Dance Company Artistic Director / President/Founding Artistic Director, Dancing Wheels Company & School

Cleveland, OH

Mary Verdi-Fletcher is a professional dancer, business owner, activist, and leader with an expansive 40+ years in the arts and disability community. As the president/founding artistic director of the Dancing Wheels Company & School, she impacts the lives of hundreds of students every year by raising funds so that over 40 percent of the students who have disabilities or socio-economic challenges can attend on scholarship. In addition, she has led hundreds of education workshops and master classes around the world on physically integrated dance and teacher training. She has been quoted as having a “see the possible” attitude which allows her to change the lives of many, helping them grow to their fully realized potential. 

On top of her involvement in academia, Verdi-Fletcher leads a full-time dance company of 11 stand-up and sit-down dancers. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had been traveling worldwide to more than 70 locations a year, and in its more than 40 years of existence, it has touched the lives of more than six million people. Even with this, Verdi-Fletcher still found time to assist in building three other physically integrated dance companies in the U.S. and produce a manual and DVD on the company’s training methods so that people all over the world can benefit from their structure.

Verdi-Fletcher credits her love of dance to her family. “My interest and love of the arts was influenced greatly by my mother who was a professional dancer and my father who was a musician. I feel that the arts are a vocation that chooses you; you do not choose it.” She began to work with non-disabled dancers in the 1970s before entering a dance competition in 1980 and immediately began to tour. She credits her formal training to the Cleveland Ballet, where she studied vocabulary and dance technique. Ever the hard worker, while Verdi-Fletcher was first pursuing dance professionally, she also helped create the first independent living center in Ohio. She rose to eventually become the first development director for the organization, raising $100,000 in her first year alone. 

She used the combination of her activism and love of dance to lay the foundation for her future. “My work as an advocate and an administrator at Ohio's first independent living center was the basis for my knowledge of accessibility and the need to make the arts accessible to all,” she said. Verdi-Fletcher also became known as the “Rosa Parks of Cleveland” for her work in ensuring accessible public transportation for people with disabilities. 

When asked what she would change for people with disabilities in the arts field, Verdi-Fletcher stated that she would change the opportunities in academia. “To date, a wheelchair user (in most colleges or universities) cannot get the same degree in dance as their non-disabled peers. In this day and age, it seems outrageous that this is permitted.” She continues her activism in academia through her school and dance company, and her best advice to students is to “know that anything is possible if you believe in yourself and work hard…Sky's the limit.”