Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, one of the nation’s leading contemporary dance ensembles and a fixture of New Jersey’s arts scene since 1988, has announced its 2026-27 season, mapping out a touring calendar that runs from late August through June 2027 across the Northeast and Midwest. The company, headquartered at 2460 Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee, continues carrying forward the distinct choreographic voice of its founder, the late Taiwanese American choreographer Nai-Ni Chen, under the current artistic leadership of Artistic Director Greta Campo and Executive Director Andy Chiang.

A Choreographic Language Built Over 90 Works

Nai-Ni Chen founded the company in 1988 alongside her husband, Andy Chiang, after studying at NYU under Doris Rudko, Ellen Tittler, Bertram Ross, and Mary Anthony, the last of whom personally encouraged Chen to start her own company. Over the following 33 years, Chen created more than 90 original works, building a repertoire that ranged from pieces rooted in dances thousands of years old to highly abstract modern creations, often drawing on the poetic motion of Chinese calligraphy, folk ritual, and her own experience as an immigrant navigating a new country. Her later work grew more directly political, speaking openly against division and injustice in American life through movement rather than narration.

That hybrid choreographic language, blending ribbon and fan dancing, acrobatics, and ceremonial dragon and lion dance traditions with contemporary Western modern dance technique, remains the company’s defining artistic signature. Chen died suddenly in December 2021, and the company’s board and Chiang moved quickly to protect that legacy, elevating longtime associate artistic director Greta Campo, who had worked and performed alongside Chen since 2012, into the role of interim artistic director before she was later confirmed in the position permanently.

Where the Company Is Headed This Season

The 2026-27 season opens August 28th with a performance at the Lake Superior State University Performing Arts Center in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, followed closely by a mainstage showcase at the Midwest Arts Expo inside Milwaukee’s Baird Center, the company’s second consecutive year appearing at that event. From there, the tour continues through a genuinely wide geographic footprint before circling back to New York and New Jersey for its flagship winter programming.

The company’s January return to the AAPI Dance Festival, held as part of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference, gives Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company a prominent platform in front of the national presenters and programmers who help determine which touring companies reach stages across the country the following season, making the January stretch of the tour a genuinely important one for the company’s continued national visibility beyond its home base in New Jersey.

A Lunar New Year Tradition Anchored at NJPAC

The company’s Lunar New Year Tour has become one of its signature annual traditions, and its most prominent New Jersey performances continue to take place at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, where the company has staged its largest annual productions for years. The 2026 Lunar New Year programming, tied to the Year of the Horse, has already included community focused performances in Brooklyn and a gala celebration in Manhattan, and the company’s 2027 tour is expected to bring that same blend of large scale mainstage programming and free, family oriented community events back across both states.

Roots That Run Deeper Than the Stage

Beyond its touring performances, Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company has built a lasting educational presence across New Jersey through long running residencies, including a program at New Jersey City University’s A. Harry Moore Laboratory School, which serves urban children with multiple disabilities, and at School #26 in Elizabeth. That educational commitment has become as central to the company’s identity as its mainstage touring work, reflecting a mission the organization has described as using dance to foster creativity and cross cultural understanding rather than treating community engagement as separate from its artistic mission.

For a company approaching four decades in existence, continuing to tour nationally while sustaining its New Jersey based educational programs represents a genuine balancing act, one the current leadership has clearly built its 2026-27 season around honoring. Nai-Ni Chen’s own vision, that the immigrant experience of crossing cultures and adapting to a new home offers endless creative inspiration, continues to shape both where the company performs and who it chooses to teach, nearly five years after her death and more than three decades after she first founded the company out of a shared conviction with her husband that this particular fusion of movement traditions deserved a permanent home.