Doma Dance Theater

Doma Dance Theater creates dance works that explore the body as a tangible site of culture. 

Doma, the Carpatho-Rusyn word for “at home,” cultivates a sense of belonging, curiosity, and exuberant self-expression for its performers and audiences. Doma’s cross-cultural approach creates powerful contemporary dance works that examine shared experiences of diaspora and displacement. 

Doma is led by Artistic Director and cultural activist Alexandra Bodnarchuk, the first Carpatho-Rusyn American choreographer to make contemporary work with a folk lens. Informed by Bodnarchuk’s pan-Slavic cultural upbringing in Pittsburgh, PA, Doma’s work incorporates cultural influences, circular spatial patterning, and intimate partnering. These works blaze a trail for Slavic representation in contemporary dance, demonstrating the enduring necessity of unearthing the cultural legacies that each of us carry.

Founded in 2024, Doma represents an evolution of Alexandra Bodnarchuk Dance Projects (ABDP), founded in 2017. Building upon Bodnarchuk’s past focus on body identity and societal expectations of womanhood, Doma continues to unfold the embodied experience in an ongoing search for the elusive feeling of home.

Alexandra Bodnarchuk

Founder, Artistic Director, Choreographer

Alexandra Bodnarchuk is a Carpatho-Rusyn American choreographer and cultural activist based in Minneapolis, MN. As the Artistic Director and choreographer for Doma Dance Theater, Bodnarchuk creates original works for the stage and screen that draw together her ethnic heritage with contemporary movement practices. Centering the body as a tangible site of culture, Bodnarchuk explores questions of self-expression, community, dispossession, and cross-cultural identity through works that range from solo pieces to ensemble works.

Bodnarchuk is a 2021 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow and a 2022 & 2020 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow Finalist (Jerome Foundation). In May 2024 she will present the dance film Mamko Moja L’uba, named for a folk song recently popularized by Carpatho-Rusyn singer Maria Mačoskova and featuring costumes inspired by traditional clothing from the Zemplín region in Eastern Slovakia. Her second evening-length work, Rock, Paper, Scissors, premiered at The Southern Theater in March 2023. She is currently working on a commission for The Museum of Russian Art, responding to Serbian sculptor Zoran Mojsilov’s surrealist exhibition, The Dry Neck of the Pig.

Bodnarchuk is the daughter of first- and third-generation immigrants. She was raised in Pittsburgh, PA, where she studied European folk traditions, including classical ballet and Slavic and Balkan folk dance. Southwestern PA, which hosts an active community of Eastern European folk organizations, has the largest concentration of Carpatho-Rusyns in the United States. As a member of the North Hills Junior Tamburitzans, Bodnarchuk was taught by the renowned Željko Jergan with a primary focus on Croatian dances. She also performed with the now-shuttered Slavjane Folk Ensemble, the sole Carpatho-Rusyn children’s dance ensemble in the United States. Under the direction of Jack Poloka she toured Slovakia, Poland, and Ukraine, exploring the diasporic homeland and cultural landscape of the Carpatho-Rusyns. 

Bodnarchuk graduated from Bodiography Contemporary Ballet’s College Preparatory Program and then earned a BFA in Dance Performance and Choreography and  BA in French from Ohio University (OU). During college, she spent a semester in Avignon, France, training at the Conservatoire d’Avignon under Cyrille de la Barre. She also studied Ghanaian dance and drumming under the direction of Paschal Yao Younge and Zelma Badu-Younge and was a member of their group Azaguno African Dance Ensemble.

Embracing her role as a cultural activist, Bodnarchuk has continued to deepen her study of and connection to Carpatho-Rusyn cultural traditions by visiting her ethnic homeland and learning the Rusyn language. By amplifying her ethnic heritage and probing the connections among the Carpatho-Rusyn experience and diasporic communities around the world, Bodnarchuk offers a potent invitation to rediscover the unrecognized histories embedded in each of us.

Brandon Anderson Musser

Co-Founder, Producing Artistic & Music Director

As of late Spring 2024 - Brandon Anderson Musser is a son of a saxophonist truck driver and a union head nurse, born 1989 near present day Pittsburgh, PA. He is primarily working with music and sound for dance and theater.  He prioritizes projects that possess self awareness, tenderness, humanity, and that strive for reformation. 

He is the Producing Artistic and Music Director of Doma Dance Theater. Notable credits reflect service as artistic associate to Alexandra Bodnarchuk Dance Projects, company composer and sound designer to the Taja Will Ensemble, and creative technical work for Hatch Dance. Most recently he is collaborating with Marcela Michelle. 

Occasionally he creates solo work.