DAVID LEVENTHAL was a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1997-2010. During that time, he appeared in more than 40 of Mark Morris’s dances, and performed principal roles in The Hard Nut, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare. Leventhal received a 2010 Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for his performance career with MMDG. He has taught technique and repertory classes for students of all ages at schools and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including UCLA, University of Michigan, Harvard University, The Juilliard School, University of Washington, University of Illinois, American Dance Festival, and the Governor’s School for the Arts (Virginia) among others.


David is Program Director and one of the founding teachers of MMDG's Dance for PD® program, which offers weekly classes for people with Parkinson's throughout New York City; fosters similar classes in more than 300 communities in 25 countries around the world; and presents acclaimed training workshops for teachers interested in leading Dance for PD® classes. He received the 2018 Martha Hill Dance Fund Mid-Career Artist Award; the 2016 World Parkinson Congress Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Parkinson community; and the 2013 Alan Bonander Humanitarian Award. Leventhal has 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 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, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Liège (Belgium), and Peking Union Medical Center, among others.


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. Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, he trained at Boston Ballet School and attended Brown University, where he received a B.A. in English Literature.