Below are the latest announcement for the Odissi Odyssey: Dancing Worlds Conference marking the five-year anniversary of UNC Charlotte's commitment to the global Odissi dance community.
The dNc Laureate Award recognizes excellence in dance and music as artistic, academic, and reflective practices. Grounded in the values of the National Honor Society for Dance Arts and Tri-M Music Honor Society, this award honors students who embody artistic merit, scholarly engagement, leadership, and commitment to documentation and legacy-building in dance. This award affirms that artistic knowledge is not only performed but also archived, articulated, and transmitted, positioning students as emerging artist-scholars and cultural stewards. There will be two awards:
Odissi Odyssey 2027 is excited to announce a special collaborative performance project for K–12 dancers under the artistic direction of Dr. Marissa Nesbit, Professor of Dance at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Dr. Nesbit will create a new ensemble work featuring K–12 dancers, developed through a series of in-person rehearsals at Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts on the UNC Charlotte campus throughout Fall 2026 and Spring 2027. This unique creative process will provide young dancers with the opportunity to work alongside a nationally recognized choreographer in a collaborative university environment while exploring artistry, creativity, and ensemble performance.
This is the tentative conference schedule. We will make the final conference schedule available online after proposal organizers are notified. Please make sure you are subscribed to our conference email list for updated information.
Roster for the Directors and educators associated with the arts education and outreach efforts towards K12 in Dance and Community Research Institute at UNC Charlotte.
Odissi Odyssey is a unique initiative by University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s College of Arts and Architecture. It is an outreach initiative to the diasporic Indian community through in person gatherings as well as online scholarship. It has been a serious gathering of Odissi dancers since 2019 at UNC Charlotte and continues to create more awareness and appreciation about Odissi in the United States and globally.
Odissi Odyssey is launching an online annual dance magazine Housed in the Open Journal Systems platform at UNC Charlotte, it will align with peer-review rigor and share widely embodied knowledge creation on stage through written means. For its inaugural issue, it will focus on the Life and Works of Guru Poushali Mukherjee. In Memory of Guru Poushali Mukherjee, it will feature anecdotes from multiple generations of her students, her colleagues, her collaborators, and her extended family of artists across her dual careers in percussion and dance.
