Doma Dance Theater

Doma, the Carpatho-Rusyn word for “at home,” cultivates a sense of belonging, curiosity, and exuberant self-expression for its performers and audiences. Doma’s cross-cultural approach creates powerful contemporary dance works that examine shared experiences of diaspora and displacement. 

Doma is led by Artistic Director and cultural activist Alexandra Bodnarchuk, the first Carpatho-Rusyn American choreographer to make contemporary work with a folk lens. 

Informed by Bodnarchuk’s pan-Slavic cultural upbringing in Pittsburgh, PA, Doma’s work incorporates cultural influences, circular spatial patterning, and intimate partnering. These works blaze a trail for Slavic representation in contemporary dance, demonstrating the enduring necessity of unearthing the cultural legacies that each of us carry.

Founded in 2024, Doma represents an evolution of Alexandra Bodnarchuk Dance Projects (ABDP), founded in 2017. Building upon Bodnarchuk’s past focus on body identity and societal expectations of womanhood, Doma continues to unfold the embodied experience in an ongoing search for the elusive feeling of home.

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Alexandra Bodnarchuk is a Carpatho-Rusyn American choreographer and cultural activist based in Minneapolis, MN. As the Artistic Director and Choreographer for Doma Dance Theater, Bodnarchuk creates original works for the stage and screen that draw together her ethnic heritage with contemporary movement practices. Centering the body as a tangible site of culture, Bodnarchuk explores questions of self-expression, community, dispossession, and cross-cultural identity through works that range from solo pieces to ensemble works.

Bodnarchuk is a 2021 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow and a 2022 & 2020 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow Finalist (Jerome Foundation). In May 2024 she will present the dance film Mamko Moja L’uba, named for a folk song recently popularized by Carpatho-Rusyn singer Maria Mačoskova and featuring costumes inspired by traditional clothing from the Zemplín region in Eastern Slovakia. Her second evening-length work, Rock, Paper, Scissors, premiered at The Southern Theater in March 2023. She is currently working on a commission for The Museum of Russian Art, responding to Serbian sculptor Zoran Mojsilov’s surrealist exhibition, The Dry Neck of the Pig.