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 ​COMMITMENT IS A MUSCLE.

 

DANCE IS A FANTASTIC PROBLEM.

 

 

SARAH WILBUR
Choreography | Research | Teaching | Arts 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.  My academic research asks how economic incentives and institutionalized norms of arts production discipline the daily actions and interactions of arts workers. I study how people cooperate within funding bodies and local arts work worlds and highlight how these critical moves shape 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 across the first fifty years of grant making in the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). I am concurrently conducting ethnographic research on local dance work worlds in off-center US communities. My artistic work currently involves a large team of artists, healthcare providers, senior advocates, and service providers in Durham (didnc.org) working together on an arts engagement initiative aimed at making Durham a dementia-inclusive city by the year 2023. 

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In terms of my education, 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 as well as a B.F.A. in dance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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I have taught dance studio, theory, history, service learning, and hybrid courses at five diverse American universities since 1997. In theory and creative practice, I encourage students to situate their dance practices and productions in cultural and political economic contexts and I actively apply body-focused research methods to the study of cultural performances in and beyond the arts. 

 

I joined the Duke Dance faculty in 2018 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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