Biography
Dance Doyle is an Oakland-based artist. Born and bred there during the ’80s and ’90s, she witnessed a gritty beauty that emerged from the city after the crack epidemic had torn through it. It was the graffiti, culture, camp fashion, urban decay, and the music that flowed through the streets connecting her struggling community which has provided endless memories for her to pull on. All of Dance’s work has been informed by that beautiful, heavy environment.
Dance’s background was 13 years of ceramic sculpture and hand-building. Then, when she was attending San Francisco State University as a ceramics major, she took a textiles course led by Candace Crockett, the Chair of the Art Department and head of the Textiles Department. During the semester, the class learned a little bit of tapestry weaving amongst many other things. After envisioning tapestry as a way to paint with dyed fiber, Dance flipped creatively and she switched her major to Textiles. She felt reborn. With weaving structures and tapestry, she was then able to have full control over the images in her work. Her tapestries look similar to her drawings, pulling all designs from her crowded head. She sees the images in her warp and has never used any cartoons as an aid. She draws a tiny picture, pins it to the castle of her loom, and figures the rest out.
Through the years, she has been self-taught by trial, error, and taking risks, developing her own technique and edgy style. Her primary focus has been telling contemporary narratives, based not only on her own stories but ones told to her, that reflect, piece by piece, examples of our human condition in these overpopulated urban environments.
Dance is serving as vice-president of Tapestry Weavers West, is a member of the American Tapestry Alliance, and the Textile Arts Council at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been displayed at the Legion of Honor Museum, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. In addition, she's been published in Textile Fibre Forum Magazine, an Australian publication, and in the American Tapestry Alliance's CODA Magazine, spring of 2020. Dance was also published in Fiber Art Now Magazine twice, in the Fall and Winter publications of 2020.
In 2019, Dance finished a 9 month Artist In Residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY. She just finished an Artist in Residency at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan for 12 months (Cycle 34) ending in January 2021. In the fall of 2020, Dance did a double residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE for 2 months while she was doing her AIR at the MAD museum in NYC remotely.
In the fall of 2021, Dance will be attending California College of the Arts, in San Francisco, CA as an MFA candidate, class of 2023.
EDUCATIONMFA Candidate, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Class of 2023
Artist In Resident (CURRICULUM-BASED residency) Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY. 2019. 9 months.
Tapestry Intensive with Mary Zicafoose, Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina. 2015. 2 weeks.
BFA, Textiles, San Francisco State University, SF, CA. 2010. 4 years.
Associates Degree, Liberal Arts, City College of San Francisco, SF, CA. 2 years.
