VDA Micro-Grant Program

$1,000 Recipient

Hanna Satterlee- ANIMAL Dance

Caitlin Morgan

“Wind and Unwinding” explores humans’ interventionist relationship with our ecosystem: an internal war between the intellectual desire to control our surroundings and a fundamentally animal urge to surrender to the imperfect, sometimes violent, and nonetheless beautiful wildness that surrounds us. Drawing inspiration from mosh pits, sacred geometry, and architectural evolution, this entropic mirror of the human condition invites the audience to see where care accompanies chaos, the blurry edge between nature and Nature, and to feel their full spectrum of emotions—both individually and collectively.

Caitlin Morgan is a Burlington-based creative, interested in flow-state embodiment as a means of eliciting nuanced, collective understanding and alchemical impact. Her choreography; inspired by ecosomatics, communication theories, and postmodernism; has been featured across New York, Vermont, Ohio, and Michigan. Around a perpetual movement research practice, Caitlin edits (and reads) novels, performs with other local makers, and facilitates dance and yoga classes at Lines Vermont, Studio 3, and Sangha Studio.

Kat Coyne

Kat’s piece researches ideas of bodily autonomy and creative property ownership in the context of an AI age. How do we protect our bodies from artificial replication, our ideas from intellectual property theft? It is an exploration into the systems of power and social culture that define how we interact with ourselves and each other. 

Kat is a dance artist originally from the Boston area. She is a 2025 graduate of the UVM dance program and currently an Instructor at Lines Vermont in South Burlington. Her creative focus is in fostering radically accepting and accessible dance spaces and exploring power and control, creative freedom, technology ethics, and queer feminism as it relates to the dancer. 

As director of ANIMAL Dance, Hanna Satterlee has been commissioned by Middlebury Dance Department Professor and dance artist Kari Wolfe Borni to choreograph a new section for a unique performance she is creating and producing inside her horse barn, in Shoreham Vt, set for October 2026. This commission is a years-long conversation that is finally coming to fruition.

Thanks to the support of VDA, Hanna will use the VDA Micro-Grant to establish a May-September rehearsal schedule with a new company of dancers to create and set the choreography for this commission. Joining them on this creative journey are Vermont dance artists Sarah Vogelsang-Card, Mia Makarski, Maggie Maury and Maura Gahan, each of whom bring a captivating and daring presence to the stage. Music will be a DJ mix by noltron, sourcing tracks Hanna has been dancing to for the last four months as new ideas have been percolating for this specific piece.

The title for this new work is “Future Nostalgia,” nodding to two ideas: that there will be a time when we viscerally miss what is happening now, and there will be a time when we wish we could tell our past selves of the good that will come out of their current hardship. “Future Nostalgia” will touch on the concept of being in a specific and tenuous moment, with five sides of one character in dialogue, each dancer representing one of five voices within the self. 

The opportunity to perform the work on the Gala’s indoor stage, prior to the dirt floor stage of the Horse Barn, will give the work a unique chance to be celebrated by an audience at the tails of its completion, leaving the mystery of how the site-specific elements will enhance and change the work.

The section by ANIMAL Dance will not be danced with horses in the space, but will be a dance/theater story mixing story and character with the embodied nonverbal vocabulary that relates how physical language is shared between species.

$500 Recipients

Jennifer Daniels

Through this residency, Jen aims to expand the Talking with Strangers series by developing Conversations 4, 5, and 6, etc., inviting additional dancers into the process and exploring new collaborative dynamics. The work investigates how communication, curiosity, and vulnerability unfold when artists engage with one another as “strangers,” allowing the creative process itself to become a form of dialogue.

Jen is a lifelong dancer whose creative practice is informed by more than four decades of movement, community engagement, and interdisciplinary work. Alongside her artistic pursuits, she is a landscape architect, facilitator of dialogues in conflict transformation, leadership, and social justice, and co-founder of her family’s hemp farming and product manufacturing business. Her work has been shaped by experiences across the southwestern and northeastern United States and throughout Russia, where relationship-centered collaboration and productive landscapes informed her approach to creativity, leadership, and advocacy. As both an artist and practitioner in the healing arts, Jen brings a thoughtful, community-driven perspective to her dance, facilitation, and design practices.

Melisa Clark

Melisa will be presenting new portions of Shimmers, and will bring her three daughters into the dance, inviting them to participate in the creation of movement vocabulary, mask making, audio recording, and overall development. Multiple masks will be worn and changed throughout the dance performance. In the changing of the mask, there is a transition and transformation taking place. Shifting fields, underlying currents, and overlapping realities explore a dreamlike state with a glimpse of deep shadows.

PIMA Group co-founder and Artistic Director Melisa Putz Clark is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and certified yoga instructor based in Southern Vermont. Her work integrates dance, developmental movement research, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Through PIMA Group, founded in 2001, she has created and presented performances nationally and internationally at venues including the Joyce SoHo, 92nd Street Y, and the National Center for Dance Bucharest.