NEW YORK, NY.- Oscar winner Ariana DeBose. “Dancing With the Stars” judge Derek Hough. Ballet luminaries Catherine Hurlin, Tiler Peck and Taylor Stanley. Eleven cast members of last year’s Broadway production of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’.”

Those are just a few notable alumni of New York City Dance Alliance, a dance competition and convention celebrating its 30th anniversary this winter. It’s also the kind of name parade that makes Joe Lanteri, the organization’s founder and executive director, uncomfortable.

“Of course I’m so proud of all these dancers,” Lanteri said. “But I can’t take credit for their success — for the work that every dance teacher and studio owner did with them in the trenches, for the whole community that helped them.”

Lanteri’s impulse to deflect attention might seem at odds with the look-at-me energy that defines much of the competitive dance world, a lucrative industry that to outsiders can feel about a half-step removed from beauty pageants. In some ways it’s even at odds with the Lanteri who emcees most New York City Dance Alliance events: thoroughly comfortable onstage in a sequined tuxedo, unscripted and unruffled as he announces award winners.

But showbiz polish aside, Lanteri’s conventions — at which dancers take a series of master classes — and competitions reflect his community-oriented approach. Rather than emphasizing trophies and celebrity faculty, Lanteri has prioritized longer-term investments in young dancers, preparing them for and often connecting them to professional opportunities.

Remarkably, that includes college funding. New York City Dance Alliance’s affiliated foundation has directly awarded nearly $5 million in college scholarships and helped facilitate hundreds of additional admission and scholarship offers since its founding in 2010. There are 28 New York City Dance Alliance alumni enrolled in Juilliard’s dance program.

Karen Schupp, a former competitive dancer who is now an associate professor of dance at Arizona State University, said New York City Dance Alliance occupies a distinctive place in the historically insular and increasingly commercialized competition scene.

“What Joe has done, versus the more sort of corporate competitions, is to support the pursuit of dance outside of the very specific competitive framework,” she said. “It’s recognizing that the competition weekend is just one part of a larger dance ecosystem.”

Everybody seems to know Lanteri. As the leader of New York City Dance Alliance — and the owner and executive director of the dance studio Steps on Broadway, a position he’s held since 2018 — he plays a striking role in shaping the dance landscape. But he remains a reluctant impresario.

“Joe’s not clout chasing,” said tap dancer and choreographer Chloé Arnold, a veteran of New York City Dance Alliance’s faculty. “I’m always saying to him, ‘Do you even know that you’re iconic?’”

Lanteri, who laughingly but firmly refused to give his age — “Obviously, we’re celebrating 30 years, so I can’t be 42” — took a roundabout path to dance. The son of Italian immigrants, he grew up in small-town Pennsylvania, watching his parents work multiple jobs to make ends meet. “They remained very Old World,” he said. “I didn’t taste ketchup until I was 16.”

His first formal dance class also came late, after he enrolled in the University of Southern California’s theater program. Jazz dance, especially — which he studied at the Dupree Dance Academy in nearby Hollywood — struck a chord.

In the early 1980s, Lanteri moved to New York City and booked anything and everything, from Snickers commercials to cruise ship gigs. Soon he was also working on the production side of the industry, putting together live events and acting as dance supervisor for “Club MTV” and a dance talent scout for “Star Search.”

Lanteri kept up his training at studios around New York, finding a particular home at Steps on Broadway on the Upper West Side. Steps offered him a teaching job, and for more than 30 years his jazz class was a staple of its lineup.

Lanteri’s style — a mix of slinky New York jazz and the West Coast’s more athletic, commercial sensibility — drew a wide range of talent, including the ballet phenom Desmond Richardson. Early on Broadway performer Michael-Demby Cain, now Lanteri’s husband, attended every day, and helped bring in a musical theater crowd.

“You didn’t take my class to dissect your tendu,” Lanteri said. “You came to work on your performance.” And, maybe, to land a job: He would often hire dancers out of his classes for choreography and production projects.

Lanteri also began teaching at dance conventions, in which a group of instructors would tour to different cities offering workshop classes to students. A young and growing industry at the time, conventions — “sort of the dance world’s version of Comic Con,” Schupp said — exposed young dancers to a wide array of artists and styles.

