Dancing in the Streets with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance

Cleo Parker Robinson Dance

CLEO PARKER ROBINSON is founder and artistic director of the 56-year-old Denver-based artistic institution, CLEO PARKER ROBINSON DANCE (CPRD), leading a professional Ensemble (CPRDE), Cleo II (her second company); two training-track Youth/Junior Youth Ensembles; an Academy of Dance offering a BA in Dance with Metropolitan State University in Denver; an International Summer Dance Institute (ISDI); a newly expanded creative campus totaling eight studios and two 240-seat theatres, and numerous community outreach programs nationally and internationally. The new and already award-winning Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Center for the Healing Arts launched January 17, 2026.

A master teacher/choreographer and cultural ambassador, Cleo Parker Robinson and CPRDE have performed nationwide and internationally in 40 countries around the globe. Ms. Parker Robinson’s lifetime of work in dance, evidence-based somatic movement therapy, education, and community outreach includes nearly 30 choreographed works.

CPRD holds the greatest number of works and their performance rights by American Dance Master Donald McKayle. Throughout the 56 years of Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, she has collaborated with Mr. McKayle, Professor Maya Angelou (Lush Life, 1983), mentor and Cultural Anthropologist Katherine Dunham (who bequeathed her own role in Barrelhouse Blues to Ms. Parker Robinson), Talley Beatty, Eleo Pomare, danced with Eartha Kitt, and was featured in a film Run Sister Run (1974/84, about activist Angela Davis) by photographer/director Gordon Parks. In 2012 with dancer and choreographer Julie Belafonte, Ms. Parker Robinson premiered the U.S. performance of Southland, a Civil Rights performance on lynching by Ms. Dunham banned by the U.S. government after its 1952 World Premiere in Santiago, Chile.

In 2021, the Vail Valley Foundation commissioned Standing On The Shoulders, choreographed by Ms. Parker Robinson with a composition by orchestral director Omar Thomas. Its World Premiere was on at the Gerald Ford Amphitheatre during the Vail Dance Festival that year.

She recently collaborated with fellow Denver native and renowned Grammy-Award winning jazz artist Dianne Reeves on Freedom Dance. Each holiday season since 1991, CPRD’s Denver-developed Granny Dances To A Holiday Drum has delighted audiences near and far with live and virtual performances featuring a dozen global seasonal holiday traditions.

As a national leader in American Modern Dance specializing in the global African cultural diaspora and global cultural anthropology through dance, Ms. Parker Robinson holds four honorary Ph.Ds from state institutions: Colorado College, the University of Denver (her alma mater), Regis University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder where she began their Modern Dance program.

She has received numerous national awards, including a 2005 Kennedy Center Medal of Honor, the 2021 National Medal of the Arts as co-founder of the International Association of Blacks in Dance, the 2017 Dance/USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2026 Award of Merit by the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. As a national arts leader, Ms. Parker Robinson served on President Clinton’s National Council of the Arts/NEA panels on Dance, Expansion Arts, Arts America, Inter-Arts panels for the USIS, and for the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts.

To date, six documentaries feature chronicle the work of Cleo Parker Robinson Dance with two more in development as of 2026.

Cleo Parker Robinson remains dedicated to celebrating the human experience and potential through the Arts and Education. Her life-long vision of “Inspiring Movement” with “One Spirit, Many Voices” remains strong and steadfast, expanding to welcome, embrace, and sustain all people. Each performance she attends invokes a participatory gesture and blessing of “Peace/Love/Respect…For EVERYBODY!”