Mark DeGarmo’s journey is defined by perseverance, passion, and purpose. As a choreographer, dancer, and educator, he has spent nearly four decades shaping young lives through dance, using his art as a tool for building community and fostering creativity. A Pine Plains native who shares a home in Ancram with his partner, Jan Hanvik, DeGarmo’s work is rooted in the conviction that dance can transform lives.
His company, Mark DeGarmo Dance (MDD), operates at the intersection of movement and education, supported by both public and private grants and awards. Recently, MDD received a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support its work in New York City public schools. The company also secured a three-year cultural development fund grant from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs to sustain its dance and literacy programming in public elementary schools, its professional learning program for teachers, and its virtual salon performance series for social change. DeGarmo has also been honored with a Fulbright senior scholar award to Peru, among other accolades.
His story begins when his parents, Lindley S. DeGarmo and Elsie, met while both were teaching at Stissing Mountain High School.
“My father died in 1960, when I was four,” Mark told the Herald. “I learned about him from people who’d been his students. He was a beloved higher math teacher. All of his students passed the Regents exam and graduated.”
Many locals also had Mark’s mother, Elsie DeGarmo, as a teacher. Jan said of her, “Mark’s mother was tough. Loving, but tough.” In some ways, she had to be. Her second husband, Jim Smith, died when Mark was 11. By then, she had five children to raise. Soon, she became one of the most successful sellers of Encyclopedia Britannica in the country — of every two sales calls she made, she sold one set.
For a time, the family home on Birch Drive was closed, while Mark, who attended school in Pine Plains through eighth grade, and his older brother went off to Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Mass. The three younger children went to live with their grandmother, while Elsie spent a year with the company in Chicago.
When Mark came home for the summers, his mother made it clear that he would have to work. She arranged a job for him as an orderly at a nearby care home. At the time, he only had a learner’s permit, so he couldn’t drive after dark. His shift was from 3 to 11 p.m., so he would drive to work, sleep in the back of the car overnight, and return home in the morning.
Despite the challenges, creativity was always brewing. “My approach has been unorthodox and non-traditional,” DeGarmo said. “I’d started a theatre company in Pine Plains called Thespians Unlimited. I wrote original plays; we staged protest pieces with local Pine Plains kids. I was very athletic and did exhibition lindy hop dancing. I was a creative improviser and had musical training; played clarinet and sang in a young chorus. In 1971, when I was 15, after seeing Lar Lubovitch at Jacob’s Pillow, I told my family I was going to be a dancer.”
However, his training was postponed when he discovered that, at his boarding school, only girls were allowed to take dance classes.
DeGarmo began studying dance in college at Ohio Wesleyan, where he attended for one semester. From there, he hitchhiked to Oberlin for an admissions interview, was accepted, and continued to study dance for a term. “I studied Nikolais/Louis technique. I learned movement composition through improvisation instead of relying on music to compose,” he said.
When it became clear that money for college tuition was not forthcoming, DeGarmo left school at 18 and moved to New York City. To support himself, he worked as a waiter while studying dance with the José Limón company, Marilyn Wood, and Elaine Summers’ kinetic awareness. He also began studying ballet with Alfredo Corbino and, all these years later, still studies with Corbino’s daughter.
“I performed in some avant-garde work and in experimental settings, such as a Yoko Ono festival where we engaged the public in the dance, and with cellist Charlotte Moorman,” DeGarmo said.
New York City is also where he met Jan. “I was a modern dancer in Oakland, California,” Jan said. “When I moved to New York, a woman I’d danced with in Oakland threw me a welcome-to-New-York party; Mark was the boy who lived next door.”
The two young dancers soon found themselves living together, working whatever day jobs they could while focusing on furthering their educations.
DeGarmo set his sights high, aiming to earn a degree from Juilliard — a highly competitive program that accepted just 7% of applicants at the time and graduated only a third of those. “There are three parts to a Juilliard audition: modern dance, ballet, and a solo. I was confident about modern dance and the solo. I knew I was a performer, but I didn’t yet have the technique I needed. I studied ballet for a year and a half to get ready for the audition.”
When the audition finally arrived, DeGarmo was prepared. “When I did my solo, the other applicants cheered me.” He was in.
Meanwhile, Jan majored in dance and Latin American studies at City College and earned a full scholarship to the master’s program in Latin American and Caribbean studies at NYU.
