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DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Judy Tyrus, From Principal Ballerina at Dance Theatre of Harlem to Founder & CEO of ChromaDiverse
IMPRESSIONS: Dance Theatre of Harlem: A History, A Movement, A Celebration - Book by Judy Tyrus and Paul Novosel
DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Ballerina Turned Techie, Judy Tyrus, Brings Social Networking and Dance Preservation Together with CurtainConnect
By Christine Jowers/Follow @cmmjowers on Instagram
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Published on February 9, 2026
Judy Tyrus & Deborha Vaughan* ; Photo: Alexandra Barlowe
header photo shows Judy Tyrus, CEO of ChromaDiverse with Deborah Vaughn, Founder and Artistic Director of Dimensions Dance Company,a ChromaDiverse Partner
This is The House That Judy Built — ChromaDiverse
Last summer, I met with Judy Tyrus, former principal dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and author, with colleague Paul Novosel, of DTH's definitive history, Dance Theatre of Harlem: A History, A Movement, A Celebration. We spoke about the many surprising roles she's performed throughout her career, with one of the most unexpected being her current position as a dance archiving technology entrepreneur.
After the 2021 publication of the DTH book, dancers and companies contacted Tyrus, bemoaning the fact that they didn't have their own book or any way to organize and record their stories properly. This is not surprising. Dance companies are chiefly concerned with the here-and-now work of performances and teaching. Historic preservation can seem a far-off luxury or a daunting task, especially for smaller groups with lower budgets.
Concerned about the erasure of dance history, particularly that of companies of color, Tyrus founded the non-profit technology company ChromaDiverse in 2019; her mission — to make the collection and preservation of dance stories easy and accessible for all.
Under her leadership, ChromaDiverse has developed proprietary software that swiftly scans performance programs and other written materials for vital information about a dance company's history. Work that would have taken months, even years, to record and organize by hand can now be captured automatically by the company's trademarked CD SmartCapture software.
Once documents are scanned and digitized, a dance company can choose to have its information stored in ChromaDiverse's CD DigitalVault or exported into another archive. Unlike material-world vaults in a library or bank, one can visit the CD DigitalVault from anywhere in the world at any time of day. All you need to learn about a dance company's history is an internet connection.
While innovative technology and accessibility make ChromaDiverse a revolutionary platform in dance preservation and education, another crucial feature is its safety policy. Unlike other information-collecting forums, such as YouTube, FB, or Instagram, ChromaDiverse guarantees that participating companies and artists never give up ownership or control of their digitized materials. The organization simply houses these items so that partner companies can retrieve, download, and utilize their materials for marketing, re-staging, teaching, etc. And, while viewers can enjoy pictures, read articles, and watch videos, they can't download, screenshot, or otherwise "take" items without the express permission of the dance companies or their associated artists.
CurtainConnect — A Room in the House Judy Built, Where Dancers Share and Preserve Their Stories
With the scanning, housing, and protection of dance histories established, Tyrus and her team have added a new feature to their project—one that makes the experience of documenting dance history even more accessible to the public, individualized, and, well, fun —CurtainConnect.
Imagine a free online platform explicitly geared to the dance field that combines the bonding and storytelling pleasure of Instagram and FB with Ancestry.com's ability to illustrate large family trees and uncover relations. CurtainConnect is even more sophisticated and specific.
How CurtainConnect Came to Life — and the Stories It Makes Possible
Jessica Cavender, CurtainConnect's product manager, is an MFA graduate of Ohio State with a specialty in Dance and Technology. She joined ChromaDiverse after spending over a decade working in dance preservation, collecting and recording oral histories. Cavender saw how the assembly of each oral history demanded extensive planning, research, interviewing, editing, and review. Ever since, she's been looking for ways to scale this massive effort so that "anybody could learn how to document their history and do it well." When she heard about ChromaDiverse, a company dedicated to amplifying dance histories that are often lost or ignored, she knew she'd landed at the perfect place to pursue her interests— her dream job. She remembers “Let's go!” being her first thought when she joined the group.
With Cavender's input, the ChromaDiverse team created yet another ground-breaking tech framework, StoryCapture. Its creation eliminates the more than 30 hours of research and video editing required to produce a single professional oral history. StoryCapture translates the best practices of expert historians into a streamlined, intuitive, guided set of processes that anyone who knows how to fill out an online form can follow.
The essence of collecting a rich oral history lies in the questions asked. Figuring out the perfect questions for all dancers and dance genres was a challenge. Cavender developed a system of user-friendly prompts to help artists give their best answers and tell their stories fully. "I think we have something around 48 questions," she says. "These are never just exploded in front of the user. We have a wizard that guides you, or you can browse topics.
You can choose Career Stories, and select by category: Beginnings and Influences, Career Shifts, Community Collaboration, Creative Process, Identity, Values and Experience - all of these different subcategories. You may jump into one like Teaching and Research. There we have questions like, "How did teaching your research become part of your practice?" or "What questions, ideas, and problems drive your research or inquiry?" But maybe none of those questions apply to you. And so we ask other things. I have a section called Unexpected Questions, which is one of my favorites."
Dianne Brock, one of the founding members of the Oakland Ballet, and an early participant during CurtainConnect's beta stage, answered the Unexpected Question prompt with a story about a wardrobe malfunction. She described a moment during a lift when her tutu caught on the collar of her partner's costume. No matter what, they couldn't get unstuck. Eventually, her partner had to (awkwardly) shuffle sideways off stage with her still in the air, attached to his neck.
"Those stories really humanize everybody's experience,” says Cavender. There's so much joy we can share with some of our best mistakes, but," she adds, "I don't define what kind of stories one should tell… I've [created] a big container with lots of useful prompts to help the storytelling along."
At the moment, most of the artists populating CurtainConnect are later-stage or retired dancers. "We're starting with the legacy crowd," says Cavender. "They have the stories that are in most urgent need of recording immediately, for fear of being lost." But the scope of CurtainConnect is much broader, with benefits for everyone at any stage of a dance career, whether they're concerned with preserving their dance history or just beginning to create it.
What ChromaDiverse is building are links that connect the personal, social, and oral histories of living dancers to archival materials and figures, so that as the system develops, an interested researcher, journalist, professional, student or fan, can easily click on a dancer's profile, and learn not only about that artist's personal story, but also about their professional affiliations and lineage connections.
"It's solving the very real disconnect between archives and living documents," says Cavender, "Archives are gate-kept. You have to have some knowledge about how to even interact with them, or where they are, or what you can do with them." But everyone knows how to get online.
"We're all done with the infinite doom scroll, but we're not done with community. So, how do we create a meaningful community where, if I'm going to interact and if I'm going to tell stories, it is not just a throwaway post on Instagram or FB? CurtainConnect is a place where your dance story will live, and we're underpinning it fully with real archival infrastructure so that it can have a canonical view that will matter, and be legible forever."
