Miriam Adams, C.M., Co-founder/Director

Miriam Adams, Co-founder/Director of Dance Collection Danse, is a graduate of the National Ballet School and former dancer with The National Ballet of Canada. She and her late husband, principal dancer Lawrence Adams, went on to teach, choreograph and found 15 Dance Laboratorium, Toronto’s first experimental dance venue. The Adams became publishers, producing the newspapers SPILL and Canadian Dance News, and created Visus Foundation, established to videotape dance activity in Canada. In 1983, they initiated the ENCORE! ENCORE! reconstruction project, designed to rescue Canadian choreographic works created in the 1940s and 1950s. This led to the founding of Dance Collection Danse, Canada’s national dance archives and publishing house. To date, DCD has published over 37 dance books encompassing biography/memoir, cultural history, educational resources and reference books including the Encyclopedia of Theatre Dance in Canada/Encyclopédie de la Danse Théâtrale au Canada. DCD also produces a semi-annual magazine promoting its discoveries and celebrating the country’s dance legacies.

Miriam Adams has been a board member of the Toronto Arts Council, the Dance Umbrella of Ontario, the Nightingale Arts Foundation, Artscape, Judy Jarvis Dance Foundation, the Dancer Transition Resource Centre and was named Adjunct Professor at York University in 2006. She received a Dance in Canada Service Award; a Mayor’s Medal of Service; and, with Lawrence, the Dance Ontario Award for her contributions to dance. In 2009, she won the Rita Davies and Margo Bindhardt Cultural Leadership Award. Miriam was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012.

DCD Co-founder Lawrence Adams passed away in 2003. To learn more about Lawrence and the beginnings of Dance Collection Danse, Click Here.
 

Amy Bowring, Director of Research

Amy Bowring (B.A. Fine Arts Studies, York University; M.A. Journalism, University of Western Ontario) is a freelance dance writer and historian, Founder/Director of the Society for Canadian Dance Studies and Director of Research at Dance Collection Danse where she was mentored in dance history and preservation by Lawrence Adams. She has written historical essays and articles for Dance Collection Danse Magazine, Canadian Encyclopedia, International Dictionary of Modern Dance, Encyclopedia of Theatre Dance in Canada, The Dance Current, as well as for the anthologies Estivale 2000 Proceedings: Canadian Dancing Bodies Then and Now, Canadian Dance: Visions and Stories and Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights. She copy edits several dance publications including The Dance Current and the publications of Dance Collection Danse Press/Presse. She chronicled Peggy Baker’s Choreographer’s Trust project and curated virtual exhibitions on dance artists Nancy Lima Dent and Alison Sutcliffe. Amy is currently writing a book about the Canadian Ballet Festivals (1948-1954). She has presented papers at various academic conferences in Canada and the United States and has given lectures at Ryerson University, York University, School of Toronto Dance Theatre, George Brown College and Cawthra Park Secondary School. Amy is a co-recipient of the 2002 Toronto Emerging Dance Artist Award for her work as a dance writer. She was a board member for Dance Media Group, sat on the Founding National Council of the Canadian Dance Assembly and has served as a member of the Discipline Advisory Committee for Dance at the Canada Council for the Arts.

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