About Cara
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; 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 Dance Film” at the Bronze Lens Film Festival, “Best Film Score” at the Carpool’s Drive-In Film Festival, “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 the remainder of 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.
Hagan is the author of many publications, including the book, Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice published by McFarland in 2022. They are editor and contributing author of the book, Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom, published by Routledge in 2021. Hagan’s article, Dancing for Laughs: Signifyin(g) Bodies and the Black American Sitcom won the Gertrude Lippincott Award for Best English Language Article from the Dance Studies Association in 2024. Hagan’s article LOAM: Transformation through Eco-Theatre was invited to be written and was published in the HowlRound Theatre Commons’ Earth Day 2025 issue. Other pieces have been published in the International Journal of Screendance, the Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, the Journal of Dance Education, The Journal of Sustainable Education, Dance Magazine and more.
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 Joined the faculty of The New School in 2022 and works as Associate Professor and Program Director for the MFA in Contemporary Theatre Performance. Hagan also works for Dance on Camera, the world’s longest-running dance film festival as its Executive Director since 2025. They were a co-curator for the festival for the 2023 and 2024 seasons.
