About Shakia
Shakia “The Key” Barron is an accomplished choreographer, performer, and educator specializing in African Diasporic dance forms with a focus on Hip-Hop, House, and Funk styles. She currently holds the position of Class of 1929 Virginia Apgar Assistant Professor of Dance at Mount Holyoke College and serves as the Artistic Director of Kia the Key & Company. Barron is known for her passionate teaching and dedication to celebrating the roots and history of these dance forms, helping to make them more accessible within academic spaces. Barron values and aims to create possibilities for embodied connection–using movement and music to generate kinesthetic empathy for both members and guests of the cultural forms she practices and teaches. Barron is known for her passionate teaching and dedication to celebrating the roots and history of these dance forms, helping to make them more accessible within academic spaces.
Barron’s performance and choreography experience is extensive. She has choreographed and directed more than 70 Street and Club dance works that have been performed at colleges, universities, and dance institutions, including Bates Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow. Barron has toured nationally and internationally, dancing with Face Da Phlave Entertainment, Illstyle and Peace Productions, and as a guest artist with Rennie Harris PureMovement.
As a dance educator, Barron spent many years teaching at the Bates Dance Festival and taught community classes at Jacob’s Pillow. Barron is a DEL (Dance Education Laboratory) faculty member who has facilitated multiple professional development workshops around the integration of Hip-Hip dance and history in the curriculum. Barron was the 2019 Arthur Levitt Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence at Williams College. She was a 2023 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award from Bates Dance Festival, a 2024 Cowles Artist in Residence at University of Minnesota. Barron showcased her evening-length work, “The Gathering,” in the summer of 2025, made possible by a Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, and looks forward to touring this work.
Photos by Jim Coleman
