Shakia Barron

Shakia “The Key” Barron is an accomplished choreographer, performer, and educator specializing in African Diasporic dance forms with a focus on hip-hop, house, and funk styles. She currently holds the position of Class of 1929 Virginia Apgar Assistant Professor of Dance at Mount Holyoke College and serves as the Artistic Director of Kia the Key & Company and Co-Artistic Director of Ladies of Hip-Hop Collective. Barron is known for her passionate teaching and dedication to celebrating the roots and history of these dance forms, helping to make them more accessible within academic spaces. She values and aims to create possibilities for embodied connection–using movement and music to generate kinesthetic empathy for both members and guests of the cultural forms she practices and teaches.

Barron graduated with her MFA in Choreography at Wilson College, holds a Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts from Westfield State University, an Associate’s degree in Dance and Psychology from Dean College, and received the National Dance Institute’s Teaching Artist Certificate in 2009. She is an alum of Bates Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, and Pioneer Valley’s Performing Arts Charter School.

Her performance and choreography experience is extensive. She has choreographed and directed more than 50 hip-hop, modern, African and lyrical works that have been performed at colleges, universities, and dance institutions, including Bates Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. She has performed for numerous hip-hop events including opening for concerts by Fat Joe, Jadakiss, 112, Charlie Baltimore, and Kima from “Total” and Omarion. In 2005, she choreographed hip-hop works for the Celtics/NBA half-time show. Barron has toured nationally and internationally, dancing with Face Da Phlave Entertainment, Illstyle and Peace Productions, and as a guest artist with Rennie Harris PureMovement. 

As a dance educator, she spent many years teaching at the Bates Dance Festival and taught community classes at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. She is a DEL (Dance Education Laboratory) faculty member who has facilitated multiple professional development workshops around the integration of hip-hop dance and history in the curriculum. She was the 2019 Arthur Levitt Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence at Williams College. She is a 2023 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award from Bates Dance Festival, and a 2024 Cowles Artist in Residence at University of Minnesota. Barron showcased her evening-length work, The Gathering, in the summer of 2025, made possible by a Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, and looks forward to touring this work.