Manning earned her B.F.A. in Dance Performance and Choreography from The Ohio State University, where she studied under renowned artists including Abby Zbikowski, Bebe Miller, and Ohad Fishof/Noa Zuk. As a student she presented Blended Hues (2015) at the Midwest ACDA Conference and won the BellaMoxi Emerging Choreographic Artist Festival in Chicago, Il with her undergraduate thesis work From Four to Two (2016). She later joined Found Movement Group, a Nashville-based dance theater company specializing in immersive and physical theater, becoming Associate Director in 2017. With Found, Manning created numerous works exploring the intersection of physical dance theater and technology, including Bum One (2018) & the way i see it (2019). She also co-created with executive director Stacie Flood-Popp Obsession (2019), and Four Me’s (2019), and Entwination (2020) which premiered at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.

During the pandemic, Manning choreographed and directed her first episodic dance short film, We Keep on Going (2020), in collaboration with WeGo Nashville Public Transit, sparking her focus in screendance. Her 2022 film Going Down, has screened internationally and won Best Film at the LA Dance Film Festival 2022 as well as Best of Comedy at the Utah Dance Film Festival. Manning recently completed her M.A. in Screendance at London Contemporary Dance School, where she now serves as an Associate Lecturer and continues to research the intersection of the moving body and the moving image in creation, production and research avenues.

In addition to her choreographic and film endeavors, Manning has taught at organizations such as New Dialect Summer Intensive, Millennium Dance Complex, Watkins College of Art, Nashville School of the Arts and London Contemporary Dance School. Her creative vision bridges live performance and technology, fostering innovative approaches to movement and storytelling.