The Dallas Dance Film Festival welcomes dance film submissions from all over the world evoking stories and heritages of people living throughout our world in ways that directly speak to us here in Dallas.
Be the first to view the top 10 Festival submissions and you can vote on Best of Fest, Creative, and Innovator. After the screenings a Q&A session with available film creators concludes the evening. Also featured will be a Gallery Exhibit of the dance photography of Kent Barker.
Kent has photographed music legends like Jerry Lee Lewis and created portraits for a wide array of magazines such as Rolling Stone, Outside, Travel & Leisure, Texas Monthly, Vanity Fair and Fast Company. Now he shares his dance photography with us.
THE ART OF DANCE: BODY LANGUAGE BY KENT BARKER
Kent Barker’s creative pursuits started at the age of 6 when he began studying dance with Edith Royal in Orlando, Florida. After high school he accepted a scholarship at Joffrey Ballet in New York City. A knee injury forced him to return home where he began undergraduate studies at University of Central Florida.
A photographer friend introduced him to the darkroom and Kent knew this was what he wanted to do with his life. He enrolled in a photography class the very next day.
After graduating with a degree in fine art, Kent took the advice of a mentor and moved to Dallas, one of the best photography markets in the country. By the mid eighties, Kent was considered a top shooter in the U.S—working for national clients in both the advertising and editorial realms. His career has now spanned over 40 years and his photographs have appeared in magazines such as Vanity Fair, Esquire, Town & Country, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Inc, Fast Company, Outside and Texas Monthly.
The initial lockdown brought on by the COVID pandemic provided Kent with an unexpected gift: unfettered weeks of exploring his archives. As he sifted through decades of work, a handful of dance photos caught his eye and his new ambition.
“Re-visiting these images from my past woke up something inside me,” he says. “I realized that this is what I want to spend the rest of my career doing. Dance photography closes the circle… it reconnects me to the first real passion of my life and it also makes exquisite use of the skills I have honed as a top-level shooter.”— Kent Barker
