Robin Prichard

Title: Professor Dance
Dept/Program: Dance, Theatre & Arts Admin
Office: Guzzetta Hall: 398L
Phone: 330-972-6721
Email: rp55@uakron.edu

Biography

Robin Prichard is an international artist/scholar who strives to present inscrutable, unruly dancing bodies in order to reveal the complexities of bodies in motion. As a performer, she danced with Guggenheim award winners Victoria Marks, Donna Uchizono, and David Rousseve, danced with Opera Australia, and performed works by Doug Varone, Doris Humphrey, Paul Tylor, and Mark Morris. She has been hailed as “a significant contemporary artist with an expressive vocabulary and an entrancingly total engagement” (Dance Australia). Her choreography, “noted for its wit and vulnerability” (L.A. Weekly), has been seen at American Dance Festival, Movement Research/Judson Church, Joyce/Soho, Guggenheim Museum Los Angeles, The Sydney Opera House, The Kennedy Center, American Dance Guild, Highways, Dance/USA, and other national and international venues.  She has won awards and fellowships including an Australian Federation of University Women Fellowship, the Kahn Fellowship, the Harkness Award, Ohio Individual Artist Award, and Puffin Individual Artist Grant. Her commissions include Parramatta Riverside Theaters (Australia), State University of New York, Morehead State University, Dublin Arts Center, the intergenerational company The Dance Generators, and University of Western Sydney. Her most unlikely commission was for American Idol, where she served as the choreographer and performer via motion-capture for the interactive video game. Her scholarly and choreographic interests straddle the worlds of contemporary concert dance and Indigenous dance; she has received two Fulbright Fellowships to study Indigenous choreographies in Australia and New Zealand. With more than two decades as a professor of dance, she has taught at Arizona State University, Australia’s National School of Dance for Aboriginals and Islanders (NAISDA), Sydney Dance Company, and Smith College. She has served as a grant reviewer for the National Endowment for the Arts and for the MAPFund, and she is a reviewer for Journal of Dance Education.  Her scholarship has been published in numerous dance education journals and books; in 2022, three books in which she contributed book chapters won national book awards. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BFA from SUNY Purchase.