Directors
Amberly M. Simpson
Founder and Artistic Director
Amberly M. Simpson is a dancer, educator, and choreographer local to Louisville, KY. Before moving to Louisville, Amberly attended Purdue University where she received a minor in Dance, as well as Bachelors degrees in Psychological Sciences and Creative Writing. During this time, she trained and performed with the Purdue Contemporary Dance Company (2011-2015) where she traveled and performed in multiple American College Dance Association Festivals (2013-2015), the American Dance Festival (2013), two TED Talks (2013, 2015), and the Prague Quadrennial (2015), as well as co-directing a production for Obsessive-Compulsive Dance (2014). She later attended Bellarmine University (2015-2017) where she received her Master of the Arts in Teaching, and is now the full-time Dance teacher at Noe Middle School. Through her work as an educator, Amberly was able to present her work on empowering youth through nontraditional partnering forms at the National Dance Education Organization’s National Conference (2019), as well as receive a full Professional Development Scholarship to attend the conference.
In 2019, Amberly founded Ambo Dance Theatre, a contemporary/modern dance company. Through Ambo Dance Theatre, Amberly has presented work with Brighton Dance Festival (2019), Lighthouse Dance Festival (2019), the Kentucky Refugee Ministries (2019, 2020), the Louisville Dance Series (2019, 2020), the Louisville Arts Network (2020), the Going Dutch Festival (2020), and Princeton Research Day (2019) where her collaboration with David Vartanyan received the Impact Award. She was also honored as one of the Hadley Creatives (2019-2020, Generation III) through the Community Foundation of Louisville.
Additional performance and choreography credits include Blackbird Dance Theatre (2015-2016), Kentucky Conservatory Theatre (2016 - awarded Commonwealth Ambassador for Excellence in the Performing Arts), Voices HEaRD (2017, 2018), the 6th No Borders Project (2018), Kasari Dance (2018, 2019), Fund for the Arts Opening Night at Churchill Downs (2017-2019), Suspend Productions (2016-2019), and the Allegro Dance Project (2016-present).