Biography
Dance Doyle is an Oakland-based artist. Raised there during the ’80s and ’90s. Dance’s background was filled with years of ceramic sculpture and hand-building. When Dance was attending San Francisco State University in 2005, they took a textiles class and learned how to dress a loom. After college, Dance became self-taught at woven tapestry and envisioned it as a better way to record what’s happening around them in a painterly way with hand-dyed and some bought natural fibers. Dance’s process is to draw a tiny sketch, pin it to the castle of their loom, and “eye it” the whole way. From 2018 to 2020, Dance finished three artist-in-resident programs at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. Dance has served as vice-president of Tapestry Weavers West, is a member of the American Tapestry Alliance, and the Textile Arts Council at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, CA. Their work has been shown at the Legion of Honor Museum, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.
Dance has been published in Fibre Forum Magazine, Untitled Magazine's Innovate issue, and was a Chenven Foundation Grant recipient. Then in 2022, Dance was nominated for the Outstanding Student Award, granted by the Surface Design Association, and was awarded the 2022 All-College Honors Scholarship from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. That year, Dance was awarded both the Jack K. & Gertrude Murphy and the Edwin Anthony & Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan Award in 2022, in addition to being the recipient of the Barclay Simpson Award in 2023.
During the summer of 2023, Dance finished two residencies, including being an Open Studio Resident at Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, Maine, and then a Meantime Artist in Residence at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. In August of 2024, Dance completed a year-long Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, for fall 2025 and winter 2025/2026. Dance will be a Fellow at both Chulitna Lodge in Port Alsworth, Alaska, and MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Dance is currently teaching Extension courses at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA.