Camryn Stafford is a member of the class of 2023 from Dallas, TX, concentrating in African American Studies with certificates in Dance and Entrepreneurship. Camryn is very proud to be in the African American Studies department and is grateful to have taken incredibly enriching courses, worked closely with renowned professors, and received a comprehensive, rigorous, and engaging education.
Camryn has a potent dance background, dancing since the age of 3 and having the opportunity to train at various schools, programs, and at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. She is the founder and executive director of Turning Tables Inc., a nonprofit organization that strives to increase diversity in dance and challenge society’s perspective on discriminatory practices in dance. Through Turning Tables, Camryn has provided students and professional dancers with a platform to choreograph on select topics of diversity and inclusion, allowed student volunteers to give back to the Dallas community by teaching dance classes to underrepresented youth, and given striving dancers opportunities to continue their training through summer programming. Camryn has choreographed multiple evening-length pieces, for Turning Tables to inform the audience about issues of underrepresentation, implicit bias, and unfair standards in the dance world.
On campus, she is a dancer with diSiac Dance Company, Princeton University Ballet, and Black Arts Company. Within the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton, Camryn has worked on dance projects with Netta Yerushalmy, Christopher Ralph, Peter Chu, Francesca Harper, Urban Bush Women, and EVIDENCE by Ronald K. Brown. She is Lewis Center Student Advisor and has been granted funding through The Peter B. Lewis Fund, The Mellor Fund, and The Mallach Fund.
Camryn is deeply interested in diversifying and increasing equitable practices in the dance and art fields. She is also interested in how the black identity informs dance practice and how dance can be used as an embodied communicative practice. A striving professional dancer and arts administrator, Camryn hopes to continue to use her platform to advocate for social change and reform through her initiatives.