Grinnell professor awarded national dance grant

Aguibou Bougobali Sanou, assistant professor of dance at Grinnell College, has been selected as a 2025 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, one of just 25 annual recipients of the honor.

The fellowship honors movement and dance-based artists who use their work as an instrument for social change and includes a $31,000 grant that the artist may use at their discretion. Sanou said he plans to put the grant towards the dance programs he runs in his home country of Burkina Faso. 

The grant application process took over a year, he said. Upon learning he’d been chosen from a pool of hundreds of applicants to receive the award, he said he felt both excited and humbled.

“The interesting thing is, when you receive the official notification, they ask you to keep it a secret,” Sanou said. “So I knew for like, six or something months. You want to scream in the sky, but you can’t.” Sanou said. 

“Receiving this is such an honor for me and also for my college, my department, my family, my friends, so I feel blessed,” he added.

Sanou said that, unlike many artists’ grants, Dance/USA’s comes with little to no restrictions as to what it can be used for. Some fellows choose to put the money towards basic living expenses to balance the demands of their work with living a decent, dignified life, he said.

Sanou said he will use the entire grant to fund his dance programs and related work in Burkina Faso, including an international dance festival he created that attracts over 80,000 visitors each year. He said that other projects currently in the works are a research center, performance stage and housing at Ko-Don-So Bougobali SANOU, an organic farm and creative arts space started by him. 

“For me, dance saved me a lot from a lot of negative energies,” he said. “So I constantly asked myself, what can I do to serve better than to be served?”

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Sanou said he personally felt the power of dance to uplift people through difficult times after the death of his young son, who had a medical emergency during a hospital workers’ strike in Burkina Faso.

Dance became a way for him to process the tragedy.

“You know, you said, ‘Oh, maybe I also need to take the life of the doctor that refused to save the life of my kid,’ you have this kind of thing. And then suddenly, somehow in my head, something told me that you are not this kind of person. So I keep dancing. I dance a lot, and every time I’m dancing, I realize that dance is allowing me to digest and be quiet and meditate and feel good,” he said.

This personal experience using dance in the face of hardship led to Sanou founding a dance rehabilitation program for incarcerated people in Burkina Faso, he said. He added that the program, which was featured in a 2019 Al Jazeera documentary, will also benefit from the grant. 

Sanou said that his artistic style blends roots in West African Mandingo dance traditions with influences from Western choreography and theater to tell stories.

“My mom, she said, even if you are well rooted, there is no restriction that the roots of one tree cannot meet the roots of another tree and merge to bring a new energy,” he said. 

In addition to his projects in Burkina Faso, Sanou said he plans to meet with other Dance/USA Fellows over the coming year to plan potential collaborations. 

“I think people know him as the professor on campus, but he’s also, you know, an internationally recognized artist, and I think that this award helps affirm the work that he’s doing,” said Craig Quintero, chair of Grinnell’s Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies Department. “He carries a lot of knowledge and embodied experience, and so I think our students are the beneficiaries of that.”

“I really would like to thank Grinnell College, from the President, to the dean’s office, to the department. They did everything they can to help support me,” Sanou said.