Sarah Wilbur

Sarah Wilbur is an Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance with a secondary appointment in Theater Studies. She is also the Director of Graduate Studies in Dance at Duke. 

Sarah's research is shaped by her longstanding work as a cross-sector dance artist and collaborator working across the contexts of concert dance, theatre, musical theater, opera, K-12 education, social services, health care and veterans’ affairs. As an artist and humanist who studies arts labor through the lens of performance, Sarah's scholarship highlights the felt effects of economic investment on artists' daily choice making or, as she likes to say, how money motivates movement in the arts. Sarah's research, teaching and creative work together highlight the relationship between art that gets performed and arts labor practices that remain hidden or ignored.

It is her primary goal to credit arts labor and laborers in all aspects of her professional work.

Sarah's interdisciplinary approach accounts for US arts infrastructures as simultaneously economic, physical, and kinesthetic (embodied) support systems. Her first book, entitled: Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts offers a historical account of the shaping influence of US federal arts funding policies on the aesthetic and organizational practices of two generations of US dance organizers (1965-2016). Published in 2021, Funding Bodies was a finalist for three book prizes from the Dance Studies Association (the de la Torre Bueno Award, de la Torre Bueno First Book Award and Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize) and was a finalist for the Freedly Award from the Theatre Library Association. Sarah was recently awarded EXPLORE! seed funding from Duke's Office of Research and Innovation to undertake ethnographic field work for her second book, which looks ethnographically at the shaping influence of the US health industry on the working lives of dance artists.

Sarah has published ethnographic accounts of arts labor and infrastructure in peer reviewed journals in theater, dance, and performance studies including the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review; she has featured essays in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, the Futures of Dance Studies edited collection. She has a forthcoming chapter on economic and embodied accountability in the multi-volume Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2027).

In service to dance, theater, and performance studies, Sarah recently completed a two-term appointment as a Director on the Board of the Dance Studies Association (DSA) 2022. In fall of 2022, Sarah founded an inter-campus, multi-disciplinary research and working group of arts labor scholars in the humanities with support from Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute. Initially entitled the Cross Campus Consortium on Equitable Arts Infrastructures, the group is now in its fifth year convening (as the renamed Equitable Arts Infrastructures Research Group). This collegial organizing has yielded two exciting and recent offshoots: Sarah is now one of four proud co-editors of Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures, a book series inviting historical and interpretive accounts of local arts ecologies, published by the University of Texas Press. She also serves as a co-PI (alongside Drs. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Charlotte Canning)on a Collaborative Research Project supported by the from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The event (Feb. 28-Mar. 1, 2025) will gather an inter-professional roster of artists, funders, and public humanists in spring 2024 to weigh in on the practical manifestation of infrastructural equity in the performing arts, coupled by an allied publication.

Sarah's graduate (G) and undergraduate (UG) teaching centers embodied knowledge across a variety of topics. Current courset offerings include: Theories of Corporeality (G), Movement in Question: Introduction to Dance Studies (UG/G), Art as Work: Valuing Labor in the Arts (UG/G), Artists in Healthcare: Collaborations and Complexities (UG-Service Learning), Research Methods in Dance (G), Capstone Seminar: Research Methods in Dance Studies and Choreographic Performance (UG), Pedagogies of Dance (UG/G), MFA Proseminar: Professional Practices (G); she also teaches course on creative practice/production, including: Choreographic Praxis (G), Critique (G), Interdisciplinary Performance (UG/G), Improvisation (UG), and Modern Dance (UG). 

Sarah's pedagogical approach invites students to reflect on the gaps between saying and doing, or, to use academicese: textuality and embodiment. Because it is her firm belief that all knowledge is fundamentally embodied, student knowledge takes written and enacted forms. And while dance is often the topic, dance-based terms (such as choreography or performance) also function as key methods of drawing close attention to micro-practical ways that humans behave, move, and participate in the world, particularly within the institutions and communities that we each variably inhabit. Students "succeed" when they depart these learning spaces with a honed ability to reflect on and recognize the embodied wisdom in their own daily choice making as movers.

In Durham, Sarah's creative work as a dance and movement facilitator spans clinical, community and conventional performing arts contexts. Building on 25+ years of work as an arts facilitator with clinical, community, and congregate care professionals, Sarah currently facilitates an adaptive and participatory dance program in the Adult Day Health Program at the Durham Center for Senior life. She also serves as a Board Member and Arts Sector Lead for Dementia Inclusive, Inc., co-operating with elder abuse advocates and medical/social service professionals to expand equitable opportunities for cultural expression for adults living with cognitive decline in Durham County. She is a co-convener of a FHI Working Group in Disability Studies for the 2024-2025 academic year seeking to formalize the campus commitment to disability studies, health humanities, and disability access and justice in campus culture. Each summer, Sarah serves as affiliated faculty for the Reimagining Medicine (ReMed) program at the Kenan Institute of Ethics, as an extension of her longstanding work as an artists in health and care contexts.  

These creative and scholarly experiences reinforce Sarah's faith in artists as essential facilitators of hope and imagination, and as workers worthy of basic wages, optimal working conditions, and secure employment contracts. By asking historical and humanistic questions of economic data and policy discourse in the arts, Sarah hopes to contribute to research-driven action that manifests economic and cultural justice in the US.

Research Interests:
1. Dance, theater, performance, and cultural studies
2. Economic humanities, histories of US arts policy, funding, and philanthropy
3. Cultural labor studies, workplace ethnography in the arts
4. Theories of institutionality, intersectionality, and corporeality
5. Arts and health, health humanities, critical medical humanities, and disability arts

By appointment - in person or virtual
Rubenstein Arts Center
2020 Campus Drive #209F
Please email [sarah.wilbur@duke.edu] to schedule.