I’m Sarah, a dancer and anthropologist based in Southern California.
A lifelong practitioner of dance, I’ve worked freelance in New York and the greater Los Angeles area. I’ve had the pleasure of performing with groups like DIAVOLO | Architecture in Motion, The Assembly, the Esperanza Dance Project, and the Paul Taylor Teen Ensemble, and with various choreographers and directors at venues like The Getty, The Metropolitan Museum, Lincoln Center Festival, and Spoleto Festival USA.
I co-founded the x2 Dance Collective with Brynn Bodair. During our five-year collaboration we held classes, developed workshops, and produced film and installation works. During this time, I also earned an MFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach. I’ve been teaching modern, contemporary floorwork, and ballet for over a decade to students of all ages at four-year universities, community colleges, high schools, and private studios.
My research, performance, choreographic, and pedagogical endeavors are inextricably linked, and as I have grown into and along with my movement practice, my interests have converged with a study of anthropology.
As a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine, my work considers artistic practices as extraclinical care. I look to DIAVOLO’s Veterans Project as a site where the conventional binary of art and medicine is challenged. As veterans and professional dancers collaborate to create a performance through written, spoken, and movement-based creative exercises, they reconfigure their narratives not only of trauma, but also of recovery, service, and civilian life. I’ve had the great privilege of performing in several iterations of the Veterans Project, and look forward to the years-long partnership with the company that ethnographic fieldwork affords me.
One of my deeply held values is that live performance is a viable method of scholarly expression. I continue to investigate the formal capabilities of art to produce “thick description” through choreographic and pedagogical projects under the broad umbrella of Metaphysical Playthings.
When not dancing or anthropology-ing, I assist with special events, ESL classes, and various development initiatives at the South County Crosscultural Council, a grassroots organization that I am immensely proud to be a part of. In my free time I can be found catching up on sports (though I’m partial to MMA and the Eagles, I’ll watch anything) or drilling trivia (I was a semifinalist on my episode of GSN’s Master Minds and have been chasing that high ever since).