SHAINA CANTINO is a choreographer, teacher and performer.

Cantino is interested in how our bodies are vehicles for re-conceiving, through sensory perception and imagination, our dynamic relationship with our environments and ourselves. Cantino synthesizes somatic and compositional sensibilities in her choreography, teaching and performance. She combines her dance training with theater studies, pursuing how each is integral to the other for vulnerable, communicative performance. Cantino creates dance-theater as a means to examine specificity and honor the indescribable.

SHAINA CANTINO holds an MFA in dance from Smith College, works as a Licensed Massage Therapist/Craniosacral Therapist, and is a graduate of the National Theatre Institute and Kenyon College (BA, Distinction in Dance). Her creative and teaching work is grounded in over twenty years of contemporary dance training as well in improvisation for performance, contact improvisation (CI), environmental studies, and theater. Cantino is a recent recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund for developing a duet, premiered at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, MA, July 2019. She has been commissioned to present group choreographies by Smith, Bowdoin and Keene State Colleges. Cantino has taught semester courses in contemporary technique (I-V), composition and CI at Bowdoin College, Colby College, Wesleyan University, Keene State College, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College, as well as intensive CI workshops in Arezzo and Cagliari, Italy and Montreal, Canada. Cantino’s choreography was selected for the American College Dance Festival Association’s gala concert in 2014 and presented at the Kennedy Center in 2010. Her performance is noted for its understated humor and off-balance physicality. Cantino has collaborated with and performed in works by Aretha Aoki, Angie Hauser, Paul Matteson, Chris Aiken, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Kate Seethaler, Joy Davis, and Sara Coffin. She has intensively trained with Miguel Gutierrez (2019), Kirstie Simpson (2018), Sara Shelton Mann and Abby Crain (2018, 2016), Susan Rethorst (2016), Bebe Miller Company (2015), St. Petersburg State Theater Academy (2009), Kathleen Hermesdorf/Sara Shelton Mann/Keith Hennessy (2009), American Conservatory Theater (2008), and Bates Dance Festival (2007).