Shawn Womack is a choreographer, professor and the chair of Â鶹ÊÓƵ's Theatre and Dance Department. She teaches choreography, improvisation, site-specific performance, The Art of Insurgency with Political Science professor John Gould and Participatory Arts. Prior to an academic career, Shawn founded the Ohio-based Shawn Womack Dance Projects, a contemporary performance company that performed throughout the United States and in the former Soviet Union. Her choreography has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council and the 1996 Ohio Governor's award in the performing arts. Her more recent choreographic investigations interlace narrative and visual media with ethnographic and historical research to delve into matters of memory, place, and identity. In the past fifteen years, Shawn's choreography has been produced at Grinnell College, Bryant College, Iowa State University, Des Moines Playhouse, University of California, Los Angeles, Minneapolis' Southern Theatre, San Diego's Sushi, and at the University of California, Riverside where she received her MFA in experimental choreography. Most recently, she has created two original works - Drift (2015) and Terrain (2013) - for the Russian company, Pantera. Both works received their premiere in the Russian city of Kazan at the National Theatre of Tatarstan.
