Victoria (Tori) Isaac

Victoria (Tori) Isaac has received the 2025 Graduate of the Last Decade awardee from the UWM Alumni Association. The award was presented during the Alumni Awards Evening on February 21, 2025, at The Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee.

Victoria’s career as a performer, teaching artist and scholar began at UWM, where she developed her interest in dance and sociology as an undergraduate student. Her participation in the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program led her to pursue sociology in graduate school. Today, as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), Victoria explores how Black communities claim belonging within educational and religious spaces. Victoria performed and taught dance for many years in the Milwaukee area, where she focused on hip hop, tap, contemporary and improvisation, and she contributed to the development of a movement education program for incarcerated youth under the direction of Professor Maria Gillespie. She has been a teaching artist at Danceworks MKE, Signature Dance Company and Wild Space Dance Company, a dance instructor at the Schauer Arts Center and a lecturer in UWM’s Department of Dance. Her choreography has been featured in the Restore Arts Festival, Hip Hop DNA and Rhythmworks. Currently, Victoria teaches at Turning Point Dance Studio in Illinois and is a research assistant at UIC’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. She continues to explore the intersection between creative expression and community building throughout the Chicago area.