Shanda Domango

Bloomberg Arts Internship Manager

Shanda Domango is a New Orleans native, arts leader, dancer, movement practitioner, and youth advocate who believes that creativity can be a powerful pathway to self-discovery, healing, and connection. For more than 25 years, she has built a career rooted in dance, creative direction, arts management, wellness, and servant leadership—all connected by a deep commitment to helping people, especially young people, discover their voice and their capacity to thrive.

Dance has been a lifelong part of Shanda’s story and continues to shape how she understands leadership, community, and personal growth. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management with a minor in Dance from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a Master’s degree in Arts Management from Claremont Graduate University’s Peter F. Drucker School. Her early professional experiences with the Performing Arts Society of Acadiana, Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre, and Lula Washington Dance Theatre helped develop her artistic discipline, creative leadership, and understanding of the arts as a vehicle for connection and transformation.

Shanda’s work also extends beyond the traditional arts sector. As an AFAA-certified personal trainer and entrepreneur, she founded Domango Training, where she brings together dance, fitness, mindful movement, and holistic wellness. Her work with youth sports, prenatal fitness, dance-based movement, Barre, and mindfulness has deepened her belief that the body is not separate from creativity, confidence, or well-being. For Shanda, movement can be a way of listening—to ourselves, to one another, and to the communities we are part of.

At KID smART, Shanda leads the Bloomberg Arts Internship Program, creating opportunities for New Orleans high school students to engage deeply with the city’s arts and cultural ecosystem while developing professional, creative, and life skills. She brings a strategic arts management perspective to the program, paired with a deeply relational approach to youth development.

At the heart of Shanda’s work is a simple belief: young people deserve spaces where they can be seen, heard, challenged, supported, and given room to become. Through arts, mentorship, movement, and meaningful opportunity, she works to help young people build not only skills for their future, but the confidence, agency, voice, and sense of purpose to shape it.