Conventions, which often also had competition arms, weren’t geared toward long-term development. Dancers would fill a local hotel’s ballrooms for a weekend, take a bunch of classes on carpeted floors, and return home.

“I was the teacher going, ‘Does anybody see how incredibly talented these kids are?’” Lanteri said. “Shouldn’t we be doing more than showing up, teaching some steps, getting the room screaming, and saying goodbye?”

Those questions spurred Lanteri to found New York City Dance Alliance. Suzi Taylor, who has taught at the convention since its inception, remembers the early days as both exciting and chaotic.

“It started as a sort of bus-and-truck tour with just five of us, a lot of trial and error, a lot of comical little venues,” she said. “But from the start there was this great energy around making these kids from all over the country into one big, connected community. You could see why he wanted to call it an alliance.”

Lanteri leveraged his dance-world connections to offer opportunities at New York City Dance Alliance events. He invited a Broadway casting director, for example, to the organization’s national finale in 1999; the next spring several students appeared in Susan Stroman’s revival of “The Music Man.”

New York City Dance Alliance expanded from its initial four-city run in early 1994 to a national tour that this season includes 28 stops. As it grew, Lanteri considered ways to promote education beyond the convention classroom. He was teaching jazz classes at Juilliard, and noticed that college dance departments didn’t always know what to do with “comp kids.”

“I think the preconception is that these are self-centered show-offs,” Lanteri said. “Deans think that our kids can’t be taught, that they feel like they’re soloists. And those are exactly the things we preach against every weekend. I started thinking, well, maybe college is the next door we can open.”

In 2010 he established the New York City Dance Alliance Foundation, which raises funds for dancers to pursue college degrees. It also hosts auditions where they can be seen by representatives from multiple college dance departments, who often award scholarships of their own.

The resulting influx has helped change the way schools perceive competitive dancers and the way those dancers — who previously might’ve jumped right into a professional career — think about higher education. “For students with a competition background, going to college for dance used to be going against the grain,” Schupp said.

Lanteri’s knack for forging connections makes him a savvy businessperson. Diane Grumet, the artistic director of Steps on Broadway, said he was a natural choice for the studio’s executive director role though he had no formal business training. “His gift is bringing the right people into partnership with him,” she said. “On the business side or the artistic side, he chooses very well.”

The business side has become more and more central to competitions and conventions, the rare dance events that can turn real profits. The field is even attracting private equity funds: Last fall, the TZP Group announced that it was investing in two competitive organizations to create a single huge brand, DanceOne. It’s not uncommon for conventions to woo faculty from rival events with large fees.

In an increasingly money-driven industry, New York City Dance Alliance has stayed its course. “Honestly, I have been offered more money from other places over the years,” Arnold said. “I’m still here because I am committed to Joe Lanteri — because I know that he cares, and because I know that the kids at NYCDA are cared for.”

Student care has been an urgent concern throughout the field after recent allegations of sexual misconduct by celebrity faculty at another competitive dance organization. Lanteri declined to comment on that. But both Arnold and Taylor said that Lanteri’s influence has made the New York City Dance Alliance faculty a self-weeding garden.

“Instead of picking teachers because they’re popular or because they won a TV show, he’s looking for teachers who have positive, healthy practices,” Arnold said. Those who don’t fit that mold, Taylor said, tend not to stay long.

The ones who do stick around really stick around. Several current faculty members came through the convention as students. Tiler Peck first met Lanteri as a preteen jazz prodigy — “the most ferocious jazz competition dancer I’ve ever seen,” Lanteri said. She continued to study with him at Steps even after joining New York City Ballet, where she is now a principal dancer.

“Everyone would think I was taking class with Willy Burmann” — the beloved Steps ballet teacher — “when really I was taking jazz with Joe!” Peck said. She now often teaches the New York City Dance Alliance Foundation’s ballet audition class: “Whenever Joe reaches out, I say yes.”

Lanteri knows the word “family” is thrown around a lot in dance, but he thinks New York City Dance Alliance has earned the right to use it. “It is absolutely what we have grown into and what we aspire to be,” he said.

If it’s a family, Lanteri is the dad — though he groans a bit at the comparison.

Parental values, nevertheless, seem to apply.

“Dancers love him because of course he wants to help you as a dancer,” Peck said, “but he also looks out for us as human beings.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.