Dr Sally Crawford-Shepherd
Course Leader - BA (Hons) Performing Arts
Sally Crawford-Shepherd is a dance practitioner, educator, and scholar. A Kansan by birth, she has moved around the world absorbing inspiration from diverse environments to share through performance and research. She achieved her BFA in Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and her MA in Choreography at Trinity Laban in London. She completed her PhD in Dance Ethnography at De Montfort University in Leicester. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
She began choreographing professionally for theatre and dance companies in Kansas City in 2000. After moving to the United Kingdom, she continued to perform and choreograph collaboratively with professional artists and in Further and Higher Education institutions. She lectured in universities and colleges throughout the UK and the Caribbean. She was the Coordinator for Dance at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, in Trinidad and Tobago from 2015-2018. She served on academic approval and validation committees for institutions in Jamaica and Barbados and institutions in the UK. She is an active External Examiner, previously working for Plymouth Marjon University, and is currently an External Examiner for the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta.
Her research focusses on Practice as Research across various dance styles and interdisciplinary approaches to improvised movement and music performance. An advocate for open knowledge exchange, she has presented at international conferences in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. She is a Co-Director for Tap Dance Research Network UK and is part of the UK Node for PoPMoves International. She is a member of the Society for Dance Research, the Dance Studies Association, and One Dance UK. Her current research explores how tap dance improvisation can move beyond the stage to become a medium for arts activism and dance scholarship in live and digital platforms.
Sally is the Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Performing Arts and the MA Performing Arts in Manchester.
Publications:
- Crawford-Shepherd, S. (2022) ‘Independent Beats to Global Feet: The Evolution of English Tap Jams’. Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training, vol.13, no. 1, 22-33.
- Crawford-Shepherd, S. and Murray, J. (dir) (2020) Online Tap Talk Series, online video series, presented 18 Aug 2020 – 05 May 2023. [Online] Available from: http://tdrnuk.com/whats-on/
- Torres, N., Crawford-Shepherd, S., Cairo, A., Donnelly, L., and Metzger, N. (eds) (2019) Rituals of Modern Society: Perspectives on Dance Fusion in the Caribbean and Dance Sustainability. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- Crawford-Shepherd, S. (2019) ‘Improvising the Future: Expanding Perspectives of Tap Dance Scholarship’ in Rituals of Modern Society: Perspectives on Dance Fusion in the Caribbean and Dance Sustainability. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 215-235.
- Crawford-Shepherd, S. (2018) ‘Visible Beats: Competition in English Tap Dance’ in Sherril Dodds (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 361-396.
