Show Summary:

In this episode, Jay Dan talks with Susan Slotnick. We talked about her teaching dance in prison and how it was birthed out of a painful experience in her life. Read more about Susan below and check out the links.

For the past 25 years, Susan Slotnick has gone behind the walls at correctional facilities every week to bring the joy of modern dance to incarcerated men and boys. Her choreography dealt with serious themes geared to inspire audiences and students toward social justice activism.

Susan was born to a mother with a borderline personality and a distant autistic father; not the best nurturing environment for a gifted child, so she rebelled, flunked out of school, and befriended those her mother would have considered undesirables. She basically lived a life completely at odds to the one that would have ordinarily been expected. Early experiences showed Susan how difficult life was for so many and it instilled in her a passionate zeal to help the marginalized, the forgotten and the disenfranchised.

Her life work and dance company, named "Figures In Flight," has garnered much critical and professional acclaim. Numerous feature articles about her have appeared in dance magazines, she received the Dance Studio Magazine's "Caring Heart Award," celebrated for Women's History Month as Huffington Post's "Greatest Woman of The Day," featured in two radio documentaries and featured in the documentary "The Game Changer" that won Best Documentary Short at both the Harlem and Cannes film festivals. Susan is also the author of the book Flight: The Dance of Freedom.