Founder/Director
Dorothy O'Shea Overbey founded Red Nightfall Dance Theatre in 2017 with a mission to amplify voices overlooked by traditional gatekeepers in the performing arts world. A dancer, choreographer, musician, producer, and small-business owner, Dorothy brings her multidisciplinary background to RNDT's immersive experiences and films that tell stories of transformation.
Dorothy's artistic journey spans training at Ballet Austin, piano studies under University of Texas Professor Emeritus Amanda Vick Lethco, and performance experience with ballet and contemporary companies across New York, Colorado, and California. She holds degrees in both Dance Performance and Philosophy from Southern Methodist University.
Dorothy's work increasingly explores the intersection of dance, technology, and film. In 2018, while at UT Austin, she created "Invention in Three Parts," choreographing movement captured through motion capture technology and later transformed into animated films using Unreal Engine in collaboration with students from UT's Department of Radio-Television-Film. In 2023, she choreographed and performed in a groundbreaking live version of the Virtual Reality film "Once a Glacier" at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam, where her real-time motion-captured choreography was translated into animation and projected on screen. Her film credits also include two short films, "Prelude" and "Elegy."
Inspired by New York's dynamic arts scene but committed to greater accessibility, Dorothy returned to Austin where she established RNDT as a platform that embodies the belief that “the creation of beauty is not the privilege off the pedigreed, but a birth-right to us all.”
In 2023, Dorothy left her faculty position at UT Austin's Department of Theatre and Dance to focus fully on growing Red Nightfall Dance Theatre and establishing East Side Performing Arts (ESPA) as a national performing arts center in Austin.
About our name
“Out of doubt, out of dark to the day’s rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope’s end I rode and to heart’s breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!”
These verses from The Return of the King are spoken at the nadir - the darkest phase of the wheel of experience, the moment of utter obliteration of the self.
The death of hope becomes surrender, the surrender becomes Silence, and from that void emerges a spark of resolve.
I believe this moment - this defiant declaration that ‘I AM’ - is the most powerful moment of our human experience. It is this moment that we are exploring, cultivating liberation by practicing the courage that comes from non-attachment.
-Dorothy
BTS at our first photo shoot, January 2017