She performed professionally with ballet, jazz, and modern companies - worked with Pas de Quatre, performed Bebe Miller's works, former Zenon member, etc.
She has been the head of the dance department at Perpich Center for Arts Education since 1990, where she taught dance to both Lee and I.
She's a dance educator across Minnesota schools!
She received the SURDNA Arts Teachers Fellowships for 2002.
She was named National Dance Teacher for the year of 2002.
She was featured in the Annenberg Foundation's video series "The Art of Teaching the Arts" in 2005.
Her research "Peer Coaching in the Arts Classroom" recieved the Sister Ann Harvey Action Research Award in 2008.
She has presented at the Minnesota Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development conference, Minnesota DAPE conference, national and state AAPHERD conventions, and the Minnesota Dance Educator's Coalition workshops.
She has created a safer, more communal environment for Minnesota dancers through her innate understanding of how oppressive and critical many dance spaces can be. By including the opinions and choreography of students, checking in on everyone's physical and emotional state before class begins, encouraging asking for consent before working with physical touch, and allowing her students to rest when their bodies are worn out, she is challenging many of the dance community's norms and expectations of young dancers in the field.
She has uplifted the voices and careers of underrepresented communities in dance and created space for their works to be appreciated by providing education on marginalized forms of dance, choreographers, and historical dance movements. She highlights influential members of the dance community whose impact has been overshadowed by their other, more privileged, white, straight, and cis-gendered peers throughout her class curriculum, showing videos of their pieces, reading their academic works, and acknowledging their accomplishments.
She envisions a dance space where anyone and everyone can be included, spreading her knowledge of dance throughout public school systems in the Twin Cities area and enmeshing her curriculum with general PE classes.
In all of these ways, Mary Harding has created a safer, more inclusive dance space for everyone she works with. She actively stands for those who have lost their voices due to the colonization of the dance profession, uses her influence to bring them back into the spotlight, and refuses to stand for oppression or exploitation of dancers currently working within the dance world. She teaches her students at Perpich, including Lee and I, about the underlying misogyny, sexism, racism, classism, etc. within the dance profession and encourages us to stand up for ourselves. She urges us to search for dance communities who accept us for who we are and don't wish to change us for reasons other than professional and self improvement. In these ways, she expands this activism far beyond herself and will influence the environment of dance for years to come. She also uses her expansive knowledge and influence to reach kids that might otherwise not have access to dance because of socioeconomic constraints. By working within public schools and not requiring payment from parents for these services, she gives children the chance to begin their dance careers without any financial worries. This accessibility and inclusion really makes her stand out from other dance educators of her same status and creates incredibly necessary, lasting change.
By Bryn Fitzgerald-Wells and Lee Christianson