Constantina is interested in uncovering the impact of dance on the brain, an area that remains surprisingly understudied despite the widespread use of dance-based interventions in clinical and community settings. Her work examines how dance shapes neural activity as well as behavioral outcomes, spanning sensory, motor, and cognitive domains. In parallel, she focuses on less explored effects of dance, particularly on speech and vocal motor control, building on the hypothesis that rhythmic, whole-body movement may engage and strengthen shared motor circuits underlying both limb and laryngeal control (read relevant articles here and here).
 
She tests these ideas across complementary dance protocols and populations, including Adapted Tango (AdapTango) through collaborations with Emory University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Amazonian Dance through a collaboration with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and Dance for PD through her collaboration with the Mark Morris Dance Group.

 

Using the AdapTango protocol, she has examined how different roles within partnered dance may engage distinct movement strategies in Parkinson’s disease. In a randomized, controlled 12-week study, she found that both Leaders and Followers improved in clinical motor outcomes, but showed partly distinct brain-connectivity patterns. Leader training was associated with relative network stability and movement toward lower, healthy older adult-like cerebellar-sensorimotor connectivity, whereas Follower training engaged sensorimotor and caudate-motor circuits consistent with cue-supported action updating.
 

Using the Amazonian Dance protocol, she investigated whether a dance intervention could influence speech and language outcomes in Parkinson’s disease. In a 12-week exploratory clinical trial comparing Amazonian Dance with a matched Nordic walking intervention, participants in the dance group showed improvement in prosody and semantic organization, suggesting that dance may affect communication-related functions in Parkinson’s disease, potentially through auditory-motor coupling, timing, and overlapping neural systems supporting dance, speech, and language. 

 

A large interdisciplinary study using the Dance for Parkinson’s Disease protocol is currently ongoing. It integrates neuroimaging, behavioral, and clinical measures to characterize how structured dance classes influence brain networks, motor performance, including speech, and quality of life. You can find more information about the study on this flyer.

 
Beyond dance per se, she is also interested in the role of rhythmic movement through music-making that intersects with dance, such as drumming in drum circles. She is currently testing these ideas in collaboration with Yale University, using multimodal biological measures (including EEG, EKG, blood pressure, and blood-based markers) alongside psychological assessments to examine how drum circles induce sensorimotor entrainment, autonomic modulation, and cortical plasticity, with the goal of leveraging these mechanisms for conditions such as speech deficits, chronic pain, and anxiety.

These collaborations are supported by Constantina’s affiliations as Visiting Scholar at the Center for Ballet and the Arts and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab of New York Universit, as Research Associate at Emory University and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and as Visiting Research Professor at Yale University (Department of Psychiatry).

The pictures used in this gallery are from the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dance for Parkinson’s Disease program’s website.