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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 institutionalized norms of arts practice and performance make people move and organize their work. I study institutions and local arts work worlds using body-based analytical frameworks to show, in part, how people enact policies--and alternative possibilities--that sustain enabling environments for the arts in US culture.

 

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. 

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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. Thus,​ I approach arts infrastructure as a complex human exercise by bringing my cross-sector and cross cultural history as an artist to bear on the study of US arts labor, institutions, and infrastructures.

 

In addition to choreographing dance theatre works that challenge dance's hierarchies of practice and production, 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). 

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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.

 

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). 

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I have taught dance studio, seminar, and hybrid courses in academia since 1997.  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. 

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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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