Hannah Dennison Collection

Hannah Dennison was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, December 9, 1947 to James T. Dennison and Nancy Williams (Dennison). She has two older sisters, Sally and Becky and a younger brother, Andy. Her mother was a Christian Scientist and subsequently raised the children as such while her father remained an agnostic. Hannah left the formal religion in her early teens but retains some of its ideas today.

As a child Hannah was involved in sports, the outdoors and animals. She attended the Cambridge School of Weston from 1960 to 1966, with the exception in 1964 when she attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., due to her father's job change. Hannah briefly attended college at the University of Denver after which she lived on communes in California and Colorado. She moved to Boston in 1969 and lived in the macrobiotic community in Brookline.

She married Warren Durbin in September 1970 and gave birth to her son Zackary in January 1971. The family moved to South Woodstock, Vermont the following summer where they ran a Natural Food store until they moved to Burlington the fall of 1972. As soon as her son was able to attend day care, Hannah began working various odd jobs such as grounds keeper for Dorothy Westervelt and assistant administrator of Shelburne Farm Resources. She divorced her husband in 1975.

During the year 1977 Hannah began to dance. She took her first dance class with Monta Jones at UVM and received more training at the Main Street Dance Theatre with Nancy Watkin and Sara McMahon. By 1979 she was a teacher herself. After she left Main Street Dance Theatre she began devoting her energies to alternative studies of the moving body and the creation of dance/theatre pieces for stage and site specific pieces for a variety of settings, both inside and outdoors.

In 1991, she created the non-profit Cradle to Grave Arts, an arts and education organization focused on dance. Dennison continues to craft projects for this community-based company which incorporates trained dancers and relative novices. Dennison also worked with the group Over Clouds Rot, a collection of dance artists that collaborated on improvisational and site specific pieces in the late 1990s.

Hannah has suggested that her materials may be useful to those who are collecting information about the industrial revolution and the mills in Winooski in particular, oral histories of former mill workers, how art can play a role in understanding history, teaching movement art in schools, researching the creative process and how work develops, art grant applications, and community art projects. For a fuller biography and her thoughts on the value of the collection, see the 1998 biography in the collection.