Jennifer McQuiston Lott enjoys a varied career as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, director and advocate for the arts. Company credits include Gibney Dance Company, Groundworks Dancetheater, Armitage Gone! Dance, Inlet Dance Theatre, Collective Body Dance Lab, Eglevsky Ballet, and others. Her choreographic works and short dance films have been presented by USC Visions & Voices and at the Newport Beach Film Festival, The LA Short Film Fest, Baryshnikov Arts Center, National Sawdust, Celebrate Brooklyn!, Chen Dance Center’s Newsteps, the Thang Dao Dance Festival, at The Dead/Live Festival (Boston), The Cleveland Public Theatre, New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts, The Southern Theater in Minneapolis, and Festival Miden (Germany). She has created works for Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival, Gibney Dance Center, the Laguna Dance Festival, Baldwin Wallace University’s Bach Festival, Rockford Dance Company, and has choreographed music videos for groups Son Lux and My Brightest Diamond. She assisted choreographer Jodie Gates with the creation of new works for Tulsa Ballet and Kansas City Ballet, and staged Ms. Gates’ ballets at Sacramento Ballet and Princeton University. Lott is a featured performer in the official Son Lux videos Undone (dir. David Terry Fine, chor. Tyler Gilstrap) and You Don’t Know Me (dir. Nathan Johnson/The Made Shop). Her critically-acclaimed film Caught in the Chamber, a collaboration with composer Andrew Norman and director Nathan Johnson, has been honored with numerous awards and been presented by USC Visions & Voices and Cal Performances in concert with celebrated chamber ensemble yMusic. 

 

In 2012, Lott & Brent Whitney launched the Traverse City Dance Project, a seasonal company for professional dance artists in Traverse City, MI. In 2020, Lott developed and directed the TCDP's 2020 No-Distance Festival, a virtual showcase of collaborative works from over 35 artists worldwide. She co-choreographed Parallel 45 Theatre Festival's production of Hair: The American Tribal Love Rock Musical  (2019) and The Sound of Music (2021), and has collaborated with the Traverse Symphony Orchestra on performances at the City Opera House and Interlochen Center for the Arts. 

 

Lott earned her BFA in Ballet Performance from Indiana University, and her MFA in Dance from the University of California, Irvine, where she was awarded a Graduate Fellowship, the Medici Scholarship, and the Sheila K. & James J. Peterson Community Spirit Scholarship. She is certified in GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® and is an ABT® Certified Teacher in Primary through Level 3 of the ABT® National Training Curriculum. She has served on the faculty of Interlochen Summer Arts Camp, and taught master classes and workshops nationally and internationally, including DOCH (Stockholm, Sweden), Ikapa Dance Theatre (Cape Town, South Africa), the Académie Américaine de Danse (Paris, France) and Muhlenberg College (PA). Since 2018, she has had the honor of being one of only eight North American instructors of Countertechnique, an innovative and athletic contemporary dance technique developed by Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk. In 2016, she joined the faculty of the USC Kaufman School of Dance as an Assistant Professor. She and her family divide their time between Los Angeles, Traverse City, and Indianapolis. www.lottdance.com, www.tcdanceproject.org.