Image courtesy of Canaan Mattson

Leslie Parker is a dance artist, director, improviser, and performer born in the traditional homeland of Indigenous people, mostly the Dakhóta and Ojibwe people, also known as the Twin Cities, Minnesota.

Parker's earlier beginnings of informal training began with community activists who founded the Lou Wiley High Steppers (Rhythm & Drill team); and founders of the Rainbow Children's Theatre Company in St. Paul, Minnesota. Growing up in the St. Paul Rondo community rooted her in socially engaged art and motivated her research of dance forms of the Sene-Gambian region, Guinea, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire. Her upbringing in the Rondo community led to cultivating multiple home art bases in Brooklyn, NY (traditional homeland of the Lenape people) and St. Paul, MN. Parker holds a BFA from Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance, a MFA in Dance from Hollins University in partnership with Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and the Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany. She studied Senegalese dance forms at the Centre Culturel Blaise Senghor de Dakar in Senegal, West Africa.

As a dance creative, she highlights unique individual contributions, digs into collective memory to engage with the world more imaginatively and embodies an aesthetic that encompasses an organic physical/movement influenced by the Black and African Diaspora including: Traditional W. African, Black/African American vernacular/social dance, Improvisation, and Contemporary/Modern technique derived from and exchanged across multiple continents. She has received a 2017 Bessie award for Outstanding performer as part of Skeleton Architecture, a  2022 McKnight Fellowship for Choreographers, and is a Jerome Artist Fellow 2019 - 2021.​

Parker initiated Leslie Parker Dance Project, LLC as a means to experience dance art more intuitively. As an educator, she led and facilitated classes as a guest assistant professor at Carleton College, a lecturer at University of Minnesota and as a guest artist instructor at various institutions in the US. Her most recent multi-year work, Call to Remember, is rooted, researched, and performed through residencies, stage performances and workshops across the US, including, Minneapolis, MN, at Walker Art Center, Pillsbury House Theatre, and Pangea World Theatre, San Francisco, CA, at CounterPulse, New York, New York at Danspace Project, Tallahassee, FL, at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Philadelphia, PA, at BOOM.  Call to Remember and latest iteration, Divination Tools: imagine home is funded by National Dance Project/nefa, National Performance Network Creation Fund, National Performance Development Fund and National Performance Network Community Engagement Fund, Minnesota Regional Arts Council and Minnesota State Arts Board.