2025 Dance Teacher Award Honoree Roger Montoya Uplifts Students Through Mentorship

By SOPHIE BRESS
Courtesy of Ovation Dance Tour

ROGER MONTOYA WITH DANCERS. PHOTO BY CURTIS BROWN, COURTESY MOVING ARTS ESPAÑOLA.

Roger Montoya believes teaching dance helps students gain lifelong skills centered in the creative development of the mind, body, and spirit. His organization, Moving Arts Española, serves the rural communities that make up his native northern New Mexico—areas hit particularly hard by the opioid crisis and where a large percentage of residents live in poverty. Through its facility located in the town of Española, Moving Arts offers classes spanning arts disciplines including dance, music, painting, gymnastics, sewing, and cooking, plus internships, community engagement, and, above all, personal investment in the success of the students. 

“Mentorship is masterful,” Montoya says. “It’s an age-old tradition of honoring the craft and instilling discipline, and then allowing a young person to find their own way within that choreography, pun intended.” At Moving Arts, Montoya is creating a unique space of healing and hope. “My philosophy is really that art is medicine,” he says.

Montoya began dancing at age 20, after growing up drawing and painting and training as a gymnast during his adolescence. He studied at The Ailey School, the Martha Graham School, and with a variety of other influential companies and artists in New York City before joining the Paul Taylor Dance Company as an apprentice and, later, becoming a company member at Parsons Dance. In the mid-1980s, after learning he had HIV, Montoya ended his stage career and returned home to spend what he believed would be his final years with his family. Instead, he found a calling. 

MONTOYA IN HIS PERFORMING DAYS. PHOTO BY ROFF KOPPEL, COURTESY MONTOYA.

“The juxtaposition of the opulence, excitement, and opportunities of New York City against the rural, underserved landscape of New Mexico—and the talent of the young people around me [who had] no access to the things I had enjoyed as a 29-year-old—it felt like a great opportunity to open those doors for young people in this region,” he says. 

In 2008, Montoya officially co-founded Moving Arts with his partner, Salvador Ruiz Esquivel—after spending nearly two decades unintentionally laying the groundwork. With no formal background in education, Montoya began by offering gymnastics classes in the community from 1990 to 1995. Those classes led to a district-wide in-school arts program for 3,000 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. An after-school program followed, which finally led to Moving Arts in its current iteration.

Moving Arts has continued to expand over the years, and, in 2012, was authorized by the State of New Mexico to create a (now-shuttered) public K–8 charter school of the arts and sciences that served as a feeder program for the prestigious New Mexico School for the Arts. 

MONTOYA IN THE CLASSROOM. PHOTO COURTESY MOVING ARTS ESPAÑOLA.

The lasting impact of Montoya’s own mentors also inspired his work in the Española community. He cites former Limón Dance Company principal Louis Falco and dancer and choreographer Mary Jane Eisenberg, as well as his first art teacher and his high school gymnastics coach, as important guiding lights in his life and career.

​“I was really struggling, and [my first art teacher] saw my gifts as a painter and visual artist,” Montoya says. “She provided that first moment of knowing ‘I am safe, I am honored, because this person sees me.’ ”

He hopes each child who passes through Moving Arts’ doors experiences this same sense of safety and belonging.

“I truly don’t know where I would be had I not got involved with Moving Arts and not been supported to try a new thing, which was dance,” says Than Povi Martinez, a Moving Arts alum, dance artist, and 15-year mentee of Montoya’s who recently graduated from Loyola Marymount University’s dance program. “Roger has always been there and has always offered a hand of support and words of encouragement.” 

Montoya is currently creative director of Moving Arts. His roles include strategic program development and grant-writing, as well as teaching ballet and modern dance classes, teaching visual arts, choreographing, and overseeing set production, costume, and prop design for performances. He and Ruiz Esquivel also mentor students directly or connect them with one of the 35 multidisciplinary working artists affiliated with Moving Arts.

“My partner and I are still very connected to every child and every family,” Montoya says, adding that mentorship through Moving Arts can be part of a student’s life for over a decade. “We customize a plan and pathway for each student—it’s almost case management in some contexts because of the level of trauma and poverty we deal with.”

​In addition to running Moving Arts with Ruiz Esquivel, Montoya was elected to the New Mexico House of Representatives in 2020.

PHOTO BY GENEVIEVE RUSSEL/STORYPORTRAITMEDIA, COURTESY MOVING ARTS ESPAÑOLA.

​After receiving a 2019 CNN Heroes Award, Montoya had been encouraged to run for office by members of the New Mexico federal delegation—as well as his mother, Dorotea Montoya, who was a respected figure in the health-care community and another of his key mentors. He served one two-year term, during which he was an advocate for New Mexico’s rural communities, focusing on issues relating to health and human services, infrastructure investment, and justice reform via committee work in courts and corrections. However, Montoya says his time in politics ultimately led him back to his core belief that working in the community—and making change from the ground up—would give him the opportunity to make the biggest difference.
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“The most impactful moments in my career have been when a young person finds his or her place in art-making,” Montoya says. “In order to make lasting change, we have to cultivate a new generation.”