Join Sarah Ortegon, the champion jingle dress dancer featured in Jeffrey Gibson’s She Never Dances Alone for this special in-gallery performance in the exhibition The Body Electric.
Artist, actress, and dancer Sarah Ortegon is enrolled Eastern Shoshone and is also Northern Arapaho. In 2013, she earned her BFA from Metropolitan State University of Denver with a with a concentration in drawing. In August 2013, she was crowned Miss Native American, USA. Soon after, Ortegon started touring with the Native Pride Dancers, traveling and performing the jingle dress dance in the US and also in Moldova, Europe, and Guatemala. In collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson, Ortegon was featured in the film She Never Dances Alone, displayed on over sixty monitors every night at midnight for several months in Times Square, New York City. In March 2020, just before the pandemic, Ortegon was able to dance alongside the installation in Times Square.
As an actress, Ortegon has performed in the play Black Elk Speaks in Denver, Colorado, and the musical Sitting Bulls Last Waltz, which premiered in Hollywood, California, for the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2016. Ortegon was cast as an extra in the BBC/NBC Sky 1 miniseries Jamestown, which filmed in Budapest in 2016–2018. In 2020, Ortegon was featured as an artist in the PBS Emmy-nominated film The Art of Home.
Ortegon has been nominated to appear in the National Museum of Women in the Arts’s national art exhibition in Washington, DC, in 2024. Additionally, she is currently an executive legal assistant for Native American Rights Fund in Boulder, Colorado. The law firm focuses on fighting for Indigenous rights in relation to issues such as oil pipelines running through Indigenous communities.
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