Investing in Excellence: Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón Expands Her Artistic Practice

This past January, Chatham Hall’s own Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón, Dance and Spanish Teacher, participated in an extraordinary professional development opportunity that deepens both her artistic practice and the learning experience she brings to her students.

 

Lourdes was selected to participate in an award-winning, twice-yearly research laboratory for advanced and professional artists in New York City, hosted by the critically acclaimed Sidra Bell Dance New York. The laboratory is designed as an immersive, non-competitive space for sustained inquiry, rigor, and experimentation, inviting artists from diverse movement backgrounds to engage deeply with Sidra Bell’s innovative improvisational methodologies.

 

Over 42 hours of laboratory work and dialogue, Lourdes worked closely with Bell and fellow artists, entering the company's intimate creative culture and committing to what the program describes as creative stakeholding: a shared responsibility for risk-taking, reflection, and growth. The experience emphasized research over performance, offering time and space to question, explore, and refine artistic instincts in a supportive yet challenging environment.

 

Lourdes’s invitation to join the Winter Module followed her presentation of original dance work at the 2025 Dance Studies Association Conference in Washington, DC, where she first connected with Sidra Bell. After witnessing her work, Bell invited Lourdes to participate as a Research Fellow, an honor that reflects Lourdes’s artistry, curiosity, and commitment to growth.

 

This experience holds particular resonance for Lourdes’s teaching at Chatham Hall. “Improvisational practice requires a certain level of vulnerability,” she notes, “and that vulnerability can be difficult to access during the teenage years for a variety of reasons.” Sidra Bell is widely known for her ability to cultivate improvisation, transform it into award-winning choreography, and train dancers to move confidently between exploration and composition.

 

Lourdes is already beginning to integrate these frameworks into Chatham Hall’s dance curriculum, thoughtfully adapting professional-level practices for adolescent learners. The result is a richer, more expansive approach to movement, one that invites students to take creative risks, build confidence, and develop a deeper relationship with their bodies and voices.

 

At Chatham Hall, we believe that exceptional teaching grows from continual learning. Lourdes’s experience is a powerful example of how investing in faculty development directly enriches the classroom, ensuring our students learn from educators who are actively engaged in their fields and inspired by the creative process. We are proud to support and celebrate Lourdes’s work and excited to see how this transformative experience continues to shape dance education on our campus.