Nina Flagg

Nina Flagg (she/her) is a LA native, dance artist, choreographer, and educator. Her dance training began with her mother, dancer and choreographer Karen McDonald, and continued with other notable dance luminaries such as Yuri Grigoriev, Stefan Wenta, Ron Brown, Claude Thompson, Paul and Arlene Kennedy, and Nzingha Camara. Her movement foundations began with gymnastics, classical ballet, and modern dance followed by studies in West African dance, tap, jazz, and hip-hop and street dance forms.

Flagg would go on to attend Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and excelled under the tutelage of Don Hewitt, Rudy Perez, KaRon Brown-Lehman, Mary Bender, Don Bondi, and Hae-Kyung Lee. She continued her academic education at UCLA, obtaining a BA in Sociology with a Specialization in Communications.

Over the past two decades, her work has evolved as an embodied intersection of multiple movement traditions, explored through the lens of hip-hop consciousness, a methodology that began during her time as a principal dancer with Rennie Harris Puremovement. The plurality of her practice has lent itself to a diverse career in concert dance, commercial dance, and academia. Flagg has been on faculty at CalArts, UCLA, and Connecticut College, and has served as guest faculty for Bennington College and LMU. She has worked with such artists as Prince, Tina Turner, Beyoncé, Bette Midler, Chris Brown, Solange, Will Smith, and J Balvin. Her choreography has been featured on The Grammy’s, TV Land Awards, ABC, ESPN, NBC/Peacock, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and at Jacob’s Pillow.

In 2023, Flagg joined the faculty of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, teaching courses in Advanced Composition, Rep & Performance, Hip-Hop, Dancehall, and House Technique. As a BIPOC artist and educator, she remains passionate about creating curricular strategies for equitable, multi-generational engagement in dance education and live performance.