Biography

Cylene Walker-Willis is an educator, choreographer, and artist. Walker-Willis grew up in the red dirt of Konawa, Oklahoma near the South Canadian River. Growing up in the eighties she enjoyed pop music and watching MTV but she was drawn to the rhythm and soul of blues music, listening to artists like Bill Withers and Otis Redding.


Walker-Willis has been teaching jazz, ballet, and various other styles for 20 years. She was classically trained in ballet by Rebecca Larimer, formerly of the Houston Ballet, and received her jazz training from Sandra Johnson. She has been in numerous productions including the Chicago Festival Ballet’s production of Cinderella directed by Kenneth von Heidecke, protégé of Maria Tallchief. Along with ballet, she also has training in contemporary ballet, Broadway jazz, contemporary jazz, tap, clogging, lyrical, musical theater, and stage set and makeup design. Currently her choreography includes contemporary-jazz and modern genres.

Walker-Willis also has a passion for facilitating community dance projects. In 1998 she helped build Second Man Ministries, a local liturgical dance and drama company, as a performer. She then became its director in 1999, directing and producing plays, musical dramas, and dances until 2003. For the past four years Walker-Willis was an Artistic Director for Stillwater School of Performing Arts and The Art of Dance Company along with working as ballet coordinator and instructor for Dance Star Productions. Through her company, Brave Productions, she also produced an annual community wide version of the Nutcracker as well as performing at City of Stillwater events including “Reading Flash Mob” sponsored by the public library. Most recently she performed in the 2015 Oklahoma Contemporary Dance Festival. Cylene Walker-Willis received her MFA in dance at Texas Woman’s University in 2018. She resides in Stillwater, OK with her supportive husband, David.

Teaching ​Philosophy

It is a teacher’s responsibility to create a safe learning environment where all view points are valued and failure is welcomed. I believe in order for instruction to be effective students should learn on their own as well as with instructor assistance. My goal in teaching dance is to cultivate creativity and instill an effective work ethic in my classroom in a positive and structured manner. This happens through disciplined exercise of technique in conjunction with journaling, improvisation, and phrase building to allow students to explore their own artistic process. Students will be able to demonstrate technique in a variety of written and performance tasks as well as be able to create, understand, and analyze his or her own work as they develop and explore their own artistic process. 

Master Class

Cylene Walker-Willis is a community dance practitioner from Stillwater, Oklahoma. She focuses on activities that foster trust, creativity, and community connection. Various themes of human emotion and ritual with be explored throughout the class through dialogue, games, improvisation, and phrase work. These activities and games help unlock a sense of awareness of self, individually and within the group. The class progresses from a large group warm up using icebreaker games then to individual exploration via journaling or movement meditation. The class will then break up into small group work sessions where the groups explore activities that help them work together to create movement. Finally the class will culminate with phrase work composed by the class.