Laura D’Amico is a multi-hyphenate dance and performance artist with a formal background in STEM and agriculture. She is a 2023-2024 Fulbright Scholar, where she trained and performed for one year with the Anfibia Artist Program in Bologna, Italy, under the direction of Mattia Gandini, Martina La Ragione, and Carlo Massari. Using heightened sensitivity and vulnerability, her work emphasizes blurring the lines between humans and the animal species with which we interact through retelling myth and ritual.
In Italy, Laura closely worked on her breadth of creation tools with mentorship from artists of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Ultima Vez/Wim Vandekybus, Les Ballets C de la B, Compagnie Maguy Marin, Batsheva, Peeping Tom, C&C Company, Micce, and Artemis Danza. Drawing on these intimate learning experiences, Laura was a creator and collaborative artist/performer of seven original works presented in Bologna during her time with Anfibia.
Additionally, with Anfibia, she earned a certificate in Corpo Poetico ®, created by Anna Albertarelli and Roberto Penzo, which dissolves the barrier between disabled and able-bodied movement artists in dance-making through improvisational relationship-building methods and contact dance.
Both in Europe and North America, Laura has taken five Gaga Labs, including studying with Ohad Naharin at the Orsolina28 Foundation, and continues this movement research remotely online. Related to this ever-evolving movement research, she has begun her studies to become a practitioner in the Ilan Lev Method and is in the process of earning her certification by Fall 2027, amongst an international cohort in Kików, Poland.
She has studied in multiple intensives and workshops with Andrea Miller/GALLIM, as well as five years with Garth Fagan Dance. In her hometown in the Finger Lakes, she carried out a research residency sponsored by the DanceForce’s NYSCI grant in Summer 2023. In the Ithaca area, she collaborates as a figure model with visual artists and is teaching a 20-week dance course to incarcerated men at Cayuga Correctional Facility through a grant from NYSCA and the non-profit, Wave Farm. In Rochester, she studies bel canto voice technique with Deborah Norin-Kueh, works with Daystar Dance Company under the direction of Rosalie Daystart Jones, practices her devising skills at The Auguste Roost, and is teaching faculty at the Hochstein School.