Extended Professional Dancers

Black Box Dance Theatre’s Extended Professional Dancers are a group of highly talented triangle-based dancers who work to support and elevate the art-making of Black Box Dance Theatre. This group serves as an extension of Black Box Dance Theatre as they deepen BBDT’s ties to the dance community and add to the repertoire that the company can access. This group provides a playground for new touring work, performs, and trains with the company. The Extended Professional Dancers function as an advisory committee, resource pool, and support system rooted in the local dance community as BBDT spreads its mission across the state of North Carolina.

BBDTs Extended Professional Dancers

Mindy Demchak

Mindy has been dancing since the age of 3. She danced as much as she could all the way through college at Appalachian State University, where she graduated with a minor in dance and a major in Elementary Education. Once in the “real world,” she spent 16+ years building her teaching career and eventually becoming the principal of the elementary school in which she first was a teacher! She returned to the studio as a student at Arts Together and very quickly her career path took a different turn. While attending the American Dance Festival during the summer of 2013, Mindy made a significant life and career change to chase her dream to teach dance to young people~~especially students with disabilities and to children whose parents cannot afford classes. Mindy has a passion for teaching, a desire to enrich the lives of under-served and underprivileged children and to bring movement into the community as a means of expression, passion, and fun! Being a dancer all her life, she knows the benefit creative movement and dance has on overall development, self esteem, brain development and human connection. Mindy is currently dancing as much as she can and teaches the young and young at heart around the Triangle. She is a proud member of the Rainbow Dance Company and rejoices in the work she gets to do with Black Box Dance Theatre.

Sara Peterson

Sara Peterson is originally from Santa Barbara, CA, where she trained in jazz, contemporary, hip-hop, ballet, and modern. She has been a member of the dance company at Virginia Tech and Finesse Contemporary Dance Company. Sara holds a bachelors and masters degree from Virginia Tech and UC San Diego in Bioengineering and is currently completing her PHD in Bioinformatics and UNC Chapel Hill.

Jill Guyton Nee

Jill Guyton Nee is a North Carolina based dance educator and artist who is driven through the desire to move and be moved. As a choreographer, she presented in Thailand and throughout the United States. As a performer, she has worked with several distinguished choreographers including Mark Dendy, David Dorfman, Bebe Miller, Susan Hadley, Gaspard Louis, Shane O’Hara, Erin Carlisle Norton, and Carol Finley. She graduated from Meredith College with a BA in dance and BS in business management. After graduating, she joined the full-time staff at American Dance Festival and served on the Board of Directors for Code f.a.d. Company before attending The Ohio State University Department of Dance for her MFA. As a teaching artist, Jill served as the Head of Dance and an Associate Professor for the University of Memphis Department of Theatre & Dance for ten years, taught at several college dance festivals, and choreographed in the private studio sector for more than two decades. She is currently an adjunct professor for UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Dramatic Art.

Trinity Wheeless

Trinity has grown up lived in NC her whole life, where she’s been practicing and studying a wide variety of different styles and techniques for nearly nineteen years. She started her professional career in 2023, dancing for Carolina Dance Theater and then also Black Box Dance Theatre for a season.

Julia Gerrer

Jules Gerrer is a professional dancer originally based from Asheville, North Carolina. She grew up training with Kevin Overbey at Southside Dance Studio studying primarily ballet. She attended Western Carolina University where she received her bachelors in English and a minor in dance.

Jules has professionally danced for the WCU Dance Team, Storytellers Dance Company, Hendersonville Ballet, Asheville Ballet, Triangle Fusion

Dance Company, Black Box Dance Theater, and now Durham Ballet Theatre.