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 ​COMMITMENT IS A MUSCLE.

 

DANCE IS A FANTASTIC PROBLEM.

 

 

SARAH WILBUR
Choreography | Research | Teaching | Dance Advocacy
 

​MY WORK

SARAH
WILBUR
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Choreographer. 

Researcher. 

Dance Advocate.

Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance

Duke University

Durham, North Carolina, U.S.A.

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I am Sarah Wilbur. I am a dance artist and scholar whose creative and academic research together recognize the parity between dances that are performed and the aspects of dance making that are suppressed or ignored.  I am invested in illuminating the vital contributions of dance and arts labor and laborers. My academic research asks how economic flows and institutionalized norms of arts production make people move and organize arts work. Archivally and ethnographically, I study local arts work worlds to show people enact policies--and alternative possibilities--in order to sustain enabling environments for the arts. I work principally in a US context.

 

I currently serve as an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance in the Dance Program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, U.S. As a dance artist, I have spent over two decades working between the non-profit arts production contexts of concert dance, musical theater, opera, and experimental performance, K-12 education, social service, health care, and Veterans' Affairs. My cross-sector trajectories as a practicing dance artist strongly informs my approach to research and teaching.

 

I am currently completing a book that asks how instruments of federal arts funding make dance artists move through the enduring struggle to resource and recognize dance across the first fifty years of grant making at the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). I am also concurrently conducting ethnographic research on local dance work worlds in off-center US communities as part of my second monograph, and working with a large team of artists, healthcare providers, senior advocates, and service providers in Durham on an arts engagement initiative aimed at fostering a creative community of care for elders living with Dementia and cognitive impairments.

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I hold terminal degrees in dance practice (M.F.A.) and culture and performance (Ph.D.) from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. I also hold a B.F.A. in dance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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I have taught dance studio, seminar, and hybrid courses in academia since 1997 at five diverse American universities. My studio-oriented courses help students to situate their dance practices and productions in cultural and political economic contexts. My seminar courses apply body-focused research methods to the study of cultural performances in and beyond the arts.  In July of 2018, I joined the Duke Dance faculty after completing a two-year appointment as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in dance studies at Brown University (2016-2018). At Duke, I teach studio courses in improvisation and interdisciplinary performance and seminar/lecture courses in critical dance studies, dance research and writing, theories of corporeality, arts labor and political economy, critical dance pedagogy, and most recently, artists in the US healthcare system. 

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More on my institutional affiliations here: https://scholars.duke.edu/person/sarah.wilbur

 

Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance                       

Dance Department

Duke University

Box 90686

2020 Campus Drive 209F

Durham, NC 27708-0685

Office Phone: 919-660-3369            

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To avoid over-choreographing our present or future relationship(s), you might consider following me in the clouds using any of the following handles:

 

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarah.wilbur.50

On Twitter: @swilburdance

On Instagram: @swilburdance

 

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