Michael Montoya Guests On TriVersity Talk! Wednesday October 4th, 2023

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Wendy Stuart will be hosting TriVersity Talk this Wednesday at 7 PM ET in a replay with featured guest Michael Montoya. This episode is a part of the Best Of Triversity Talk series that takes place on the first Wednesday of each month.

TriVersity Talk is a weekly web series with featured guests discussing their lives, activism and pressing issues in the LGBTQ Community. With TriVersity Talk!, the goal is to laugh and learn.

TriVersity Talk! Is part of TriVersity’s ICARE Initiative. ICARE stands for Increasing Community Awareness through Relevant Education. ICARE Programs are generously funded by The Greater Pike Community Foundation.

Michael Montoya is a professional dancer, choreographer, and dance educator currently residing and teaching jazz dance history and technique in the Hudson Valley, New York area. For many years prior to moving to New York, Michael was a member of the professional dance community of Los Angeles and Orange County, California where he performed as a principal dancer, soloist, and choreographer with the Jazz Spectrum Dance Company in Costa Mesa and later established and directed his own company, The Montoya Dance Ensemble.

Mr. Montoya’s commercial dance credits include television commercials and music videos, as well as network and cable television special performances. His choreography has also been selected for The Choreographer’s Showcase of Orange County, Jazz Dance Los Angeles and the Al Gilbert Showcase of Los Angeles. In addition to his stage work, Michael writes articles and presents seminars to share his experiences as a transgender artist in the dance industry and to share teaching methods for inclusive, gender-neutral dance instruction.

In 2021, as recognition for his expertise in arts education, Michael was selected by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Arts in Education Roundtable for the distinction of New York State Teaching Artist. He was awarded a grant to create a series of video lessons for educators in order to bring attention to the rigid binary gender practices that quite often exist in dance and to address the needs of LGBTQ+ students who are often negatively affected by them.

It is from this project that the inspiration to create the full-length documentary, Out From the Wings, was born. In the film, Michael not only shares his analysis of traditional gender role expectations in the world of dance but, through video interviews, shares the stories of lesbian, gay, non-binary, and transgender dancers as they candidly discuss how these rigid gender and sexual identity expectations have negatively affected them both personally and professionally.

Out From the Wings is an official selection of the 2022 Reel Affirmations LGBTQ film festival in Washington, DC and can currently be seen at selected screenings across the US.

Watch TriVersity Talk! Live on Wednesday at 7 PM ET on Youtube here: