Our Mission

For more than a decade, Dance Curriculum Designs LLC has been creating fine quality dance resources that universities and schools need to build lasting dance literacy and necessary skills. DCD offers teachers and professors inspired materials that form core content, increase understanding in dance, and demonstrate why dance is vital to one’s education.

DCD believes good teachers need great resources that solidify dance’s essential principles and processes for students of all ages. That philosophy drives DCD to create the best materials possible to guarantee conceptual clarity, increase artistic skills, and ensure practical, broad-based achievement in each artistic process.  The dance education resources on this site produce well-rounded, literate, and highly educated students of dance from elementary through college.

Brenda Pugh McCutchen, Founder

Brenda Pugh McCutchen, M.F.A. Dance, is a US-based dance education consultant with national and international clients.  Through Dance Curriculum Designs LLC McCutchen directs her work to K-12 and higher education to improve dance education, increase dance literacy, expand curricula, and guide professional development.  An advocate for holistic educational dance, she takes schools from performance-driven, entertainment-oriented programs to more integrated, substantial arts education models.  Her mission is to ensure that dance earns the respect it deserves in education.

McCutchen ensures that dance is taught at the same level of integrity as music and visual arts education.  These beliefs drive her to create innovative studio-classroom materials which integrate conceptual understanding with skill development.  NDEO endorses McCutchen’s teacher resources which are now used in classrooms throughout the USA and other parts of the world.

McCutchen earned an M.F.A. in dance from the University of NC at Greensboro and studied at the Nikolais-Louis Dance Theatre Lab in NYC ever grateful for the tutelage of Alwin Nikolais and Phyllis Lamhut.  She was professor of dance at Winthrop University, Furman University, and Columbia College of SC.  Professional leadership animates her background:  a K-12 dance educator, a dance artist-in-residence, a choreographer-performer, a statewide arts education director/administrator, a pioneering dance professor, and a dance education professor.  These key roles generated the experiences and insights which inform her teaching and consulting today.  She is known to be practical and holistic, able to relate on many levels. McCutchen raises the bar on dance as art in K-16 education in varied ways: providing holistic teacher resources, tool kits, teacher workshops, curriculum development, consulting, and program review.

McCutchen’s widely-used textbook, Teaching Dance as Art in Education (Human Kinetics, 2006), is recognized as the premier foundation text for universities who prepare and certify K-12 dance specialists.  It is also used worldwide for professional development in the field of dance education for all levels of teachers.