Takeaways From the 2025 IADMS Conference on Occupational Health Hazards
When it comes to injuries, dancers often think of overuse issues, like stress fractures, or more acute injuries, like a sprained ankle. But this year’s International Association for Dance Medicine & Science conference shed light on an often overlooked aspect of a dance career: occupational health hazards.
The 35th annual IADMS conference, in Las Vegas in September, hosted more than 650 dance medicine providers, researchers, and educators representing 28 countries. Dr. David Hinkamp’s keynote on occupational health encouraged the dance community to consider the environmental factors that contribute to the industry’s injury rates—things like moving sets, dangerous props, lighting, sound, dry ice, improper flooring, or inadequate breaks between performances or rehearsals.
Hinkamp pointed out that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration only began tracking injury statistics in the performing arts in 2015. Since then, OSHA has found that those in performing arts companies experience the highest incident rates for nonfatal injuries and illnesses in the workplace, as compared to all other industries.
Overall, the conference served as a call to action for more research and advocacy around dancer well-being in the workplace. In recent years, IADMS’ annual conferences have included similar themes of advocacy around mental health, strength and conditioning, and disability—all of which remained present in Vegas. Among the 245 presentations this year, prominent focuses of study included gender, neurodivergence, and relative energy deficiency in sport (REDs).
For the fourth year in a row, the Linda and William Hamilton Annual Dance Wellness Symposium highlighted three promising projects in emerging research on dancer wellness:
- A study led by Kelley Wiese, PhD, LAT, ATC, assessed physical and mental workload and sleep in collegiate dancers across an academic semester. Forty collegiate dancers wore an ActiGraph biosensor on their wrist for seven days over three different periods to measure physical activity and sleep time. The dancers had consistently high physical workloads (≥7 hours) and insufficient sleep (<7 hours). As a result, they reported progressive decreases in physical and mental energy and progressive increases in physical and mental fatigue.
- Physiotherapist Theano Vikatou, BA, BSc, MSc, PhD(c), led a study involving interviews and focus groups with eight artistic staff members, 33 dancers, and seven medical staff members in a ballet company. It assessed dancer-workload monitoring and planning, concluding that parties must collaborate, rather than work in isolation, to integrate effective strategies to avoid overworking artists. Vikatou also acknowledged that while financial and logistical barriers exist, there is growing openness to adopting workload monitoring in ballet.
- Rosie Davis, MSc, spearheaded research to evaluate the efficacy of “Positive Balance,” a well-being program designed to support pre-professional dancers’ mental and physical health. Forty-two dancers completed questionnaires and participated in focus groups before and after a three-week positive-psychology program focused on strength and resilience. The program proved effective in enhancing artists’ knowledge and application of positive-psychology techniques. Future research will look at longer-term results among more-diverse populations.
The next IADMS annual conference will take place in Melbourne, Australia, September 24–27, 2026. The 37th edition will take place in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in 2027.
