AXIS Dance Company  AXIS Dance Company is a professional physically integrated contemporary dance company and dance education organization founded in 1987 and based in Oakland, California. It is one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with and without physical disabilities. Their work has received nine Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and nine additional nominations for both their artistry and production values. Founded in 1987 by Thais Mazur, Bonnie Lewkowicz, Judith Smith and others, AXIS was one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with and without physical disabilities. AXIS dancers with disabilities have included wheelchair users (both manual wheelchairs and power wheelchairs), crutch users, and people with amputations using prosthetic limbs. AXIS dancers who are not disabled come with training in a variety of contemporary dance, improvisation and other movement practices. Through interactions between these dancers and nondisabled dancers, a new dance vocabulary began to be developed. This started a trend, which eventually became known as physically integrated dance, which seeks to broaden the definition of ‘dance’ and ‘dancer’ and increase opportunities for artistic expression through movement for a wide spectrum of physical attributes and disabilities. The physically integrated dance movement is part of a broader disability culture movement, which recognizes and celebrates the first-person experience of disability, not as a medical-model construct but as a social phenomenon, through artistic, literary, and other creative means. The AXIS Dance Company has commissioned works by a number of renowned choreographers, including Ann Carlson, Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Joanna Haigood, Margaret Jenkins, Bill T. Jones, Victoria Marks, and Stephen Petronio. In May 2016 during its 30th anniversary season, AXIS Dance Company hosted the first, three-day "National Convening: The Future of Physically Integrated Dance in the USA" at Gibney Dance in New York. This event was supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation National Project Program, and culminated in the creation of the report, "The Future of Physically Integrated Dance in the USA", which looks at “ways to 1) improve and expand training opportunities and develop pedagogy for dancers with disabilities; and 2) improve training and expand opportunities for disabled choreographers and nondisabled choreographers to work with disabled dancers or integrated ensembles.” The Company has created more than sixty repertory works, two evening-length works, and commissions for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bates Dance Festival, San Francisco Exploratorium, and CAL Performances-UAM/PFA.