The Gilded Serpent presents...

Barbara Sellers-Young

Barbara Sellers-Young is a professor in Dance Department at York University with an international research profile in the fields of dance, theatre and performance. Her interest in all forms of art and diverse performance styles informs her research on the moving body and globalization, which has taken her to Sudan, Egypt, Nepal, Japan, China, England and Australia.

Dr. Sellers-Young’s publications include

• Teaching Personality with Gracefulness (University Press of America, 2002), a discussion of Kanriye Fujima's life and teaching of Nihon buyo (Japanese classical dance), and
• Breathing, Movement, Exploration (Applause Books, 2001), a text for actors whose groundbreaking approach combines body mechanics and eastern and western philosophies to create a new visceral awareness of the performance process. She is the co-editor of
• Bellydance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy (Mazda Publishers, 2005), which traces the impact of bellydancing from its initial introduction to the west through the writings of Flaubert to its popularity in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the feminist movement, and finally the globalization of the form in the 21st century.
• Belly Dance Around the World: New Communities, Performance and Identity, Ed . with Caitlin McDonald. North Carolina: McFarland & Co.
  This edition of essays written by scholars in India, Australia, New Zealand, England, Egypt, Canada and United States considers the globalization of a solo form of community dance from the North Africa and the Middle East and the various interpretations of it in rural and urban environments.
• Embodied Consciousness:  Performance Technologies , Ed. with Jade Rosina McCutcheon, New York: Palgrave.
  This volume of essays combines research from neuroscience, consciousness studies, performer training systems, modes of creating a staged narrative, Asian aesthetics, and post-modern theories of performance in an examination of the relationship between consciousness and performance. Written by actors, directors, dancers, historians and theorists, the essays participate in the paradigm shift in the humanities and the arts from the textual to the performative

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Centre for Cultural Research into Risk at the Charles Sturt University in Australia as well as a Davis Humanities Fellowship. Other research awards include a Pacific Rim Planning Grant and a Video Development Grant from the Teaching Resources Center and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

Dr. Sellers-Young was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University in July 2008. She was previously a professor and former Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis, where she taught for more than 15 years. She has also taught at universities in England, China and Australia.

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