Dance and the arts didn’t become part of Monica Noble’s life until she entered John S. Davidson Fine Arts Magnet School as a sixth grader. Now, she’s the 2025-2026 teacher of the year for North Springs High School, integrating dance education with core subjects such as math, English and science.
But her life almost took a different turn – a couple of times.
The first came around eighth grade when Noble said “the grass is greener” syndrome kicked in.
“Around eighth grade, I wanted to be a cheerleader or a majorette on the dance line. I was begging my mom. I wanted to do sports,” said Noble who wanted to go back to her zoned school instead of Davidson. Her mother didn’t listen and Noble graduated from Davidson in 2001.
While some students took dance both at school and in private studios after school hours, Noble’s only dance classes came at Davidson. She developed a love and appreciation for the art form through teachers such as Ferneasa Cutno, with whom she remains in contact.
“Ferneasa Cutno gave me my first professional opportunity with the Augusta Players, I was a specialty dancer with a couple of my friends in ‘Kiss Me Kate’,” she said.
The experienced caused her to think “I love this rehearsing and this performing and this dance life. And I was a singer at the time,” she said.
After Davidson, she headed to Georgia State University with dreams of becoming a physician. She pursued a degree in biology, but she had a huge focus on dance. But this time, she immersed herself in dance not only inside the classroom but outside of it as well.
At Davidson, most of her classes were in modern and ballet. At GSU, she discovered another world of dance – hip-hop and was part of a group called Dancers On Pointe.
“I fell in love with it. There was an amazing community at GSU. I decided I was not going to further my education in science, but I wanted to try this dance thing,” she said.
A child of the 1990s, Noble said she knew about hip-hop. She’d listened to the music, seen the videos and mimicked all the moves, but there was so much more she didn’t know about hip-hop.
“I’d always been interested, but I never had the formal training,” she said.
“Being on that team (Dancers On Pointe) with a choreographer who knew how to teach it, break it down, tell the history and nuances of it, the musicality and how to use dynamics with that specific dance genre, I had never seen that.”
Also, she expanded her dance education beyond the college walls.
Within Atlanta itself, there were dance studios for adults. I was able to go to those studios with working dancers who are training and artists coming having to rehearsal I was just immersed into this new world. Atlanta is deep within black culture, and I was able to learn more about it. It was eye-opening and I was just learning what I wasn’t able to learn back in Augusta,” she said.
After graduating, she did gig work, appeared in the films “Dirty Grandpa” and “Bolden,” choreographed at Six Flags and toured with UniverSoul Circus, which toured the country with international performers.
“It was an amazing experience working with artists from China, Gabon, Ethiopia,” she said.
She also taught at Atlanta-area dance studios before starting off in Gwinnett County as a substitute teacher and moving into teaching full-time.
North Springs High School offers magnet programs and is working toward STEAM certification.
Any time there are rumblings about school budget cuts, arts programs tend to get the ax first, and are often the last to ever come back, she said. As she heard that there was going to be more of a focus on “core” subjects in Fulton county, Noble decided to be proactive and come up with lesson plans that not only taught dance, but combined dance with core subjects.
The result of her efforts was being named the teacher of the year for her school.
Noble looked at the physics of dance, studying trajectory and other concepts related to those scientific principles. English was an easy subject to incorporate, analyzing a song by Kendrick Lamar and highlighting the literary devices he used in his writing. Music is highly mathematical; what is dance without music? So, the subjects of dance and math also work well together.
At North Springs, she teaches a variety of dance genres including jazz, hip-hop and musical theater.
She knows she’s an advocate for the arts and an educator today because of her years at Davidson, and she’s glad her mother didn’t give in to her begging to go back to her zoned school.
“Even if I stopped dancing as much as I do, it would’ve been ingrained in me. I would’ve had an appreciation for the arts. It gave me so much agency and collaboration with other people and appreciation for other people’s abilities and cultures; the empathy I gained with being a dance student. I owe a lot to my schooling at Davidson, and I would not have had the same experience if I had gone to my regular public school,” she said.
Charmain Z. Brackett, the publisher of Augusta Good News and Inspiring: Women of Augusta, has covered Augusta’s news for more than 35 years. She’s won multiple Georgia Press Association awards, is the recipient of the 2018 Greater Augusta Arts Council’s media award and was named best local writer by readers of Augusta Magazine in 2024 and 2025. Reach her at charmain@augustagoodnews.com. Sign up for the newsletter here.
