Dian Dong Chen

Dian Dong Chen is the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Chen Dance Center and the artistic leader of H.T. Chen & Dancers. A graduate of The Juilliard School — where she studied with Shirley Ubell, Vladimir Dokoudovsky, Alfredo Corvino, and Doris Rudko, and where she first met H.T. Chen, introduced by the legendary Martha Hill, director of the school's dance division — she has built a career spanning performance, choreography, education, and organizational leadership across nearly five decades.

As a performer, Dian has worked with Anna Sokolow's Players' Project, Kathryn Posin, Janet Soares, Lance Westergard, Kazuko Hirabayashi, Walter Nicks, and the national tour of The King & I, and was a featured artist with the American Dance Festival's 25th Anniversary Repertory Company. Her teaching has taken her to NYU School of Education, Montclair State College, the Center for Modern Dance Education, and Lincoln Center Institute.

Since co-founding Chen Dance Center in 1979, Dian has been the school's lead dance teacher — training generations of Chinatown children in ballet and modern dance and building one of the neighborhood's most beloved and enduring arts education institutions. That same commitment to accessible, community-rooted dance education has driven the educational programs she has designed and led for H.T. Chen & Dancers, bringing the Chinese American experience into public school classrooms and auditoriums across New York City and nationally through live performance, movement, and cultural engagement. The Early Childhood Dance Program, now in its 20th season, reaches 200 Chinatown students per week. In 2021, she contributed her expertise to the development of Tracing Footsteps: Into the Heart of Chinatown — Hidden Voices, a K-12 curriculum created through a partnership between the Dance Education Laboratory and the NYC Department of Education.

Dian has participated in the Kennedy Center's Capacity Building Program under Michael Kaiser and completed the Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders in the Arts at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She and H.T. Chen were jointly awarded the 2012 Mid-Career Award from the Martha Hill Dance Fund — one of the field's most distinguished honors, and one whose namesake first brought them together — in recognition of their shared contributions to American contemporary dance.

Photo: V. Levitsky