Sarah Wilbur

Sarah Wilbur (Assistant Professor of the Practice/Dance) is a cross-sector choreographer and performance researcher who studies arts labor, economies, and institutional support principally in a US context. She brings a cross-sector field orientation to bear on her academic research, including over twenty years of experience working within the cultural economies of concert dance, theatre, musical theater, opera, K-12 education, health care, and Veterans’ Affairs. Sarah’s creative and scholarly research and teaching recognize the parity between dances that are performed and the aspects of dance making that are suppressed or ignored. It is her primary goal to highlight under-recognized labor and laborers in the arts in all facets of her professional work.

Sarah’s current manuscript, Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance “Making” at the National Endowment for the Arts [1965-2016] offers a critical cultural history of institution building and belonging within the NEA Dance Program. A book that asks the choreographic question: how has the movement of philanthropic capital motivated the movement of dance organizers across the last five decades, Funding Bodies is under contract with Wesleyan University Press.

In addition to historical work on institutional endowment in dance and the arts, Sarah also contributes ethnographic analyses of local arts workers and work worlds. Such work appears in Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review, The Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, and Arts & Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice. She has also reviewed scholarly work on dance and performance in e-misférica, and Dance Research Journal.

Prior to landing at Duke, Sarah was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies and the Humanities at Brown University (2016-2018), where she developed coursework for undergraduate and graduate students that centralized dance as a vital topic, theory, and method of knowledge production germane to broader debates on power and embodiment in the humanities. She holds a terminal degree in dance practice (M.F.A., dance) and research (Ph.D., culture and performance studies) from the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA.

Bio Jan 2020