Michelle Sipes is a choreographer-dancer, educator, and arts administrator located in Nashville, TN.
Updated March 2022

Biography

Michelle Sipes is a choreographer-dancer, educator, and arts administrator/advocate with interests in cross-disciplinary collaborations, intimate storytelling, and curating conversational spaces. Michelle has an MFA in Dance from the Ohio State University and a BFA in Dance from Belhaven University.

Michelle performed and toured with Inlet Dance Theatre (Cleveland, OH) as a Company Member for five seasons. During her time with Inlet, she taught and choreographed for Inlet’s many education programs including the trainee and apprentice program, annual summer dance intensive, residency programs, and for masterclasses, festivals, and conferences across the country. Additionally, she served as the company’s Administrative Artist Liaison for the Cleveland Foundation’s Creative Fusion granting program.

Along her artistic practice, Michelle has worked as a fundraising professional both as the seeker and the funder most recently working as a Program Director for the Tennessee Arts Commission helping to fund and manage arts education initiatives across the state. Before her work at TAC, she worked as a Development Administrative Associate for the Wexner Center for the Arts helping to successfully write and manage grants and sponsorships from national public and private funders including the NEA, NEFA, Arts Midwest, among other local and regional funders. Additionally, she served as an artist-in-residence at the Wex for two of their Learning and Public Practice programs: Pages: An Arts, Literacy, and Writing Program and WorldView: Cultural Intersections with Contemporary Art; published works in Risk is a Relative Term: a collaborative anthology between the Performing Arts department at the Wexner Center for the Arts and Ohio State University; served on several adjudication panels for the University’s Arts Scholars program; and taught a variety of movement practice and arts management courses for OSU’s Department of Dance.

Currently, Michelle lives in Nashville, TN and is a freelance choreographer, educator, and arts consultant. 




Firmly believing that the arts are the cornerstone for transformative human experience, Michelle has cultivated a practice of amalgamation for her interests and skills to aid in advancing the field both artistically and administratively. Blending her arts management experience and artistic practice, Michelle is committed to helping artists and organizations in securing resources, advancing their craft and the field, and to furthering the ever-evolving creative economy.

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