Cara Hagan

Cara Hagan (She/They) is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer. She believes in the power of art to upend the laws of time and physics, a necessary occurrence in pursuit of liberation. In their work, no object or outcome is sacred; but the ritual to get there is. Hagan’s adventures take place as live performance, on screen, as installation, on the page, and in collaboration with others in a multitude of contexts.

 

Mama Piranha, Hagan’s most recent work for stage, is a solo work of physical theatre that explores themes of loss and reclamation of agency and what happens when we decide to tear down a world that no longer serves us to build a new one. The work premiered at JACK! Brooklyn in June of 2025. The Dance Enthusiast described Mama Piranha as “concise and evocative,” and “precisely-executed stage magic.”

 

Hagan’s most recent short film, “Cut Me Summa Dat Noise,” premiered at the Grrl Haus Film Festival in Cambridge, MA in December of 2024. The film was most recently awarded “best music video” at the Allentown Film Festival and “best choreography for the camera” at the festival Videodanza de Puerto Rico. The film has been accepted to several more festivals for 2025.

 

Other recent work has included, "were we birds?,” an immersive, site-specific work commissioned as part of the 90th anniversary season of the American Dance Festival. Additionally, Hagan's body percussion work titled, "SKIDD-ID-A-BOP was commissioned as part of the 2023 season for Rhythmically Speaking, a jazz-focused dance company based in Minneapolis. Hagan directed and co-devised “and we never went back” on the students of the MFA in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the New School in the spring of 2025. The work finds its characters 100 years after a catastrophic flood forever changed the skyline of New York City. The piece follows the characters as they attend to their own survival, their relationships and their cultivation of joy in the face of subsequent climate events.

 

Cara is grateful to have received financial support from various organizations and institutions to continue their work. Recent support has included, The Puffin Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council, the Changing Tap Times Initiative, The New School Office of Faculty Research, GALLIM Dance, and the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron where she was named the inaugural Community Commissioning Residency Artist for the 2020/2021 season. Past support has come from the Dance Films Association, the Filmed in NC Fund, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Forsyth County Arts Council, the Appalachian State University Research Council, the Watauga County Arts Council, and Betty’s Daughter Arts.

 

Hagan is editor and contributor to the anthology Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom, published in 2021 by Routledge. Hagan is author of the book, Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial practice, published in 2022 by McFarland. Her most recent scholarly article, Dancing For Laughs: Signifyin(g) Bodies and the Black American Sitcom was published in a special issue of the Cultural Studies Journal and was awarded the 2024 Gertrude Lippincott Award for best English-Language article from the Dance Studies Association.

 

Cara Joined the faculty of The New School in 2022 and works as Associate Professor and Program Director for the MFA in Contemporary Theatre Performance. Cara Hagan also works for Dance on Camera, the world’s longest-running dance film festival, as its Executive Director since 2025. She was a co-curator for the festival for the 2023 and 2024 seasons.