BIOGRAPHY: STEPHANIE SKURA
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"A radical & perpetual innovator", Stephanie has created interdisciplinary movement-based performances for over 30 years. Her process focuses on the power and totality of each performer, collaboratively discovering & developing material.
Called "a major American experimentalist", she has an international reputation for adventurous work, performing and teaching in 32 of the United States and 14 countries. Her New York City-based touring company performed worldwide for 15 years.
Skura's current work, including Surreptitious Preparations for an Impossible Total Act, Sacrilege is Needed. Competency is Hell, The Corduroy Prayer, Two Huts, and Noir Noir Noir, integrates a radically visceral approach to language with dance & theater.
Now based in the Pacific Northwest, she works independently with several companies, artists and institutions. Formerly on Graduate Faculty at the University of Washington School of Drama Professional Actors Training Program, and Core Faculty of the Skinner Releasing Institute, she's taught at such places as the American Dance Festival, Florida Dance Festival, European Dance Development Center, Naropa Institute, Movement Research in New York, and in residencies at many colleges and universities around the country.
She instigated and directs Open Source Forms, a practice and teacher certification program deeply rooted in fluidly expanded from Skinner Releasing Technique. From 2005-10, she was Associate Artistic Director of The Gravity Project, an integrative theater company weaving movement, design, music, and poetic text. She was a frequent guest artist at Juniata College's innovative theater department during 2004-16: teaching, mentoring, creating & directing performances. She has often taught & created work at I.dan.ce International Dance Center in Brescia, Italy, at La Caldera in Barcelona, and in the United Kingdom.
Skura has received 7 Choreography Fellowships and 5 Dance Company Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the first "Bessie Awards" for Choreography, and many other government, foundation and corporate grants, as well as commissions from several dance companies. She holds a BFA & MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.