Photo by Shasti O'leary

Melanie Aceto is a modern dancer and choreographer whose work has been performed in Toronto, New York (Cool NY and D.U.M.B.O Dance Festivals, American Dance Guild, Uptown Performance Series, Underexposed Festival and Hatch), Washington D.C., New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, in Ohio as part of the Heidelberg New Music Festival and at Wittenberg University, in Rochester, NY as part of the ImageMovementSound Festival, among others. Her creative interests are in contemporary choreography and improvisation. She was a 2007 Research Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow International Dance Festival investigating choreographic components of master works.

Melanie has worked extensively with contemporary composer Mark Olivieri on projects including the ImageMovementSound festival, the Heidelberg New Music Festival and the Vision of Sound concert of live music and dance. Recent work includes Knit, a duet to traditional Chinese Folk songs by composer Ping Jin and Contextual Conduct, an exploration of how music affects the audience's perception of meaning. Each night the duet is performed twice to two different musical selections chosen by the audience, offering two different contexts in which the piece can be seen.

Funded by at UB2020 grant, her newest work is a duet for pianist and solo dancer to a score by Evan Johnson. This duet explores the movements of the pianist as dancer and dancer as musician.

Melanie earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and has worked with New York based contemporary choreographers including Barry Blumenfeld, Ellis Wood, Monica Bill Barnes , Hilary Easton and Guta Hedewig. She is currently co-directing The Vision of Sound; a series of collaborative concerts with the Society for New Music, featuring original contemporary music and choreography. Melanie teaches modern technique, choreography, mind and body integration and contemporary partnering at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York.