Founder/choreographer/performer

JASON HERBERT is a New York City choreographer and performer, born and raised in Harlem and based in Long Island City, Queens. His formal training began at the Harlem School of the Arts and the Martha Graham School, and includes scholarships to The Alvin Ailey School, Deeply Rooted, Springboard Dance Montréal, and The Boston Conservatory. He holds an Associate Degree in New Media Technology from LaGuardia Community College with Honors and a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies: Liberal Arts with Honors from City College.

His performance career includes companies such as PHILADANCO!, Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, and Kymera Dance. He has performed works by choreographers including Martha Graham, Abdel R. Salaam, George Faison, Jose Navas, Nathan Trice, Kevin Iega Jeff, Danielle Russo, Carolyn Paine, Idan Sharabi, Victor Quijada, Ami Shulman, Talley Beatty, Rennie Harris, Dwight Roden, Danny Ezralow, Matthew Rushing, Hope Boykin, and Nai-Ni Chen. His film, television, and commercial credits include NBC UPfronts, Silly Walks for Hunger, the feature films Bolden and Freedom, Conan O’Brien Live, and Saturday Night Live. Jason is also an Equity Broadway artist whose credits include the Tony Award–winning musical FELA!, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, and the Off-Broadway musical Invisible Thread, directed by Diane Paulus with choreography by Sergio Trujillo and Darrell Grand Moultrie.

As a choreographer, Herbert has created original works for the BAAD! In Bloom Dance Compilation (2026), Bridge for Dance: Uptown Rising Dance Series (2025), Fertile Ground New Works Series (2025), Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center: A Ramp to Paradise (2025), Color Pointes: 48th Dance Festival Season (2024), Souls of Our Feet: People of Color Dance Festival (2024), So Very Sly (2018), Emerging Artist Theatre’s Spark Theater Festival (2025), LIU Post Concert Dance Company’s Rhapsody Showcase (2023), Expressions Showcase (2022), and Montage Showcase (2020), as well as productions for the NYC Department of Education’s New York Black Arts Kids Theater, including The Wiz (2016), A Christmas Carol (2017), The Lion King (2018, 2020, 2022), and Aladdin (2019). He also contributed choreography to the Disney Theatrical Group’s Lion King Jr. Workshop/Kids/Pilot (2012).

His early years of training and performance were especially formative, with rehearsals functioning as immersive explorations of African cosmology, social anthropology, and their relationship to the African American experience. Working across multiple avenues of dance, movement styles, and national and international touring reinforced his belief that the body operates as a living museum of cultural knowledge. This philosophy informs his commitment to translating embodied history into contemporary movement vocabularies. Through works such as Soul Ties, On The Rocks, Kairos Divide, and The Miles Davis African Suite, Jason’s artistic practice exists at the intersection of embodiment, cultural memory, and interdisciplinary innovation.

Jason approaches choreography not as invention, but as excavation—an ongoing process of revealing the encoded histories held within the body and the individual. Grounded in a bio-choreographic philosophy, his work explores how ancestry, experience, and collective memory are transmitted through physical form and reactivated through movement. Through this lens, his choreography exists in a continual state of becoming—shaped by lived experience while remaining open to the unknown possibilities of what movement can preserve, reveal, and transform. At the core of Herbert’s artistic vision is the belief that choreography is a system of transmission, where each work becomes a living exchange and dancers serve as interpreters and carriers of inherited and evolving narratives. His process is rooted in collaboration: the intertwining of physical movement, energy, lived experience, sensation, and deeply rooted sociological and genetic markers that emerge in opportune moments. This ongoing discovery fuels his daily practice, creative process, and artistic vision with Jason Herbert Dance.