Marc Kenison began his formal dance training at Interlochen Arts Academy before earning his BFA from The Juilliard School. He went on to join the José Limón Dance Company, performing leading roles worldwide, with tours to war-torn Sarajevo and El Salvador, and a performance at The White House. While with the company, he performed in The Moor’s Pavane, a landmark of American modern dance, dancing the role of the Moor’s Friend (Iago). In 1996, he joined Tere O’Connor Dance, helping create four new dance-theatre works that premiered in New York and toured extensively across the United States and abroad.

In 2004, Kenison earned his MFA in Acting from the University of Washington and co-founded Washington Ensemble Theatre, where he served as co-artistic director while also acting, directing, casting, and managing operations. The ensemble quickly established WET as a hub for bold new work in Seattle.

In 2006, Kenison created the performance persona Waxie Moon, a long-term practice-as-research project in performance hybridity and in genre and gender collision. As Waxie Moon, he has appeared at major Seattle venues including Climate Pledge Arena, On the Boards, ACT Theatre, and Seattle Repertory Theatre, as well as in New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Tokyo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Vienna, and cities across Canada and the United States. The character has been the subject of several films, including the award-winning documentary Waxie Moon (dir. Wes Hurley), A Wink and a Smile (dir. Deirdre Timmons), and the feature Waxie Moon in Fallen Jewel (co-written and co-produced by Kenison), as well as the web series Capitol Hill (Webby Award nominee, Best Actor in a Web Series, 2014). Waxie Moon’s work has been featured on television programs such as Evening Magazine, KING-5, and KOMO, profiled on NPR in “Seattle’s Waxie Moon: Performer for a New Century,” and covered by national outlets including The Huffington Post and Towleroad. Their cultural legacy is further celebrated in a large-scale mural at Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market.

Teaching has been central to Kenison’s artistic practice since 1994. He has taught a broad range of content, including modern and contemporary dance, acting, solo performance, physical characterization, devised theatre, stage presence, and neo-burlesque theory and performance, at organizations and institutions such as Rutgers University, the University of Washington, and Cornish College of the Arts. As Adjunct Faculty at Cornish, he directed four original devised works, the musicals James and the Giant Peach and Xanadu, and a production of Mary Zimmerman’s The Secret in the Wings.

He now works as an Adjunct Instructor at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches Improvisation and Composition, and Choreography 1 in the Betsy Blackmon Dance Program. His pedagogy emphasizes embodied awareness, technical rigor, creativity, joy, and the cultivation of authentic artistic voices.