Cara Graninger

Cara Nicole Graninger is a dancer and arts educator specializing in dance improvisation and arts integration. She grew up in Liberia, Saudi Arabia, Fiji and Costa Rica as well as the United States, learning Spanish and French along the way, and has made Detroit home since 1993. Passionate about contact improvisation, her “dance home” which she has studied and taught avidly for over twenty years, Cara enjoys many forms of dance and somatic practice and loves singing and sounding too. 

Cara is a certified DanceAbility instructor, trained to facilitate dance classes, workshops and performances including movers with disabilities. She leads DanceAbility Detroit for a diverse community of movers, offering classes and workshops both online and in person for movers in Wayne, Washtenaw and Oakland County. She also taught dance and music improvisation to youth with disabilities at Kennedy School in Pontiac from 2018-2022. In addition, she has facilitated movement improvisation workshops for Freedom House, Alternatives for Girls, ACCESS and Southwest Mental Health. 

Along with practicing, performing, and teaching dance, Cara has managed and directed community arts education programs in Detroit since 1993, serving as executive director of Living Arts from 2008 to 2017. Cara was born in 1972, the same year that contact improvisation began to coalesce as a form.