Research Interests
Academic research interests: dance, cultural studies, and performance studies, choreography and performance, U.S. arts labor, policy, and philanthropy, ethnography, social and political theory, critical arts pedagogy, theories of practice, institutionality, and corporeality, principally in a US context. Current research investigates economic drivers and incentives in dance and the US healthcare industry via local US clinical, community, and congregate care contexts.
Creative research interests: contemporary concert dance, dance theatre, musical theatre, opera, devised intergenerational performance, and participatory dance making across the contexts of K-12 education, social services, aging services, and healthcare.
Creative research interests: contemporary concert dance, dance theatre, musical theatre, opera, devised intergenerational performance, and participatory dance making across the contexts of K-12 education, social services, aging services, and healthcare.
Fellowships, Gifts, and Supported Research
EXPLORE Seed and Completion Grant ·
2023
- 2024
Awarded by: Duke Office of Research & Innovation
· $15,000.00
Prescribing Dance: Sweating the Impacts of the US Healthcare Industry on the Working Lives of Artists (working title) is the first regionally-specific cultural labor study of the rapidly expanding arts labor subfield of dance and art in health. Sited in three cities, dance artist-scholar Sarah Wilbur’s feminist ethnographic approach argues for care infrastructures as fundamentally embodied struggles between differently invested funders, administrators, artists, health practitioners, and program participants. Leveraging her longstanding experience as a dance artist and health collaborator, Wilbur invites a broad interdisciplinary readership to pay closer, body-level attention to how arts and health partners co-operate to mobilize local spaces of creative exchange. Peppering her structural and historical analysis of regional patterns of dance and health investment with ethnographic vignettes from local dance-based programs in clinical, community, and congregate care contexts, Wilbur uses “sweat” as a material, bodily, and semiotic marker to keep human movement, and transformation at the center of debates about how to create sustainable communities of care. Accounting for sweat as both the material/biological evidence of the body’s struggle to establish and maintain equilibrium and a symbolic marker of labor, fitness, pathology, and/or strength, Wilbur demonstrates how differently invested partners negotiate the ethical responsibilities embedded in arts/health economies, and weather the complex outcomes of local invitations to “heal” through a prescription to get up and dance.
Open Monograph Award ·
2020
- 2021
Awarded by: Duke University Libraries
For FUNDING BODIES: FIVE DECADES OF DANCE MAKING AT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, forthcoming (fall 2021) from Wesleyan University Press.
Faculty Book Workshop ·
2019
- 2020
Invited Author ·
Awarded by: Franklin Humanities Institute
David L. Paletz Course Innovation Grant ·
2019
- 2020
Awarded by: Trinity Arts and Sciences, Duke University
Co-PI, Artist Case Studies ·
2018
- 2021
Awarded by: Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
· $200,000.00
David L. Paletz Course Innovation Grant ·
2018
- 2019
Awarded by: Trinity Arts and Sciences, Duke University
Don Wilmeth American Theatre and Drama Society Fellow ·
2016
- 2017
Awarded by: American Theatre and Drama Society Fellow
Brown University
Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies and the Humanities ·
2016
- 2018
Postdoctoral Fellow-Theatre Arts and Performance Studies/TAPS, Brown University ·
Awarded by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Position held in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University
“Dance Studies in/and the Humanities” is a multi-school, multi-year initiative designed to advance the field of dance studies. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project will appoint postdoctoral fellows in dance studies at Brown University, Northwestern University, and Stanford University from 2012-13 through 2017-18. For more information, see website: http://www.mellondancestudies.org/about/
Jacob K. Javits Fellowship ·
2009
- 2012
Awarded by: US Department of Education
Position held in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles
Bessie Schönberg Choreography Fellowship ·
2008
- 2008
Awarded by: The Yard
Community-based new work choreography residencies, intergenerational teaching in modern dance and creative process, and public performances and in spring, summer, and fall 2008 at The Yard in Chilmark, Massachusetts. http://www.dancetheyard.org