Contributors

 

Sarah Carlson is assistant professor of Dance at Muhlenberg College, teaching modern technique, dance history, and pedagogy. She danced professionally for ten years in New York City with numerous companies including Alexandra Beller/Dances, Brian Brooks Moving Company, Clare Byrne Dance, Paul Mosley Dance, and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. As an independent choreographer, her own work has been presented throughout New York, as well as in Boston; Charlottesville, Virginia; New London, Connecticut; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Seattle; at The Yard on Martha's Vineyard; and in Benin. Sarah also enjoys being a contributing dance writer for Offoffoff.com, Danceinsider.com, and Gay City News. She received a 2005 Gary Parks Scholarship from the Dance Critics Association and was selected to attend the 2006 NEA Arts Journalism Institute at the American Dance Festival. In 2005–6, Sarah was a full-time visiting guest artist at the University of Southern Mississippi. More recently, she completed a Fulbright Grant studying Vodou ritual dance in Benin, furthering an on-going inquiry into sacred dance forms. Sarah received a BA in French and European Studies from Connecticut College and an MFA in Dance from the University of Washington.

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Brenda Farnell is associate professor of Socio-cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and affiliate faculty of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include multimedia ethnography, ethnopoetics and performance, Plains Indian Sign Language (Nakota/Assiniboine and Kiowa) in the context of language revitalization, dances of the Northern Plains, discourse, movement literacy, and problems in social theory and embodiment. She is the author of Do You See What I Mean?: Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action and the award-winning CD-ROM Wiyuta: Assiniboine Storytelling with Signs. Her current research involves a collaborative project with choreographer Robert Wood of Robert Wood Dance New York Inc on his choreographic process and relationships between speech and movement in the making of contemporary concert-dance work. Recent papers include "The Second Somatic Revolution" (with C. Varela) in Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. Dr. Farnell is active in applying anthropological knowledge to issues of social justice and human rights and serves on the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

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Rachel Fensham is professor of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey (UK) and visiting research fellow at Monash University (Australia). She has just completed research on choreographic histories for the Australian Research Council-funded project "Transnational and Crosscultural Choreographies: The Politics of Australian Dance, 1970–2000." Recent articles on dance and theater have appeared in Discourses on Dance, New Theatre Quarterly, Women: A Cultural Review, and Youth Studies Australia.