Marlita Hill started dancing at age 15 with the Hush Company, a Los Angeles based dance ministry under the directino of Stacy and LaQuin Meadows, where she served for eight years as  a dancer, choreographer and eventually Assistant Director.  Ms. Hill went on to earn her BFA degree in Dance Performance with K-12 Certification from Towson University in Towson, MD. She recently published the second edition of her book, “Dancers! Assume the Position,” which examines the WHAT, the WHY, and the IMPACT of the dancer’s ministry. In 2009, Hill co-founded the dance department at the Ramon C. Cortines School for the Visual and Performing Arts, in downtown Los Angeles, where she still teaches. Cortines High School is a Title-1 school, serving a largely Hispanic population. Ms. Hill is the creator and curator of The Choreography Clinic, a blog that houses dialogue among dancemakers about making dance. She has been teaching dance technique and choreography in K-12, college, liturgical and community settings throughout the country for over ten years. Through working with community organizations including HelpDesk/LA, Dance Resource Center, Career Transitions for Dancers, and serving on the steering committee for the Horton Awards, Hill is enthusiastically committed to contributing to connecting and fortifying the Los Angeles dance community. Her choreography has been presented at venues including Towson University, Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage (in collaboration with VT Dance), Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (MD), and Carpenter Center Performing Arts.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

Despise not the days of my small beginnings…I am confident that I will get to where I am trying to go and it will still be there when I arrive.

The things that I am endeavoring to do are in fact all parts of a single organism and I am continuing to learn how to see them that way.  I always knew who I wanted to interact with, contribute to, and impact through my art and my teaching but I saw them as very different people, on opposite sides of the spectrum. This created a lot of anxiety because I was trying to work all the time to cater to both of them separately;  I really got nothing done in relation to either of them. Over the past 13 months, [this project] has helped me see the circularity and cohesion of these facets. With new understanding I was able to clarify rather succinctly who I was focusing on and what I had to contribute to them. That helped me to hone my communication and plan a very clear pathway forward.