Gerald Casel (he/they/siya) is a dance artist, educator, and arts administrator whose work bridges performance, critical pedagogy, and racial justice. He is the Carole and Dan Burack Director of The School at Jacob’s Pillow and a professor at Rutgers University, where he previously chaired the Department of Dance at Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Casel’s teaching career spans institutions including NYU Tisch, Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden, UW-Milwaukee, CSU Long Beach, and UC Santa Cruz, where he also served as Provost of Porter College. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from UW-Milwaukee, he received a New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”) for sustained achievement in performance. He has danced with Stephen Petronio Company, Michael Clark, Stanley Love Performance Group, Zvi Gotheiner, Sungsoo Ahn, and The Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and performed in works by Netta Yerushalmy, Cid Pearlman, and Woolgathering, a collaboration with John Heginbotham, Patti Smith, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

As founding director of GERALDCASELDANCE, Casel’s choreography interrogates colonialism, cultural memory, and power structures. His acclaimed work Not About Race Dance earned an Isadora Duncan Award (“Izzie”) for Outstanding Direction/Choreography and was supported by NEFA’s National Dance Project, MANCC, NCCAkron, and The Bogliasco Fellowship. He has received grants and fellowships from the NEA, MAP Fund, NYFA, California Arts Council, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and others.

Casel also founded Dancing Around Race, a community-engaged initiative fostering transformative dialogue around systemic racial inequities. Learn more at geraldcasel.com.