According to Jan, Elsie encouraged Mark to start his own company. Following his mother’s admonition — “You need a backbone, not a wishbone” — he took her advice and founded Mark DeGarmo and Dancers in 1982.
In 1985, DeGarmo was accepted into the Laura Dean Company, but the offered salary was not enough to live on. By that time, he had spent seven years working as a waiter while pursuing his dance career, and he was eager to secure institutional support for his projects.
“We incorporated in March 1987 as Dynamic Forms, Inc., a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. Mark DeGarmo Dance (formerly Mark DeGarmo and Dancers) was established then,” he said.
DeGarmo earned a Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University, completing his studies in 2007. By then, he had extensive experience in aesthetic education and had performed widely. He was awarded Fulbright senior scholar fellowships in Peru and Ecuador, where he worked with dance companies.
For his dissertation, DeGarmo explored the origins of creativity, focusing on the relationship between movement improvisation and non-verbal learning. “How does movement heal the divide between verbal and non-verbal communication? How do people access the embodied imagination?”
“My father was a farmer, my grandfather a carpenter. Dad painted houses in the summer to make extra money when he wasn’t teaching,” DeGarmo said. “There’s a deep intelligence that comes from the body. There’s another way to look at someone’s potential. Like my mother, who always said she was a Dewey educator, I was driven by passion and wanted to honor experiential learning.” (John Dewey’s educational theory emphasizes learning by doing, social interactions, real-world experiences, and practical activities.)
Ultimately, DeGarmo developed a sequential process for engaging and teaching young learners, helping them build focus, confidence, and literacy skills. MDD refined this approach in New York City public schools, working with students from pre-K through fifth grade. “At the early age it’s learning how to learn — how to focus. It’s a seven-year cycle, with the curriculum advancing each year,” DeGarmo explained.
His approach is intensive: 16 sessions, taking students from zero to performing a dance they’ve created. As Jan, who has been a teaching artist with MDD, notes, “We’re not there to entertain or babysit,” DeGarmo said. “Kids go from feeling they can’t do it to performing before the entire school.”
After each session, students write in a journal about their experiences — what they learned, what they thought, or how they felt. “The work requires reflection in order to make sense of the movement. We teach children how to generate movement from their own bodies, from improvisation. You don’t have to be an expert with steps. You can learn dance from the body’s necessity to communicate,” DeGarmo said.
DeGarmo’s embodied cognition program has a measurable impact on students. A John’s Hopkins study by Dr. Roisin Corcoran cited “statistically significant” improvement in 4th grade reading scores for students who participated.
MDD’s programs are often the only arts and dance offerings in under-resourced New York City public schools. “I’m committed to hiring effective teachers,” DeGarmo said. “They have to not only be good dancers but have educational ability. We try to integrate into the school culture — we are all movers.”
Teachers are trained through MDD’s professional learning program, which provides 30 hours of training, including 10 hours each of seminars, methods, and project-based learning for education program staff.
“We’ve worked across all five boroughs. We’ve had up to 1,000 students at a time,” DeGarmo said. “The point is to find the avenues for the child to unlock her full potential and to use the arts to transform school culture. We’re creating school change in one semester; creating partnerships in literacy through dance.”
Currently, MDD is active in nine schools, one of which has an after-school program. Two are in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, three are in the Bronx, and four are in Brooklyn.
Callie Hatchett, an experienced dancer, has been teaching with MDD for eight years. At one of the schools where the program has operated for 21 years, she guided nine kindergarten students through a vivid sequence, with each step written out in different colors. “Be aware of your personal space,” she advised. “Make a heart.”
The students worked on upper body movements, followed by lower body exercises. They practiced a series of “freezes” and releases, explored weight, and performed movements like “swimming.” They moved quickly, then slowly, working with levels, balance, and the concept of “melt.” They also learned “words of the day”: entrance and exit. Individual children demonstrated various ways to exit, including jumping, hopping, galloping, and skipping.
Then, the students made letter shapes with their bodies and created a sequence of fruit shapes they had practiced before. When asked what is easy about dance, Naima replied, “Spinning and jumping is easy!” The session concluded with a “cool down,” where the children imagined raindrops and a rainbow. After the 16 sessions are completed, the class will perform in the auditorium. In May, the school plans a gala showcasing the students’ work.