Meet the Team

NWA Movement Hub was founded in 2022 NWA and originated from a need to develop the dance ecosystem in Northwest Arkansas. In 2021, Karen Castleman received a grant from the Walton Family Foundation to conduct a year of research aimed at assessing the needs of the dance community in NW Arkansas and providing strategies for building that ecosystem. The results of the survey showed that there are many dance makers in the NWA region, especially POC representing beautiful cultural dance traditions, as well as an eager and curious audience base. NWA Movement Hub’s initiatives build bridges across communities through vibrant engagement with dance as a form of art.


  • Co-Founder

    Karen Castleman’s choreographic and performance work spans more than two decades and includes work with companies such as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Rubberbandance Group and MOMIX. Over the past five years her work has involved engagements and collaborations with some incredible organizational partners in the high south and beyond, from more classical commissioned works of contemporary ballet, Red Rover for Tulsa Ballet II, and Late Summer Cycle for NWA Ballet Theatre, to abstract creations for engagements at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary. Both within the gallery and outdoors, in sight specific conversations with sculptural works of art, Castleman’s work stretches across the boundaries of contemporary concert dance genres.

    Her work has been seen in collaborative projects with her artist/husband, Dayton Castleman, as they explored the challenges of space, work and family during the pandemic in Panemdemic, a dance work for film for OZCast, a project of CACHE, as well as with musician Fernando Valencia in Collision: When Visions Combine, a project by The Momentary and CACHE, bringing artists of different disciplines into conversation for a showcase of collaborative experimentation. In 2019, Castleman joined a national ensemble of performers in Florida, for an historical look at the story of American Modern Dance in a multimedia narrative and dance presentation, directed by Brett Perry, for the Venetian Arts Society, honoring ballet great, Edward Villella, in which she performed work by Isadora Duncan and original pieces inspired by Loie Fuller, Doris Humphrey and other modern dance pioneers.

    Castleman was honored to be in the first cohort awarded by the Mid-America Art Alliance and Walton Family Foundation’s Artists 360 grant program. In 2021, Castleman received a research grant from the Walton Family Foundation for the purpose of mapping the existing dance and movement ecosystem in NW Arkansas, connecting with national organizations to investigate potential organizational models for elevating and filling gaps identified by the research. This research, which included a survey disseminated by 20 diverse community partner organizations, identified an eager and curious dance audience with little familiarity of the dance offerings available in the region outside of classical ballet.

    A pilot program of the research project, Castleman introduced DanceChance NWA, a choreography focussed performance series featuring local choreographers and a unique response process giving useful feedback to choreographers and audiences to further understanding and fluency around the craft of making dances. Designed by Julie Nakagawa, Artistic Director of DanceWorks Chicago, DanceChance NWA was adapted and directed in NW Arkansas by Castleman. DanceChance NWA received tremendous community support, selling out 175 free registrations when presented in its second iteration at partner institution The Momentary in Bentonville, AR. Over five months, a total of 10 local choreographers received stage time and audience feedback on their creative work and over 45 local dancers were featured in dance works of a variety of genres.

  • Production Manager

    Mary Forrest is dabbling back into dancing and production after a hiatus from those adventures. After graduating with a BFA in dance from the University of Hawaii and an MA in theater from San Jose State University in Northern California, Mary taught, choreographed, produced, and performed dance for 25 years. She moved to this area five years ago and is delighted to have found her way back into the dance community here in NWA.

  • Co-Founder

    Michelle Summers, Ph.D., is creative entrepreneur and dance advocate dedicated to community engagement via the arts, She is currently a lecturer in Theatre and Dance at the University of Arkansas. Previously, she has been on faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, the university of Arkansas, the Graduate Theological Union, and on Thaden School. Along with Karen Castleman, she is the co-founder of the Northwest Arkansas Movement Hub, an organization dedicated to promoting dance in the NWA region.

    Originally from Arkansas, Summers' dancing has taken her across the U.S. as she completed her B.F.A. in Ballet and B.A. in English from Texas Christian University, and then received her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. She completed her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside in 2014.

    Summers has performed professionally with Montage Arts, Casa Manana Equity Theater, and Contemporary Ballet Dallas. Her choreography has been presented at the Culver Center for the Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, the Barefoot Brigade Festival, Dallas Dance for the Planet, Berkeley Ballet Theater, and Regional Dance America. She has also served on faculty at Santa Clara University, Texas Christian University, Berkeley Ballet Theater, the Bentley School, the American College Dance Festival, the Bay Area Dance Exchange, and the Pasadena Dance Festival.

    Summers has received multiple awards for her dance scholarship including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant for Course Development from Cal Performances, UC Berkeley Professional Development Grant, the AAUW Dissertation Year Fellowship, the Center for Arts, Religion, and Education Grant (GTU), a Creative Capacity Fund Professional Development Grant from the Los Angeles Center for Cultural Innovation, the Sophia Scholar/Elise Lipscomb Ferguson Fellowship and the Louise Johnson Miller/Jean Johnson Smith Fellowship from the Kappa Alpha Foundation, a UCR Graduate Division Fellowship, a BYPED Grant, a Sacred Dance Guild Festival Scholarship, the UCR Humanities Research Grant, and a Gluck Fellowship, among others. She has been an invited participant at the Mellon Dance Studies Summer Seminar at Brown University and the Performance Studies Summer Institute at Northwestern.

    Conference presentations include the Congress on Research in Dance’s Re-generations, Harvard's Body in History, Body in Space, the Society of Dance History Scholars' Dance and Spectacle, UCR's Dance Under Construction, and the UCLA's Thinking Gender. Michelle has publications in the Women and Performance Feminist Journal, UCLA’s Thinking Gender Papers, and the North Texas Dance Council’s DANCE magazine. She has been an invited guest speaker at Stanford University, the Graduate Theological Union, Camelot Prep's Exchange Program in China, the Montage Arts Scholarship Workshop, the University of Wisconsin at Madison's Dance Department, and at the Emerging Leaders in Arts Administration Panel at the Rose Marine Theater. She has also held arts administration positions at the Kennedy Center and the Fort Worth Symphony.