David Leventhal is a founding teacher and Program Director for Dance for PD®, a program of the Mark Morris Dance Group that has now been used as a model for classes in more than 100 communities in 1​7 countries. He leads classes for people with Parkinson's disease around the world and trains other teachers in the Dance for PD® approach around the world. He's co-produced three volumes of a successful At Home DVD series for the program and has been instrumental in initiating and designing innovative projects involving live streaming and Moving Through Glass, a dance-based Google Glass App for people with Parkinson's. He received the 2016 World Parkinson Congress Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Parkinson's Community and was a co-recipient of the 2013 Alan Bonander Humanitarian Award from the Parkinson's Unity Walk. Leventhal has written about dance and Parkinson's for such publications as Dance Gazette and Room 217, and has a chapters about the program in Moving Ideas: Multimodal Learning in Communities and Schools (Peter Lang) and Creating Dance: A Traveler's Guide (Hampton Press). He is in demand as a speaker at international conferences and symposiums, and has spoken about the intersection of dance, Parkinson's and health at the Lincoln Center Global Exchange, Edinburgh International Culture Summit, University of Michigan, Rutgers, Penn State Hershey Medical Center, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, Georgetown, Tufts, and Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Liège (Belgium), among others. ​He serves on the boards of the Davis Phinney Foundation and the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center's Arts and Humanities Program. Leventhal designed and currently teaches a pioneering dance-based elective course that is part of the Narrative Medicine curriculum at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. He's featured in the award-winning 2014 documentary Capturing Grace directed by Dave Iverson. As a dancer, he performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1997-2011, appearing in principal roles in Mark Morris' The Hard Nut, L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, and Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare. Leventhal received a 2010 Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for his performing career with Mark Morris. He graduated from Brown University with honors in English Literature.

Sarah Robichaud is a classically trained dancer who has studied and performed extensively throughout Canada, Europe and Moscow where she studied at the Bolshoi Ballet School. She has performed and choreographed for many theatre, film and television projects over the last 15 years. Her passion for an optimum mind-body connection led her to become a certified personal trainer, incorporating functional training to help her clients improve their core strength and posture. Sarah is the on-air fitness expert for CBS Early Morning Saturday in New York and The Steven and Chris Show in Toronto. Sarah's newest book "Getting Fit Without Hitting the Gym" and her 2006 release "Working On The Ball - A Simple Guide to Office Fitness" provide the reader with straightforward workout tips to make being fit and healthy an enjoyable and sustainable way of life. Sarah's interest in Parkinson's disease began in the spring of 2007 when a client asked for help managing his physical PD symptoms through exercise. Sarah received her training in the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dance for PD method in New York in 2007. In 2008, she launched Dancing with Parkinson's which offers on-going classes in six locations throughout Toronto.

About Dance for PD®

The Mark Morris Dance Group's Dance for PD® program, celebrating its 15th anniversary, invites people with Parkinson's and their families in more than 120 communities and 17 countries around the globe to experience the joys and benefits of dance while creatively addressing symptom-specific concerns related to balance, cognition, motor skill, depression and physical confidence. Through its innovative, internationally-replicated classes, acclaimed teacher training program, and high quality media resources, Dance for PD​'s fundamental working principle is that professionally-trained dancers are movement experts whose knowledge about balance, sequencing, rhythm and aesthetic awareness is useful to persons with PD. In class, teaching artists integrate movement from modern, ballet, tap, folk and social dancing, and choreographic repertory to engage participants' minds and bodies and create an enjoyable, social environment for artistic exploration.​​ Dance for PD has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Dance Magazine, The Guardian and hundreds of other publications,​and has been honored by several local, national and international awards, including the Parkinson Awareness Award, Alan Bonander Humanitarian Award, and the Sapolin Public Service Award from the New York City Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities. Peer-reviewed research from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany suggests that dance provides a range of benefits, including improved walking and short-term mobility, enhanced quality of life and self-efficacy, and improvements in mood and social inclusion among people with Parkinson's. Dance for PD, which began in 2001 as a collaboration between MMDG and Brooklyn Parkinson Group, leverages technology—live streaming, a popular instructional At Home DVD series, and an experimental App for Google Glass—to make the program more available to its diverse and expanding network of constituents around the globe. The program actively pursues research opportunities with top academic centers including Columbia University, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, and Syracuse University.

In Toronto, Dance for PD partners closely with Dancing with Parkinson's and with Canada's National Ballet School to present training opportunities and foster other collaborative initiatives.

About Dance for Parkinson's Network Canada

The DFPNC—a consortium of partners including Canada’s National Ballet School, Dance for PD®, Dancing with Parkinson’s Canada, and Parkinson Canada is committed to:
* Improving accessibility to dance programs for people living with PD
* For the PD community: Improving access to classes and resources, regardless of physical mobility or geographic location
* For dance instructors: Increasing training opportunities and professional development resources for program delivery
* Expanding program offering and classes in communities across Canada

For all inquiries about the Network, please contact Rachel Bar, Manager of Health & Research Initiatives, at Canada’s National Ballet School. She can be reached via email at rbar@nbs-enb.ca or by phone at 416-964-3780 x 2160