Alison Dietterle Smith

Alison Dietterle Smith is a movement alchemist who integrates her love for eco-somatic practices with embodied myth-making and collective rituals. She is a lecturer and magic-maker in the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been teaching since 2003. Alison holds a BA in Anthropology from UCSD, and an MFA in Dance from UCI. Her teaching and artistic work is influenced by a merging of her early conservatory classical ballet training at the San Francisco and Pacific Northwest Ballet schools, contemporary dance, and her present movement investigations as a Feldenkrais Practitioner® and ritual-space facilitator. Through Alison’s interdisciplinary lens, the dance class becomes a portal for arriving to our aliveness, a transformational space of self-discovery, movement meditation, and weaving ourselves into connection. 

Alison began dancing in the fog and forests of the Central Oregon Coast with Nancy Mittleman-Merkens. Her dancing path has been illuminated by her experiences performing with The Eugene and Idaho Ballet Companies, Ballet Pacifica, and a decade working with Jean Isaacs and San Diego Dance Theatre.

Other important influential teachers/choreographers include: Margaret Marshall, John Malashock, Christopher Pilafian, Joe Goode, Kim Epifano, Lisa Naugle, Donald McKayle, Yolande Snaith, Risa Steinberg and the work of Jose Límon, and Ohad Naharin’s Gaga Metodika. Core matrilineal teachers/wisdom-holders include, Anna Halprin, Shiva Rea, Starhawk, Evelyn Rysdyk, Sharon Blackie, and Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Alison also honors all the inspiring faculty, guest artists, and students that have passed through the studios of the Molli and Arthur Wagner dance building at UCSD for the past 25 years.  

Alison’s choreography and dance films have been presented at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, San Diego State University, Palomar College, Jean Isaacs San Diego Dance Theater’s site-specific Trolley Dances, The City of Carlsbad, The Light Box, The 10th Ave. Theater, Sushi Performance and Visual Arts, The Electric Lodge in Venice, Dance Camera West Festival (Los Angeles); Colorado College Dance Festival (CO); Frederick Lowe Theater (NYU); Constanta Opera House (Romania); and CECUT (Mexico).

When she is not dancing with the trees, Alison guides the following courses in the Theatre and Dance Department at UCSD:

• Advanced and Intermediate Ballet Technique
• Advanced and Intermediate Contemporary Technique
• Movement Lab: Myth into Dance
• Movement Analysis/Somatic Practices
• Dance Pedagogy
• Site Specific and Site Responsive Improvisation
• Choreography and Dance Making Series 
• Screendance/Dance for the Camera 
• Performance and Composition