant cultural productions, including serving on the choreographic team for the official opening of the Olympic Winter Games (2010) and as choreographer for the Pan-American Games (2015). Recognized as a pioneer in Indigenous contemporary dance worldwide, Ronceria was Program Director of the first Aboriginal dance program in North America, at The Banff Centre for the Arts from 1996-2000. The ground-breaking program brought together dancers from Canada, the USA, Mexico, New Zealand, and Greenland – an incubator that developed a new generation of Indigenous dance artists and served as a model for schools internationally. With an MFA in dance dramaturgy from York University, he has dramaturged works by numerous choreographers and is an active guest teacher. Born in Bogota, Colombia, Ronceria is classically trained. In Canada, he danced for Canadian contemporary choreographers such as Jean-Pierre Perreault and Karen Jamieson before premiering his first major solo work The Jaguar Project (1991). With The Jaguar Project, he began to explore his mixed-race heritage (Indigenous/Spanish) as an artist, leading to a lifelong passion for pushing boundaries of contemporary western dance and creating space for emerging, diverse artists. Most recently, Ronceria was appointed as the Director of Dance for the Banff Centre for the Arts.