Audrey Baran Lands on Her Feet After Parting With UNC Charlotte

On April 18, Audrey Baran posted a selfie on her Instagram account in which she’s extending her thumb-and-pinky in a “hang loose” gesture while standing in front of Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts on UNC Charlotte’s campus.

“And like that … she was gone,” Baran’s caption reads, paraphrasing a line of dialogue from the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects.

Baran has made many moves in her distinguished career. Her professional trajectory includes the roles of dancer, choreographer, founder and director of innovative troupe Baran Dance as well as UNC Charlotte professor and lecturer — but this is perhaps her most surprising move of all. After more than 20 years of involvement as both a student and faculty member, Baran has ended her association.

It began in 2000 when Baran first set foot on campus to earn a Bachelor of Arts in dance. She returned to UNC Charlotte in 2009 and since then has taught dance and yoga classes, choreographed student dance concerts, and set up a student internship program through Baran Dance.

The flashpoint for her separation from the institution is a new full-time faculty position the university created for the 2026-27 school year. Baran applied for the job but wasn’t granted an in-person interview.

“It was a shock,” Baran admits. “Not that I thought I was a shoo-in for the position, but I thought I had a strong chance.”

Though the dance department’s decision was a setback for Baran, the dance artist and educator is moving ahead. She’s preparing to open a new business, East Side Yoga, and is currently in rehearsals for a collaboration that conjoins her dance company’s abstract, kinetic vignettes with the immersive, enigmatic soundscapes of Charlotte rock four-piece Moa.

BDXM: Baran Dance and Moa goes up at Open Door Studios in the Eastway Crossing shopping center from June 5-7.

Doing academia’s adjunct dance

After Baran’s Filipina American family moved from New Jersey to Monroe when she was 4 years old, Baran promptly fell in love with dancing. She’s been involved in the region’s scene ever since and credits UNC Charlotte with introducing her to contemporary dance, influencing the kind of dancer and choreographer she would become.

After graduating from the university in 2003, she returned to teach dance a few semesters over the course of 14 years.

In 2012, Baran launched Baran Dance. As its founder, lead dancer and principal choreographer tells it, the company’s genesis was almost accidental. Baran was teaching contemporary dance classes at the company’s now-permanent home, Open Door Studios, when she created a piece featuring some class members for a festival in Matthews.

“One of the dancers … designed and printed a couple of T-shirts that said ‘Baran Dance’ and surprised me with them,” she remembers. “I said, ‘I guess we’re a company now.’”

Baran Dance has since expanded to include a mentorship program with college-age students.

By 2017, Baran had earned a Master of Fine Arts in Dance at Hollins University in Virginia and returned to UNC Charlotte as an adjunct dance professor. Adjunct faculty often shoulder larger course loads than full-time faculty for far less pay, no benefits and shaky job security.

“As an adjunct, I taught as many as five courses in a semester. That’s usually what most full-time [professors] teach in a year,” Baran offers.

In 2019, she received the UNC Charlotte Distinguished Alumna in Dance award.

“My dad died two weeks before the ceremony and he was really proud,” Baran says, her voice breaking as she recounts the memory. “That award sits on my mantle and reminds me about my accomplishments [at UNC Charlotte], but more so how proud he was of that.”

In 2020, Baran was promoted to visiting assistant professor, a full-time position with benefits that included a lecturing role. In 2025, however, UNC Charlotte eliminated the position and Baran went back adjunct status.

In her stint at UNC Charlotte, Baran taught modern dance, beginning ballet and choreography. She also created powerful, enduring choreographic works involving social issues important to students including institutional racism, the environment, land ownership and gun violence.

In 2019, Baran’s Luck of the Young encouraged dancers and audience members to process their still-fresh trauma from a campus shooting in April of that year, in which a student opened fire and killed two students while injuring four others.

Fall 2024’s Open Wounds and spring 2025’s Walls and Mazes addressed warfare, fueled by conversations about genocide, Gaza and the Holocaust. Along with teaching the choreographic process, Baran encouraged her students to do their own research about the topics they were making dances about.

“I think fostering this culture of reciprocal creativity was important,” she says.

Bringing dance and yoga to east Charlotte

Baran says her department’s chair told Baran she wanted her to become a lecturer. A year later, in 2025, the department announced the creation of the Lecturer in Contemporary Dance and Creative Practice position. Baran applied.

“The search committee has not selected you at this time to participate in campus interviews,” a December 2025 email from the department chair to Baran reads.

“She did not give me a reason why I was not selected for an in-person interview,” says Baran, who decided not to pursue the issue any further.

She informed the chair she would not be teaching the yoga class she was scheduled to lead this summer, nor any classes beyond the spring 2026 semester.

“I was just so over this kind of dangling the carrot in front of me,” Baran says.

Instead, she hopes to have East Side Yoga up and running by the end of the year.

“I’ve taught in just about every studio in Charlotte … [and] I’ve also taught yoga as a course at UNC Charlotte for the majority of the past decade,” Baran notes.

She says she’s looking at locations in east Charlotte, primarily because the neighborhood has never had a yoga studio.

“The same dancer who made the Baran Dance T-shirt in 2012 just sent me a T-shirt that says, ‘East Side Yoga,’” says Baran.

She intends to incorporate yoga philosophy and the practice’s ethical restraints and recommendations in her classes.

“Even if it’s just an hour once a week, you can still drop those little nuggets for people,” Baran says.

She currently has an Instagram account and a website where people can get updates on East Side Yoga’s progress.

In a spirit of renewal and new beginnings, Baran Dance’s current season is focused on reimagining and reshaping the company’s older works into something new.

BDXM: Baran Dance and Moa looks back at a series of performances from 12 years ago, in which Baran Dance collaborated with Charlotte experimental band Sam the Lion. That group evolved into Moa, which is now composed of vocalist-keyboardist Lindsey Ryan, drummer-electronic mage Chris Walldorf, guitarist David Driscoll and Audrey’s husband Mark Baran on bass.

“[The band] is different now and we’re different now,” Audrey Baran says.

Most of Moa’s nocturnal, mysterious and luxurious music is brand new, with several pieces coming from the band’s upcoming album Ghost Notes. Since the band is playing live to accompany live dancers, the performances promise spontaneity and surprises.

The performances at Open Door Studios will be in the round and Moa’s Walldorf says rehearsals thus far have been like passing through a surreal funhouse mirror.

“They had [the studio] sectioned off into two parts,” Walldorf says. “There’s eight dancers working on a song and then you go through the curtain and there are eight more dancers working on another song.”

Read more: Baran Dance’s ‘Homegrown’ Feeds on Edgy Sunshine (2024)

Adding to the oneiric atmosphere are live digital projections by Ryan Persaud, who creates shifting dreamscapes as Sweat Transfer.

“Our music is relatively enveloping in the first place,” Walldorf maintains. “[Sweat Transfer] adds another aspect of surrounding you and bringing you into this world that we’re all creating.”

After leaving 20-plus years at UNC Charlotte behind, more than two decades where creative triumphs vied with the economic uncertainty of the adjunct shuffle, Audrey Baran is ready to create new worlds.